Antietam Iron Works

Took a fun trip to Antietam today, first the iron works and then the battlefield. This is the Antietam furnace as it was rebuilt around 1845. It was probably established in the 1760s and it was used down to about 1880. However, the history of the iron industry in this region is an almost unbelievable tangle of competing ventures, rapid failures, furnaces that kept the same name even after they had been moved several miles, and so on; the pages about this site at both wikipedia and the C&O Canal Trust are wrong. (E.g., it was never called the Frederick Forge.) We spent a lot of time trying to sort this out when we worked up there in 2008-2010, but I would say we were still only about 80 percent certain we had it right.

View into one of the furnaces. In a furnace like this, the iron ore and charcoal were stacked in alternating layers, and when the charcoal burned the molten iron drained out the bottom of the stack and pooled in molds.

View down into a furnace from above.

Sample of the ore kept at the site. The iron ore along the Potomac River here was noted by one of the first European settlers, Finnish/Swedish frontiersman and Indian trader Israel Friend, and the first mining was in a spot called Friend's Ore Bank. The ore was not of high quality but it was plentiful, and it was easy to dig it out of the river bluffs and load into onto boats for transport.

Moss on a retaining wall.

Across the road from the furnace is a complex of mill foundations. These included the mill where waterpower was used to crush the ore before it was loaded into the furnace.

The nearby Antietam Aqueduct, which carried the C&O Canal across Antietam Creek.

A place I never get tired of.

Hampton National Historic Site

I finally made it to Baltimore County's most famous historical monument, Hampton Mansion. The property is now run by the National Park Service.

The main house was constructed in 1783 to 1790 by Captain Charles Ridgely, one of the richest men in America; when finished, this may have been the largest private house in the new nation. The design is supposed to have been inspired by Howard Castle. Famous guest include Charles Carroll and the Marquis de Lafayette.

The Captain was the second of seven Ridgelys to own the property, a run that extended from 1745 to 1948. Their money came from farming – at one point the estate was 10,000 acres – stone quarries, and the iron business. They had iron ore mines, coal mines, and a furnace, which is now under Loch Raven Reservoir but peaks out at low water.

View of the house from the rear, up from the terraced garden.

Plan of the property made in 1843, recording many now-vanished buildings.

Eliza Ridgely posing with a harp in 1818, by Thomas Sully.

What really fascinated me about the place was the outbuildings, most of them built of stone in an identical style. I had to look these up to figure out that they were the stables; why are they so tall?

Even the random sheds are lovely.

Fascinating Dairy, dug into the ground over a spring. Water flowing through the sunken room cooled the milk.

This strange building has at least four sections built at different times, one of which may have been standing on the property when the Ridgelys bought it in 1745. After the mansion was built this served as the overseer's residence.

View of the farm complex. The overseer's house is to the left, and the stone buildings to the right are slave quarters built around 1850. They are eerily similar to the ones John Custis had built at Arlington in Virginia.

The Quarters from the northeast.

Ruined greenhouses. A delightful place to explore.

Baltimore's Mt. Vernon Methodist Church Sold to Preservation Group

One of the most famous buildings in Baltimore, Mount Vernon United Methodist Church, has been acquired by a nonprofit preservation group created for just this purpose:

At a closing held on July 10 in Baltimore City, UNITE Mount Vernon, Inc. became the new owner of the 153-year-old Mount Vernon United Methodist Church. . . . UNITE Mount Vernon Inc. acquired the church with a forward-facing vision for community activation and public benefit. UNITE Mount Vernon Inc. is a recently formed non-stock corporation which has applied for IRS 501(c)3 non-profit status.

The church was designed by Thomas Dixon and built in 1872. It sits on Mount Vernon Square right across from one of the oldest monuments to George Washington. 

It's quite a lovely building, but that didn't help it stay viable as a church; when the Methodist entity that owned it put it up for sale last year they said it had a congregation of 25. 

The cost for the land and construction was $400,000, in 1872 dollars. Last year a developer bid $1 million for the church and adjacent townhouse, but died before the sale went through, so it was back on the market this year at an asking price of $600,000. Nearby townhouses have been selling for more than a million. It seems to me this might say something interesting about our time: a gorgeous old church is less valuable in our oh-so-domestic world than a nice house.

