Mount Hope Estate (Boundary Increase)

Mount Hope is an iron plantation near the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Lancaster County, built around a charcoal blast furnace begun in 1784 by Peter Grubb II. The furnace stack, 27 feet high, was later converted to hot blast and anthracite fuel in 1878, and the stack and part of its hot blast apparatus remain visible. The complex included workers' houses, a manager's house, a mill, a school, a church and an alcohol plant that distilled wood alcohol, all built to serve a self-contained ironmaking community. The Gothic Revival Mount Hope Episcopal Church, dated 1848, and the sandstone workers' houses are noted as architecturally important, and the site holds archaeological evidence of production and daily life. The furnace operated until 1885. The boundary increase was added because the ironworks and its residential elements are considered essential to understanding the plantation as a whole.