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 to Furnace, Kentucky. KY 52, a smooth blacktop highway. Beyond Furnace, should we overshoot, is one of my favorite name-places in the Commonwealth, an empty locale on the edge of the stunningly beautiful Red River Gorge named Nada.
It has been a dry, unpredictable spring, but the dogwoods, beloved of country people here for their Easter significance, are in pristine bloom. Wild dogwood is a slender, sparse tree. Insinuating into second-growth woods logged out a half-century ago. Their blossoms are an impossible white among the new-mint foliage, like scattered snowflakes whirled down on the sloped ridges.
Furnace is deep in Estill County, real back-of-beyond country now largely sequestered by the rambling borders of the Daniel Boone National Forest. Once logging and mining thrived here, once the Kentucky River—untamed and unpredictable—teemed with barge traffic, floating store-bought goods into the eastern mountains and towing out coal, lumber, other parts of the landscape, bound for Frankfort, Louisville, to the Ohio River.
We never reach Furnace, whatever it may be. A pair of bronze roadside plaques direct us to the furnaces themselves, pointing us into the forest. A rustic Forest Service sign there reads COTTAGE FURNACE * PICNIC AREA* 3 MI. Three miles up a twisty washboard of white clay, then down into a wooded cove. A turnaround and picnic tables in a clearing. Beyond the clearing an odd grassy hump at the edge of the bluff.
Descending a rustic path, we reach a grassed plateau. There, hunched back against the cliffside like a crouching giant, is a structure of dark grey, roughhewn stone. It is a barbecue pit from Brobdingnag, about 20 feet wide by 15 feet deep and 20 feet high.
Centered in his face is a gothic arch opening into a hearth big enough to engulf a pickup truck. The mossy stones are lozenges roughly 5 x 3 x 3 feet. They are loosely stacked, mortared, with rough gaps between them. Only the sheer weight of the massy pile holds it together. The big stones have been brought here, it seems—no quarry cuts show in the softly wooded vale.
A keystone over the hearth, half-obscured by tufted ivy, reads simply W & W 1854 in plain, sharply incised, thin-serifed glyphs as elegant as any design by Eric Gill.
The cove is deeply quiet, wholly secluded. A crow calls once, staccato, mezzo-forte. A pileated woodpecker bangs a few strokes on a hollow tree a long way back in the forest. It is hard to imagine that before the Civil War, this was an industrial site, that workers had lugged ore and fuel here to create iron in what must have been an even more remote and silent wilderness.
Since the middle of the eighteenth century, Kentuckians have made metal around here. Half a world away, in Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, England, Abraham Darby and his Quaker family since the late seventeenth century produced iron, inventing new techniques for smelting and working the metal. They built there the world’s first wrought-iron bridge over the River Severn. It still stands at the river port simply named Ironbridge.
The Kentucky cottage furnace reminds me of Abraham Darby’s works, now excavated and stabilized by archaeologists in an open-air museum. But this is no museum. Just an improvised park, a glen a few miles south of the Red River Gorge and real tourist country. There is no distracting ballyhoo here. No one knows of this place, I believe, but me, my wife and the industrious pileated woodpecker.
We imagine eighteenth-century Kentuckians as stalwart Fee Parkers, skulking in deerhide suits and coonskin caps, long rifles at the ready to shoot the eye out of a squirrel or to kill a b’ar. Yet some Kentuckians were industrial revolutionaries, ready for heavy-metal business here in this half-mapped extension of Old Virginia whose variously-spelt name means “dark and bloody ground.”
The massive chimney evokes other experiences of Britain: the ruins of old abbeys and monastic centers that dot that green & pleasant land. Places like Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire (now the National Trust site most heavily visited in all Britain) or like isolated Tintern Abbey in the beautiful Welsh border, the gorgeous Wye Valley, where Wordsworth composed one of his most profound meditative odes.
This cottage furnace is a melancholy ruin, like the “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang” Shakespeare described only two generations after Henry VIII expropriated church lands. The cold stones and isolation, the chiseled number 1854 evoke times when people wrested a future from this emptiness.
From the late eighteenth century up to the Gilded Age of the 1870s, the Red River iron industry throve, transmuting ore into ingots and even into nails or cast-iron kettles for the settling of Kentucky. It bid fair to become a center for America’s metals industry. The spectacular canyon-and-forest landscape might have become what Charles Dickens called nineteenth-century Pittsburgh on first sight—“Hell with the lid off.”
The nation moved on. The old frontier evaporated. These folded foothills of the Cumberland Mountains were forgotten, along with the efforts that brought stones, fuel and ore here to make iron for pioneers.
In the tidy countryside of Britain, monuments to medievalism, weathered stones of gothic chapels and charterhouses, with empty windows framing sheep pastures. Here a hearth for making metal, with its quaint gothic doorway, tucked into an unpeopled forest.
 toward Fitchburg, where another furnace is promised. We stay on good paved roads, climbing a steep ridge and descending into a broad valley dotted sparsely with farmhouses and barns. The hills of eastern Kentucky are lonely, empty. We pass no cars, coming or going, on the well-maintained asphalt.
This is different from the emptiness of the far west, where you may spy an oncoming pickup truck five minutes before you pass it on the flat plains. That is an emptiness ochre-colored and lighted by a dry sun. Here you dip into the gloom of unpeopled hollows, climb untraveled ridges through silent woods. Signs of people everywhere, but no movement. Birdsong—clouds of goldfinches (called “wild canaries” hereabouts)—and once, a chainsaw snorting on a hillside. Little else.
