GREENWOOD FURNACE VILLAGE
Former Industrial Village — McAlevys Fort, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania
Status: Historic site · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/greenwood-furnace-village-pennsylvania/

Former charcoal-iron company town preserved within Greenwood Furnace State Park.

Greenwood Furnace Village is a former industrial village in Pennsylvania. Former charcoal-iron company town preserved within Greenwood Furnace State Park. Ironworks began in 1834; closure in December 1904 caused the company village to empty. A forest nursery followed in 1906. The state park preserves six original buildings, a cemetery and a furnace stack restored in 1936.

The furnace went into blast on June 5, 1834. Norris, Rawle and Company had bought the Freedom Iron Works at Burnham the year before and needed a steady supply of pig iron; the site along the Juniata offered ore, limestone, water, and — above all — trees. The charcoal-fired stack produced about four tons of pig iron a day, roughly 1,200 tons a year, hauled by wagon over Stone Mountain to be worked into wrought iron.
Charcoal meant colliers. Crews burned about 330 acres of woodland a year in hearth pits to feed the stacks, and the flat, still-barren circles those hearths left in the forest floor can still be found inside the park.

THE COMPANY VILLAGE
A village grew to serve the furnace — a company store, office, blacksmith shop, stables, and workers' houses — and after an 1847 sheriff's sale it passed to John A. Wright and Company. John Armstrong Wright, a civil engineer who had helped found the Pennsylvania Railroad and the city of Altoona, put Greenwood iron into the railroad boom: from 1856 the works produced locomotive tires, car wheels, and axles. A second, steam-powered stack rose in 1864, making Greenwood the only known Pennsylvania charcoal ironworks running two stacks side by side.
At its early-1880s peak the village held two furnaces, an ironmaster's mansion, church, school, seventeen stables, ninety tenant houses, and a gristmill — about three hundred employees and their families, a baseball team called the Energetics, and a fifteen-piece brass band.

CLOSURE AND PRESERVATION
The end came in December 1904, when depleted timber, changing fuels, and industry consolidating in urban complexes closed the furnace for good. The workers moved out and the village was largely torn down — Greenwood Furnace became, briefly and literally, a ghost town.
The Commonwealth bought the land in 1906 and ran a forest tree nursery there until 1993. Today Greenwood Furnace State Park preserves six original buildings, the village cemetery, and a furnace stack restored in 1936 — a charcoal-iron landscape kept whole enough to read.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· Ironworks began in 1834; closure in December 1904 caused the company village to empty. A forest nursery followed in 1906. The state park preserves six original buildings, a cemetery and a furnace stack restored in 1936. The site's documented history is the record the rest of the file stands on. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. The detail is preserved in 'History of Greenwood Furnace State Park'. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· History of Greenwood Furnace State Park — Pennsylvania DCNR
  https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dcnr/recreation/where-to-go/state-parks/find-a-park/greenwood-furnace-state-park/history

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