A walk into rich history
A week spent on Catoctin Mountain reveals Annapolis connection
Millie and I spent this past week camped on Catoctin Mountain near Thurmont. On one of our many adventures, we explored the Catoctin Furnace and discovered an Annapolis connection there.
I had read a Historic Resource Study compiled by Dr. Edmund Wehrle on the Catoctin Mountain Park website. Wehrle stresses the importance of the Catoctin Furnace in the development of Frederick County.
Starting at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, this ironworks was in operation from 1776 until 1903. Immigrants from Germany and Ireland worked alongside free and enslaved Africans. They mined iron ore, cut down thousands of acres of trees to make charcoal and smelted the iron in tall stone “stacks.” The remains of one of three stacks still stand in a park just south of Thurmont within earshot of Rt. 15. It’s within the boundary of Cunningham Falls State Park.
I was eager to visit the site and pleased to see all of the detailed interpretive panels along the trail that described the furnace’s history and operation. We learned a lot as we walked the path through the secondgrowth forest that has reclaimed the site since operations ceased more than a century ago.
The original stack, thought to have been located just south of the site, was built and operated by Thomas Baker and Roger Johnson. Roger’s brother, Thomas Johnson, had discovered hematite ore nearby. Thomas Johnson served as the first governor of Maryland after the Revolutionary War and married an Annapolis girl, Louisa Jennings.
According to Jane McWilliams, author of the definitive history, “Annapolis: City on the Severn,” Governor Thomas most likely lived in the “Capital Mansion House.” It was located on Annapolis harbor, but the Naval Academy bought it in 1866 as the yard expanded. That’s when Maryland built the current governor’s mansion.
The hematite Johnson discovered at Catoctin is considered the most important iron ore because it’s 70 percent iron and relatively abundant. Its reddish color accounts for the name, which comes from the Greek word for “blood.” The impurities are extracted by adding limestone as a flux. Workers would roll wheelbarrows full of charcoal, then ore and then lime on a ramp up to the top of the furnace, dump the ingredients in to charge the stack, then heat it to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The molten iron would puddle down to the bottom of the furnace and when the ironmaster thought the time was right, he would order workers to break a clay dam to let the iron out. The casting shed to the right of the furnace was where the guttermen would do their job. They’d dig trenches in the sand to form gutters, then dig side trenches perpendicular to the main gutter to form ingots.
The guttermen would guide the flowing metal with a tool shaped like a hoe to fill up the gutters. The way the ingots connected to the main gutter resembled piglets suckling from a sow, which is