Today Roaring Run is a designated “recreation area” in the JNF. It’s a popular spot, but many hikers seem to barely notice the furnace ruin nestled off to one side, or realize that the woods around it are not an old-growth forest. These trees descend from the survivors of the industrial hunger for charcoal and pulpwood, or are survivors themselves.
Roaring Run was named for the rushing water that powered its bellows. During the summers of the 1830s and 40s, the ironworkers of Roaring Run—hired white laborers and enslaved African Americans—harnessed the creek and made it blast hot air into the furnace. In the hottest months of the year, the ironworkers shoveled charcoal, iron ore, and limestone flux into the furnace’s hungry mouth. When they’d tap the base, molten iron would surge hot out onto sand to cool.
Each year when summer ended, the fires went out. The brick cores and limestone sheaths of the furnace cooled, and the work changed. Some ironworkers became miners. They stripped ore from the iron seams that spider through the hills above and around the furnace. Others became charcoal makers. They cut and stacked trees into pyres, then interred the arboreal bodies under a crust of earth and baked them. Through this sorcery they transformed the forest acre by acre into the blackened food for next summer’s iron.
Roaring Run struggled to compete with the northern iron industry and was shut down in 1854; Virginia charcoal was no match for Pennsylvania anthracite. But then the war began. With the Confederacy cut off from Northern supply chains, Virginia iron furnaces were stoked back into blast. Again the creek was harnessed, again the squat stone belly of Roaring Run Furnace became a crucible, and again ironworkers shoveled into its maw the stuff of the landscape—ore, limestone, trees—to transform the living land into crude iron. The iron journeyed down the river to Richmond. There, in Tredegar Iron Works, the transformation was finished: wood, water, and rock became railways, wheels, and weapons. For Roaring Run, this revival lasted only as long as the war. The furnace went out of blast for good in 1865.
One hundred and fifty-six years later, we gather around the furnace ruin. Some students bend to read the ground: they see the slag, shards of black crystalline impurities belched out of the furnace and left behind as waste, a glittering witness to the old alchemy of turning forest to iron. Tall pines and lofty hardwoods surround us. Less than two centuries ago, this whole landscape would have been stripped bare.