Catoctin Furnace
Catoctin Furnace

Author: Elizabeth Yourtee Anderson

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2013-02-19

Total Pages: 155

ISBN-13: 1625840713

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On the eve of the American Revolution, the Johnson brothers founded Catoctin Furnace near present-day Thurmont. Catoctin iron was turned into bombshells used against the British at the Battle of Yorktown. After the colonies won their independence, business boomed for the ironworks. The labor of African slaves and European immigrants produced household goods, tools and stoves for the young country. A small iron-making village evolved around the industry, and though the furnace closed in 1903, its legacy is still remembered and celebrated today. It was rescued from imminent destruction in the 1960s and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. This proud history was chronicled in full by beloved local historian Elizabeth Yourtee Anderson. Discover the story of Catoctin Furnace, which for more than 130 years helped define the industry, history and culture of western Maryland.

Forging America
Forging America

Author: John Bezis-Selfa

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-10-18

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1501722190

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Stacks of stone preside over many bucolic and wooded landscapes in the mid-Atlantic states. Initially constructed more than two hundred years ago, they housed blast furnaces that converted rock and wood into the iron that enabled the United States to secure its national independence. By the eve of the Revolutionary War, furnaces and forges in the American colonies turned out one-seventh of the world's iron.Forging America illuminates the fate of labor in an era when industry, manhood, and independence began to take on new and highly charged meanings. John Bezís-Selfa argues that the iron industry, with its early concentrations of capital and labor, reveals the close links between industrial and political revolution. Through means ranging from religious exhortation to force, ironmasters encouraged or compelled workers—free, indentured, and enslaved—to adopt new work styles and standards of personal industry. Eighteenth-century revolutionary rhetoric hastened the demise of indentured servitude, however, and national independence reinforced the legal status of slavery and increasingly defined manual labor as "dependent" and racially coded. Bezís-Selfa highlights the importance of slave labor to early American industrial development. Research in documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries led Bezís-Selfa to accounts of the labor of African-Americans, indentured servants, new immigrants, and others. Their stories inform his highly readable narrative of more than two hundred years of American history.

Catoctin SlaveSpeak
Catoctin SlaveSpeak

Author: Elayne Bond Hyman

Publisher:

Published: 2020-02

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780578617312

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Catoctin SlaveSpeak is a collection of narrative poems in the voices of enslaved Africans, as well as their enslaved descendants, who were imported to work at the Catoctin Iron Furnace in Thurmont, Maryland. The poems are meant to be read aloud. They are based on available archeological and forensic anthropological evidence resulting from studies conducted on behalf of the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society. They also draw on general knowledge of the peculiar institution of slavery in the United States of America and throughout the African diaspora. They are the result of many hours of walking the earth, visiting the cemetery, studying the history, quiet listening, intuitive knowing, and creative writing by the author, Elayne Bond Hyman. They have been read on several different occasions to audiences in Maryland. The purpose of this publication is to broaden the reading and listening audience, thus giving voice to a heretofore voiceless and often ignored and uncredited segment of Maryland's historic population. Their availability in printed form will enrich the experience of visitors interested in learning the full story of the Catoctin Iron Furnace, beyond the archeological and historic interpretation available in the Museum of the Ironworker. This poetic, artistic, and emotional enrichment can foster a changed conversation about who the founding mothers and fathers of this nation really were.

Guide to Freedom
Guide to Freedom

Author: Peter H. Michael

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2008-06

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 1434380378

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This book should be of interest to any reader who has ever stopped to ponder what children usually ask their elders: Why are we here? In the context of history and myth, several aspects of Western and Eastern civilizations such as the ideas about the existence of an afterlife, evolution, creationism, God and lately inflationary cosmology have constantly been a subject of thought in many peoples' minds. The advances of modern science have provoked a clash between the beliefs in the existence of immaterial beings and the findings of historical people. This has resulted in a challenge to various myths and religious concepts that eventually have been neither entirely adopted nor implemented all over the world. This book is not intended to be a polemic about the existence of God. It is rather an account of how the IDEA of GOD originated and evolved in the mind of the most influential thinkers of all time. The advances of modern science in the West have giving rise to variable ideas about the origins of the universe and the possibility of a final end, which have permeated our society. This contrasts sharply with the thought of Eastern civilizations. This book is a reflection of the different opinions and beliefs about the idea of God as conceived by the minds of individuals in the past and present and by those that now continue to be concerned about the role of evolution and creation after more than five millennia of controversial discussion. The contributions of prominent figures, both ancient and modern, are exposed here with brevity and clarity.

Frederick County Chronicles
Frederick County Chronicles

Author: Marie Anne Erickson

Publisher: Arcadia Publishing

Published: 2012-11-20

Total Pages: 223

ISBN-13: 1614237727

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The rails and covered bridges of Frederick County are framed by the waters of the Potomac River to the south and the Mason-Dixon line to the north. The county rests at a crossroads of Maryland cultures and history, and journalist Marie Anne Erickson sought out the oldest members of this diverse community to record their colorful stories. Twenty years after the articles appeared as the "Crossroads" series for Frederick Magazine, Ingrid Price has compiled her mother's fascinating essays for the first time. Stories of Civil War battles and Prohibition-era raids share the pages with memories of sledding by moonlight and the hunt for the mythical Snallygaster in Erickson's spirited history. From Brunswick to Mount Airy and from Emmitsburg to Point of Rocks, discover an affectionate and occasionally offbeat portrait of Frederick County.