Etna Furnace

Begun in 1805 on a heavily wooded tract along the upper Juniata River, Etna Furnace was built as more than an iron works. Its founders, Barree Billy Moore, John Canan and James Stewart, formed the Etna Iron Furnace Company and laid out a complete community. Surviving structures include a four-sided stone furnace about 16 feet high, a blacksmith shop, a long three-family tenant house with four chimneys, a stone store and paymaster's office dated 1832, and a horse and mule barn. Several buildings are now reduced to ruins or foundations. The furnace was active until the late nineteenth century, and during the years after the Civil War it produced as much as 100 tons of charcoal iron and 600 tons of bloom iron annually. Its value lies in the variety and number of its remaining buildings, which illustrate how a company-owned ironmaking settlement operated in the mid-nineteenth century.