So far no indication what the new owners plan to do with the church. Might make a nice concern venue, but there are already two churches in that neighborhood known for hosting concerts, so I don't know that there would be much demand.

A Week in the Field

I was in the field for four days this week, with long commutes, so not much time to write.

Here is one archaeological find, a sherd of a kind of pottery called Pope's Creek Net Impressed. This was made and used by the same Middle Woodland people I wrote about three weeks ago, although from a different site.

Incidentally Pope's Creek was named for the same Pope family that created endless confusion over the naming of places around Washington. One of the Popes claimed a land grant in what is now DC that he called Rome, so he could be the Pope in Rome. He named the creek that flowed across this property the Tiber. That, not some later claim to imperial grandeur, is why Washington had a stream called Tiber Creek.

Don't know what this is beautiful bush is; looked like some kind of feral hydrangea, escaped from one of the expensively landscaped mansions in the neighborhood.

I was near Pimmit Run for much of this time, and I had time to explore down the creek to its mouth. This was an industrial area for two centuries. I believe these stones are a remnant of Pearson's Mill, which is where the Declaration of Independence and other key papers were hidden when the British took Washington in 1814.

This seems to be a remnant of a small hydrolectric station built in the 1890s.

The saw-toothed landscape is a remnant of quarrying in the early 1900s; the Potomac is in the background. 

Very little about this landscape is natural. Knowing so much history about this part of the world, I often find it amusing to participate in environmental impact studies here. Under NEPA, there are two kinds of impacts, "temporary" and "permanent." Temporary means during construction, things like dust and vibration from machines. Everything else is permanent. So I will hear people talking about "permanent" impacts to a forest that I know has only been there for 60 years, growing over an old quarry or a factory or what have you, and while I feel certain that whatever I am helping to build will not really last any longer, I strive to keep my mouth shut about what "permanent" really means; nobody likes a smart-aleck.

Walking along Pimmit Run I beheld the marvelous spectacle of wisteria overhanging the creek, like something from a fantasy jungle.

And then when I walked in the other direction, even more spectacular. There is much to be seen in the world, if you look.

The Wisteria House

My neighborhood was developed in stages. The first phase took place in the early 1900s, when part of it was divided into 2- to 5-acre lots; the neighborhood is still dotted with houses from that period. This is one.

This particular house has over the past decade fallen on hard times.

The front porch has completely collapsed, and the lovely old lattice fence looks like this. 

On the other hand, the yard has gotten completely overgrown with feral wisteria.

Which is really kind of amazing.

Cormorants and Mayapples

Spent Friday back on the Potomac, a day made interesting by two signs of progressing Spring.

Down on the river, something was clearly happening. At least a hundred cormorants were swarming the half mile or so of river I could see from my vantage point. Here you can see four resting in a tree and one floating on the river beyond.

They were all over the river because the shad were running. Shad (Alosa sapidissima) is eastern North America's main anadromous fish, that is, they spend most of their lives in the ocean but return to fresh water to breed. They were a vital food source for Indians and a key economic support for the early British colonies. 

The swarms of cormorants were amazing. Overfishing, dams, and polution nearly ended the shad migration in the Potomac by 1970, but since then they have been coming back, and it is great to see.

And then when I took a lunchtime walk I found that the mayapples are blooming.

The blooming of mayapples is one of those events that is wonderful mainly because it lasts such a short time, and is so unpredictable, that you are unlikely to see it. It's been at least a decade since I last enjoyed it.

So to most people mayapple flowers are sort of a myth, and mayapples just boring forest plants that other people tell you are amazing when they bloom. In fact just two weeks ago somebody pointed to a mayapple plant growing near our site and said, "They tell me those bloom." They do!

Following the mayapples up a little creek called Donaldson Run I blundered into this concrete dam. I think this had something to do with the quarrying that took place all along this stretch of river from the 1890s to World War II. (The Pentagon was built with stone from around here.)

So it ended up being a pretty good day.