Scranton Iron Furnaces

Absolutely worth the visit while in the area. Such a nice little piece of Scranton’s preserved history. I only wished we could have entered the actual furnaces. A decent amount of litter was noticed as well, which is sad. A lot of money goes into the preservation and upkeep of these special places so they shouldn’t be desecrated or disrespected in this fashion. What you carry in should be what you carry out.

Pig Iron, who knew how involved the foundry process was back in the day. Very nice, clean and well maintained park feature displaying same. Upper and lower view areas surrounded by manicured grass. Some bench seating and several storyboards. No bathrooms or other features. Ample parking but not recommended for large rigs or towables. I had full bars of Verizon 4G LTE Roaming.

This was a pretty cool place. Well worth coming here if you have 30 minutes. You get to see 4 of the old school 1840s giant blast furnaces that are basically giant cylinders made of bricks that are like 60 feet tall that they used to dump the coal into. You can read about a dozen signs detailing the history of the old iron forge.

You won’t need much time to make your way through the entirety of this historical site, but will be glad you stopped. It has easy access with close proximity parking, and would make a great place for a picnic. I’m happy this gorgeous land is being preserved for future generations!

Such a cool sight to see, especially considering it’s free and it only takes about 15 minutes to check everything out. There’s panels showcasing information regarding their construction and their use.

This place is beautiful and the history around it is awesome. I wish they offered tours through the inside. The city should really clean it up more often, there were a lot of bottles and trash inside the furnaces.

Great place to visit if you are interested in industrial history. Even if not, it's a cool scenic site. There are lots of informative signage covering the historical and technological background. (Attaching photos of the signage in case anyone is interested)

Very interesting place, good information boards and history. Very clean, well kept historical grounds.

The Scranton Iron Furnaces, aka the The Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company Furnaces, represent the 19th century iron industry in the United States at it's finest. The four massive stone blast furnaces are the remnants of a once extensive plant operated by the Lackawanna Iron & Steel Company. Started in 1840 as Scranton, Grant & Company, the firm began as a partnership between William Henry (he had already been experimenting in New Jersey will the concept of using a "hot-blast technique" to make steel), his son-in-law Seldon Scranton, George Scranton and Sanford Grant. Henry with help from the Scrantons and other investors bought 500+ acres of land in what was then called Slocum Hollow along the Roaring Brook and set up shop building their first blast furnace in 1841. Initially the operation hemorrhaged money and had numerous production issues that plagued the company for its first few years almost driving it to bankruptcy on several occasions. Eventually by 1844 more investors were brought in so that capital could be raised for upgrades and to take care of any lingering flaws in their production model. By the summer of 1844 the furnace averaged five to seven tons of pig iron a day, but the company soon went into the more profitable business of producing T-rails for the railroad industry as there were no facilities in America where rails were capable of being produced. Everything at that point had to be ordered and shipped from Europe. In 1851, the town of Slocum's Hollow changed its name to Scranton in honor of the majority owners of the iron works for their success. (Scranton had other names in between like Harrison in honor of Presidential candidate William Henry Harrison and Scrantonia but I'm just focusing on what stuck.) By 1865 the company had the largest iron production capacity in the United States and were the second largest independent steel making operation in America.. After a long and successful run the fortunes of the company began to change due to higher labor costs, multiple strikes, higher shipping costs, changing markets and more efficient steel making processes in Europe all of which caused the company to move the operation to the Buffalo area in at the beginning of the 20th century. (The operation in the Buffalo area lasted all the way thru several mergers until Bethlehem Steel shut it down in the 1980's.) In 1903 the Scranton property was sold to the Wyoming Valley Railroad, which contracted with a Philadelphia company that scrapped all of the equipment, and tore down all the structures except the stone blast furnaces that you still see today. From the Internet: "In the late 1960s the furnaces were acquired by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and were administered under the State park system. The furnaces were transferred to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in 1971. Today the four connected stone blast furnace stacks are surrounded by 3.84 acres. The furnaces are set into the south side of a hillside with a 10 foot wide bridge, supported by masonry arches connecting them to the rock cliff. The two easternmost furnaces, dated 1848-1849, are built of smooth dressed stone blocks and stand 40 feet high and are 40 feet wide at the base. No. 3 and No. 4 furnaces were constructed c.1852 and c.1857 respectively, and are constructed of rough dressed stone blocks and also stand 40 feet high. Furnace No. 3 is 46 feet wide at the base, and furnace No. 4 is 48 feet wide at the base. All of the furnace stacks still contain vestiges of their firebrick linings. The first, third and fourth stacks contain ruins of their 19th-century hearths." If you go today what you see quite honestly isn't a whole heck of a lot. The entrance to the furnace site has two small brown NPS style signs that lead you up a narrow driveway to the parking area which has space for maybe 15-20 cars. You've got what's left of the four blast furnace stacks, an example of a T-rail along the walkway the leads from the parking lot to the upper viewing platform and an acre or two of grassy park land that sits along Roaring Brook. Worth mentioning is that there are plenty of displays at the site explaining what you're looking at but if you need more your best bet would be to head over to the Anthracite Heritage Museum which is about four miles away over in McDade Park on the other side of town. If you go: The site itself is free and open to the public daily from sunrise until sunset. There are no amenities on site although you are very close to all the fun (LOL!) that downtown Scranton has to offer including the foamtastic fun over at Steamtown. There are a few special events that occur on the grounds annually. Most notably would be the Scranton Bonfire Festival which happens every year in October.