The Fitchburg furnace is down a flat, straight valley road paralleling a low creek. Just before we reach the site, we pass Aldersgate Camp, operated by the United Methodist Church. Broad lawns and attractive shingle-sided, quasi-rustic buildings. A pokerwork sign, spar-varnished against the weather.
A dozen yards further is a steel gate, swung open, and a graveled turnaround. A hundred yards beyond this, looming like an Aztec wall or a vast chunk of aquaduct left by Titans, is the Fitchburg furnace.
It is immense, of a butterscotch stone still tiger-striped by smoke marks. This is a polished design. Careful classical architecture, with dressed and close-fitted stonework like the ramparts of Machu Picchu. It is a golden ziggurat or hurdled-shaped mass like a dam rearing up out of this old orchard.
The bulk is 100 feet wide by 25 feet thick at the base by 35 feet tall, the size of a respectable building. The face opens in three bays—two inverted-U-shaped hearths flanking a narrower doorway, very symmetrical. The beveled, cantilevered arches of the hearths are 15 feet wide by a dozen feet tall. I walk into one mouth and gaze up the chimney. I am standing in a giant stone bottle. Around the floor are gutters and channels and side openings, where the blast was stoked, the molten iron run off, the slag and residue skimmed.
Inside, the air is cool, the constant 56 degrees F. of caves, although it is an unseasonable 80 degrees out in the sunshine. Finding a shaded coolness in this place where ore was once superheated and melted in a vortex of oxygen and coke is odd. It convinces me of the pastness of the structure. An umbrageous tomb to vanished industry.
I walk back into the sunlight and gaze up the raked face of the furnace. A finely carved plaque halfway up the height reads:
RED RIVER FUR.
Frederick Fitch designer 1869
Samuel Wrothley bldr
A nearby Forest Service signboard explains that the furnace was “in blast” from 1874 to 1879. Only five years’ production for such a cyclopean structure.
I meditate on the effort that trundled these large stones to an empty valley, that hauled wagon loads of ore and charcoal, that dragged the ingots away. I think of the unpredictability of economics that might explain this sarcophagus for failed enterprise. The scene is utterly quiet, as melancholy as Ozymandias’ monument.
As we walk back to the car, I take a last look. It is a noble structure, with its slight upward taper, its carefully finishes and the pediment banding the top. It is fortresslike, palacelike. Like Wallace Stevens’ jar in Tennessee, its inert stone mass seems to redefine the greening woods and low knolls around it. It possesses an idiosyncratic gravitas. It calls out for this Latin to dignify its emptiness.
Across a sagging barbed wire fence (“bobwhar,” locally), some landowner has posted an irate notice:
NO TRESPASSING
NO ROOT HUNTING
KEEP OUT
“Root” here means ginseng. “’sang,” a form of herbal gold prospected in the light woods and sold in the Orient for small fortunes. A long way from the heroic effort of iron-mining and the Haephestian work of smelting and forging.
Above the furnace is a glen, enclosing a little secret meadow. In one corner of the square, overlooking the road stands a white plastic cross, perhaps five feet tall, on a concrete base. This emblem is hollow and evidently electrified, can be illuminated at night to call the Methodists in the camp below to devotional thoughts.
A curious conjunction, like Henry Adams’ virgin and dynamo—the prime symbol (electrified, in styrene) of the old religion, just a hundred yards from another symbol (now cold and unlighted) of the nineteenth-century religion of progress. I don’t know whether Adams would be pleased to see the dynamo used to generate the Light of the World, whether he would mourn the furnace’s cold hearthstones.
* * *
 on roads more traveled. Pickup trucks, a Southern Bell repair van, salesmen in respectable sedans. Along the Kentucky River, placid and narrow here, into Ravenna, then Irvine, once river-and-railroad hubs, now stagnant.
We pass an intersection: the corner of River Drive and Locomotive Street. The old railyards are now a Choo Choo Park, where children play among the dereliction of another industry. Only small pleasure boats now navigate the river, between dams that tamed it.
The small towns and villages have hermetic economies: there are numberless flea markets and swap centers. There is a Do-It home repair emporium, as large as a zeppelin shed, near a smaller Fixit Center. People are handy here—they repair their homes, make do.
The road out of Irvine is lined with mini-mall shops, rows of stall-like storefronts. Few national chain names (except for the ubiquitous Kentucky Fried Chicken). Homebuilt drive-in restaurants and dairy stores. Minit Marts and country groceries. Hair salons in houses with jokey names. There is always a nail-treatment shop and a tanning parlor. In Irvine there is even the Mack Theater, possibly the last picture show. Not a segment of some maxi-mall’s multi-cinema, with Dolby-surround sound and reclining astronaut seats. Just The Movies.
I wonder, as Irvine vanishes in the rear-view mirror, if many people have made pilgrimages to the furnaces. Some who have been left egocentric spray-paint graffiti to mar the heroic stones. But how many just stood and wondered at the audacity of the structures, the pioneering impulse behind them?
I look in the mirror again, but the afternoon sun dazzles. My odometer says I put a hundred miles on the car. And a hundred years, perhaps. ###
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