State College, PA: 1792-1809 & 1825-1858 Centre (Blast) Furnace

Furnace Remnants: (Satellite, a tree must have been removed since this satellite photo and the Sep 2021 street views below.)

Ironmaster's Mansion: (Satellite)

Street View, Sep 2021

I backed off to see what kind of hillside it was built against. Normally, a blast furnace is closer to a steeper hill so that they can easily build a bridge from a building on the hill to the top of the furnace. That bridge allows them to easily use wheelbarrows to dump the charcoal and iron ore into the top of the furnace.

Street View

JuQuay Edward Carter posted four photos with the comment:

THE CENTRE FURNACE STACK ✨️

State College, Centre County, Pa.

Charcoal Ironmaking (Juniata) 

Built c. 1825

Centre Furnace operated until 1858, when it began to face more growing competition from anthracite-coal and bituminous-coke furnaces.

Without these early metallurgical innovations, the iron and steel production industry as we know it today, would have not been possible.

 

1

2

Digitally Zoomed

3, see below for a higher resolution photo of the plaque.
[The old road was the original route of College Avenue.]

4

It is hard to tell if the bridge to the top of the furnace was already gone when this 1912 photo was taken. If the bridge is still there, it is not covered.

Pennsylvania State Archives via ExplorePAhistory
By the 1850s, workers had to mine the iron ore and make the charcoal in the Barrens, about three miles away. The Panic of 1857, the increased distance to the raw materials and better fuel sources caused the end of production in this furnace. The better fuel sources were anthracite coal and coke made from bituminous coal.

Photo via hmdb

Digitally Zoomed
The original furnace was a "cold blast" design. "In 1847, the remodeled furnace became 'hot blast' when heated air was recycled rather than permitted to escape through the top." The furnace was 35' tall. Metal produced by the Centre Furnace and other renional ironworks became known as Juniata Iron. This was the nation's leading iron-producing region from 1800 to 1850.
Thompson Run powered the waterwheel. [Thompson Spring probably had a larger flow back then.]

PSU
The Centre Furnace Mansion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Credit: Patrick Mansell / Penn State. Creative Commons
This house was owned by Moses Thompson, the last ironmaster of Centre Furnace. In 1855, he and his co-owner of the furnace, Gen. James Irvin, donated land to help found what became Penn State.

The location information in hmdb is wrong. This satellite image is what allowed me to find the furnace.

Global Earth, Apr 1994