Double Pond floodgates bring Wawayanda Millrace to life

Deep in Wawayanda State Park below Double Pond lie the ruins of what once was an industrial village that centered on a giant smelting furnace William Ames built in 1846. The furnace bears Ames’ initials and the date scratched on an iron bar at the entrance to the mouth of the furnace. Today, some of the mossy 160-year-old granite walls and foundations still are standing, and look more as if they should belonged to some ancient pre-Columbian civilization than to a 19th century village in northwestern New Jersey. Most days, the ruins are cloaked in silence and birdsong. But for just a few hours on the afternoon of Sunday, June 11, the old stones rang with life and the forest was filled with the fragrance of rushing water, when park officials opened the three floodgates that released thousand of gallons of water from Double Pond into the stone-edged millrace channel. Amazed on-lookers stood on a small footbridge to view the torrent that once had powered the huge millwheels that powered great bellows that provided the blast of air that drove the furnace, which yielded nearly seven tons of very high quality of iron per day. The millrace also drove a sawmill, a box manufacturing mill, and a machine that smashed iron ore into small pieces for smelting. “People just don’t know about the historical wonders that exist in this park,” said Delores Dobbs, president of the Vernon Historical Society. Guide Kristine Nelson, eyes shining with enthusiasm, led a small group back into the dense grove of maples and oaks that now surround the iron-smelting furnace. “Families once occupied houses along the creek and single workers lived in a bunkhouse,” Nelson said. “There was even a post office, a cheese-box factory, an ice house, a blacksmith shop, a general store, a brick schoolhouse, spindle factory, charcoal pits, a shovel factory and a 40-mule barn.” Nelson explained that for a 150-year span from the middle of the 1750s until the last years of the 19th century, the New Jersey Highlands were rich in iron-smelting furnaces, forges and iron mines. The mines in Wawayanda produced iron of a particularly high degree of purity, which was used to make wheels for locomotives and train cars. The iron smelted in the large furnace was popularly known as “pig iron,” because the shape of the molds into which the iron ingots were poured was a branching structure formed in sand. The individual ingots lay at right angles to a main channel, and appeared to resemble piglets suckling a sow. Muleteers then transported the iron in a cart drawn by four or six mules to Woodport at the head of Lake Hopatcong, from whence it was loaded onto barges and shipped to market via the Morris Canal. The pig iron was delivered by a mule team, which dragged the wagons to Woodport, at the head of Lake Hopatcong, whence the iron was shipped to market via the Morris Canal. According to local histories, the iron also was transported across Wawayanda Lake to Newburgh, N. Y., and from the lake to barges or boats on the Hudson River.  The furnace was in use until 1857 when cheaper iron-processing methods that employed coal came into use in coal-rich Pennsylvania. The Wawayanda furnace used charcoal prepared by charcoal-burners who practiced their craft deep in the forest. “This part of New Jersey is so full of history,” said Dobbs. “The better we understand the lives of those who preceded us, the better we’ll understand ourselves. People don’t realize it, but every day, we are living in history.”