The Trip Begins - Hopewell Furnace

Day 1

Total Miles Traveled: 84

Today's sponsors:

*Miles 74-?? sponsored by Shirley, Candy, Carol, Charli, Chad, Joann, Laura and Trish at the PA Association of Resources for People with Mental Retardation (PAR).

*16 year remission celebratory drink (Anchor Steam for Gab, Yard Porter for Michael) sponsored by Drew Bradley. Drew, we're in Philadelphia for the next three days. Email us if you want to get together!

Gab:

I suppose we shouldn’t have expected everything to go smoothly.

We've been running a bit behind schedule, partly because last week I had a chance to take a trip to New Orleans to attend a national conference for my boss who, at the last minute, had to drop out. Tell me, would you have said no? So, we've crammed a week or so of packing into, well, yesterday. By the end of the day Michael and I were so tired we both started to hallucinate. This is when we decided to focus on what we needed to pack the car and to leave the remaining items in our apartment for our wonderful family members (thank you!) to throw into boxes before the end of the month.

Things were looking good. Even with our sleepy vision and coordination, everything fit in the Nissan. Mission #1 accomplished. We shut off the lights and said goodbye to our apartment and drove to Michael’s parents’ house for the night since we no longer have a bed. On the ride over, I got a little teary. I blamed exhaustion but I could be wrong.

Went to bed almost immediately, woke up this morning feeling strange. I wouldn’t call it dread, but I could be wrong. In fact, it felt a lot like the feeling I had waking up the morning of my first chemotherapy session. I remember walking around in a daze. I knew I should be feeling some sort of really big emotion, but nothing seemed real so I couldn’t get very excited. That’s how I felt this morning. After over a year of planning and preparation and talking, this dream is finally real. How do I feel? I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.

After breakfast, we said our goodbyes to Michael’s parents, planned to stop by the apartment one last time to see if we had forgotten anything critical and en route, realized that neither of us had seen the digital camera among our things. Oh boy. We raced back to our apartment. Nothing. Called Michael’s parents. Nothing. All Michael could think was that we had somehow dropped it on the street as we were stuffing the car last night. If that was the case, the camera, a crucial piece of equipment for the journey, was gone forever. This is when I realized what dread truly felt like. We decided to head back to Michael’s parents house for one last ditch effort to find it even though we had both started mentally budgeting for a replacement.

Luckily, Michael’s mom saved the day. She found the camera. We rejoiced. We started off (again), made a quick stop at my parents’ house to say our farewells and hopped on the PA Turnpike.

Our stop today was Hopewell Furnace, a National Historic Site seated in the middle of the French Creek State Park. Here’s Michael’s summary of the day:

Michael:

The first Site. Our first visit. At last. Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site (NHS). From nearly two years of planning, saving, and belief, the culmination of a lifetime of dreams has begun. That being said, there was very little chance that an 19th Century blast furnace and early Industrial Revolution era village would be able to capture our thoughts and attentions.

It didn’t. The goodbyes with our families, friends and lives dominated my day’s thoughts. The grogginess from the poorly-timed last minute packing and moving didn’t help my concentration not one bit. Neither did the lost camera panic attack that Gab has described.

I wasn’t expecting much. I grew up less than an hour and a half from this place. My mother never took me and my sister there on one of our countless day trips growing up. Our school never took us there on a field trip. I was expecting to be bored and underwhelmed. I’m not sure I even know what a blast furnace is or what it produces.

That was my mood heading off the Pennsylvania Turnpike (aided by newly installed EZ Pass) at Exit 298, Morgantown. 75 miles since we had first started this morning. I thought the park was going to be right off the turnpike exit. It wasn’t.

We took a winding route for about 10 miles through the small towns of Morgantown, Elverson, and Warwick. The two-lane road zigged with houses, driveways, and large trucks on both sides and zagged past old farm houses, grazing cattle and small forests. The sites were very Pennsylvania and very familiar.

Our circuitous route was aided by very helpful brown National Park Service directional arrows at every bend. We were very excited when we first spotted the Hopewell Furnace NHS entrance sign. I stopped the car in the middle of the road (no traffic) and Gab took this picture. We weren’t far now. We turned left, into the Site and up a long driveway. The Village was on the left.

