I had promised last week to write more about the stone huts that were once used to blow up pieces of iron. The three mounds of rock pictured are three sides of one of these two huts, still visible today.
According to an account written by Robert Earl Houck, the sides of the three-sided "fort" were stone covered with dirt, with the opening on the fouth side facing north, away from the railroad tracks nearby (now part of the Horse-Shoe Trail). During the early 1920's large pieces of iron were offloaded from flat cars into the fort and covered with large trees. An explosive charge would be placed underneath, and the workers would retire to a cave when they set off the explosives. The resulting small chunks could be loaded back onto the railroad car, and was taken to the E & G Brooke Iron Co. mill in Birdsboro.
Mr. Houck recalls a day as a child when a 50-pound chunk of iron landed in the lane in back of his house, about a half mile away. The operation ceased in the late twenties. The railroad grade, the fort, and various bits of iron are all that remain of this industry; the woods here are quiet today.
I've also turned up more information about the foundation I found in the privet thicket (History on the Land, January 6). According to Robert Houck, the three families in the cabins were Mose and Rose Gradis, Abie and Black Annie Simpock and Blackie and Muzzie Burns. The men worked in the Sankanac quarry (to the east of Trythall Road) and also cut cobblestones from quarries (still visible in the woods) and cut cordwood for making charcoal for the local furnaces. The women worked in the homes of local families, helping with the house, and worked in the fields and garden and truck patch. Houck writes, "Their wages were fifty cents per week, and all the vegetables and meat for their table." By the 1930 all three families had passed away, and are buried nearby on the lands of what was then Trythall Farm.
