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For about a hundred years
the main economic activity
in the upland parts of the park
was making charcoal for the Catoctin furnace.
Using the methods of those days
it took 200 bushels of charcoal to make one ton of pig iron.
So an active furnace burned through about 500 acres of trees in a year.
The owners of the furnace
owned thousands of acres of land
up here in the mountains
but even that wasn't enough
but even that wasn't enough
but even that wasn't enough
they still bought a lot of timber from their neighbors as well.
The way they made charcoal was
they dug out a wide, shallow hole
30, even 50 feet across
They piled up the logs on top of it
Then they covered it over with dirt
leaving just a couple of holes
so that the fire smoldered and charred the wood
rather than consuming it.
Those fires burned for 2 to 3 weeks
and the whole time they had to be watched
to make sure that they never got too hot or went out.
The men who watched the fires
The men who watched the fires were called charcoal burners
were called charcoal burners, or colliers.
We don't know much about the colliers
but in pictures they're always old men
so they may have been semi-retired loggers or furnace men.
They lived up here on the mountain
in crazy wood shacks while they tended the fires full time.
Once the fired had burned out
They closed up the holes so the fire would die.
When it cooled, they wracked the soil off to expose the charcoal,
loaded it up in wagons, and took it down the mountain.
The archeological record of the charcoal industry
consists of two things
The foundation of the huts
which are usually just a little mound of dirt
with a pile of stones at one end
marking where the hearth or chimney is.
Or the charcoal hearths themselves.
These are just wide, shallow depressions
which you can see as you walk through the woods on the mountain
there are hundreds of them up here.
The only way to know for sure is
to stick a shovel in the ground, turn the soil over,
and see how black it is from all the charcoal.
There's your black charcoal-stained soil.
Charcoal hearths are not much to see
but they're the only remnant of a whole way of life
that's disappeared from our part of the world.
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