“In small things forgotten,” is a phrase I have admired since I first ran across it reading archeaology books, when it was used to describe those little pieces of the past that are all around us: Gravestones, bridges, and although not this lost village in particular, places like it. 

Pennsylvania’s fame as a home of foundries began in places like this 18^th-century “iron plantation.” It was not dissimilar, I suspect, from a mill town, with a big house for the boss and his family, smaller ones for the workers, a company store where folks traded work credit for goods, and where everything centered around the production buildings – in this case, a blast furnace. 

Enough of Hopewell Furnace remains, restored to its most productive years during the 1830s, that I  find myself at home in a place I didn’t even know existed. It’s about an hour outside of Philadelphia, but the drive through the green, boulder-strewn woods has already taken me more than 60 miles away from one of America’s great cities. The sun leaks through the trees and the past piles up, thick as leaves, until the old fantasy returns that I am going to a nearly secret place, preserved at great expense by the government just because they want to keep me informed and amused. 

And so it seems on the day I visit. Hopewell is one of those places where the park rangers are awfully glad I know they exist, and awfully happy to let me listen in as they discuss what plants might have once grown in the ironmaster’s vegetable garden. That they are concerned about such things enough to argue about them is reassuring. My tax dollars at work on something I would argue about, too.

It’s not the smell of plants, however, that I recollect when I think of Hopewell: It’s the suffocating residue of charcoal. It’s almost a pressure on the lungs, and I run into it throughout the site. Most oppresively it’s in the cooling shed and the dark (how could it be otherwise?) charcoal house, but most memorably I smell it at the open-air hearths, on the edges of the woods. There I learn that a name on my family tree – Collier – is the same term given to the workers who created the charcoal that fed the furnace. I may have roots here.

After watching the foundry workers demonstrate how Hopewell’s famous iron stoves were once cast, I wander down the road to the boarding house, where I sit for half an hour in a chair propped up on the front porch. I’m writing in my journal, wondering if the fields and forests in front of me looked this way 150 years ago. Soon another thought crosses my mind: That I’m happy because I have no future here, and nothing to worry about. Everything at Hopewell is past.

Other thoughts occur to further relax me and endear that place to me – I see a bee, a twist of wire on the fence post – but mostly they’re little things I forget.