Furnace Town Historic Site

Furnace Town was a company town built around a technology that arrived too early. The Maryland Iron Company's 1830 Nassawango Furnace smelted bog ore dredged from the swamp — iron in the wetlands — and its cast-iron 'stove' on the stack was hot-blast gear installed within a decade of the process's invention in Scotland: possibly the earliest hot-blast furnace in America, now a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.

Around it stood a whole village — 300 people in the Pocomoke Forest, miners and colliers and molders, blacksmiths and weavers and broom makers, a schoolhouse and an ironmaster's mansion, the charcoal made in the surrounding woods and the shells for flux barged up the Pocomoke from the Chesapeake. The town's ledger closed in 1850 — bankruptcy, the sale notice listing the furnace, mills, houses, 21,000 bushels of charcoal, and 1,650 tons of ore; the residents left, and by 1929 only the furnace and foundations stood.

The restoration is the forest's partial reversal — the Worcester County Historical Society cleared the hundred-year growth in the 1960s, the Furnace Town Foundation rebuilt the living-history village around the furnace stack: artisans demonstrating the trades the company town once ran on. The woods took the town in a lifetime; the foundation took back just enough to let you stand in it — the bog-ore furnace in the swamp forest, the only one of its kind Maryland ever ran.

Furnace Town is the archive's bog-ore file — the 1830 Nassawango Furnace and its company village in the Pocomoke Forest, bankrupt in 1850, reclaimed by the woods, and partially rebuilt around America's earliest surviving hot-blast stack.