There it was indeed. A clearing spotted with 15 or so buildings set up along a T formation. The larger of the buildings sloped along the top of the T’s soft rising contour. A few small buildings dotted both sides of the T’s body. Near these smaller buildings along the T was a small livestock grazing area. From the car I saw a few sheep, a bull and some draft horses.

Hopewell Furnace NHS setting is not classically picturesque. But as a Pennsylvanian it is comfortable. Grass, rolling hills, forest, farmland. It is surrounded on three sides by French Creek State Park. In the warmer months, the green of the grass and in the leaves will make the site a little nicer on the eyes. Today, however, the swaying barren trees and the partially snow-covered yellow grass made the Site look freezing cold.

Which it was. We got out of the car and stepped into 40 degree weather with 20 mph winds. We left the sparsely populated parking lot and rushed into the pre-fab and architecturally out-of-place Visitor’s Center. The Park Ranger asked where we were from. He guessed Minnesota because of my Twins baseball cap. I answered “No, just Harrisburg.” Then I asked for a National Parks Pass.

The National Parks Pass, formerly the Golden Eagle Pass, is one of our country’s most wonderful bargains. For only $50 you get entry into every one of our 388 National Park Service Sites. Since we will be going to all 320+ of these Sites within the Continental United States it is a colossal help. But for everyone else it is wonderful open invitation our country’s treasures. Quick comparison: Walt Disney World Theme Parks Annual Pass $369.00; Hershey Park Season Pass $98.95; Dutch Wonderland Season Pass $80.00; National Parks Pass $50.00. I digress.

Buying the National Parks Pass was such a momentous occasion that I had asked Gab to picture me buying it at least 10 times today alone. We were so excited that we forgot the snapshot. I’ll mention our slip to Gab in a second. Maybe we’ll recreate the photo op tomorrow. We also bought a National Parks Passport and got our first cancellation stamp. We were giddy. The Site could never equal our anticipation fulfilled.

But the Site tried. The Museum explaining the blast furnace helped to get us back on point. A blast furnace, like the one at Hopewell Furnace creates iron from charcoal (essentially wood that is baked for about a week), limestone, and iron ore.

A 10-minute slide show at the Visitor’s Center was also helpful regarding the Furnace’s history. Built in 1771, builder Mark Bird enjoyed moderate success. His main product was, amusingly enough, stoves. The American Revolution five years later brought both Mr. Bird and his Furnace into battle. Mr. Bird himself headed the Berks County Militia, feeding and supplying his regiment with his own money. Hopewell Furnace shifted to cannon and arms production. After the war Mr. Bird fell onto hard times “collecting debts from the young nation” (Park Pamphlet) and he himself fell into debt and lost Hopewell.

After a series of owners, shutdowns, and other disasters, in 1816, Hopewell opened again. It made a turnaround, similar to the one the American economy was enjoying. Its production peaked in the 1830’s, aided by the newly built Schuylkill Canal. At that time over 100 people were employed in the Village. Ironmaster, clerk, founders, moulders, colliers, teamsters, woodcutters, miners, teachers, and farmers. Hopewell Furnace would shut down production in the 1883, unable to keep up with the anthracite coal furnaces of the north and with it the full steam of the Industrial Revolution.

The buildings at the Site are mostly originals. Many of them have new roofs and other minor improvements. With very little imagination one can see typical industrial life in the early 1800’s, the combination of rural and industrial. The blast furnace a few yards from sheep and cattle. If you’re wondering, the farm animals are kept and taken care of by the hard working and extremely helpful National Park Service Rangers.

Hopewell Furnace was not the first of its kind. In Pennsylvania alone, hundreds of furnaces were built at this frame. The first blast furnace in the U.S. was thought to have been built in Virginia as far back as 1620. Hopewell Furnace is unique because it is very typical. The Site is a microcosm of life in the antebellum years of the North. It is a valuable example of the many furnaces that brought the United States into the early Industrial Revolution. We are fortunate that it was saved from destruction post-mortem in the 1930’s by the Franklin Institute.

If one lives in the surrounding areas I would highly recommend a trip to this historical snapshot. The self-guided audio tour is an interesting and sometimes lively narrative. The Park Rangers are quite knowledgeable and are more than eager to answer questions. We talked for nearly a half hour. Just come when it’s warmer so that you can talk outside and enjoy the rural-industrial charm.