The other day we took a short trip to the abandoned ruins of nearby Scotia Barrens, tucked away in the mixed hardwoods of central Pennsylvania. We’d heard about them, but didn’t know anything of their origins.
Our directions were to enter at the gate (which one?) and stay to the left at each branch of the trail. We apparently lucked out on our first pick, and found ruins within a few minutes of walking in the early spring woods.
Our first discovery was the concrete block outline of an old square foundation, that still had some duffy steps cut down into the ground in what may have been a cold cellar. But there were few clues to anything else of its history.
But soon, the brightly-glaring graffiti on a concrete structure caught our eyes through the green-tinted brown: an odd-shaped, rusting, reinforced concrete collection of columns and plates with an interior pit, leading to what appeared to be an old spillway.
On either side of this structure were two tall narrow berms that were higher than the top of the structure. Could it be a railway line that permitted an emptying of hopper cars? Yet if there had been a trestle, there was no trace of it. The berms sloped down on either side to the valley floor in 200 feet or so. Clearly they were manmade, and, judging from the size of the trees growing on them, was abandoned some 60-75 years ago.
Leading a hundred feet in the opposite direction from the incongruous concrete skeleton were parallel lines of squat, square posts, each bristling with a stubby, rusty rebar or two. At the other end of this dotted line was another superstructure, likewise decorated in lively graffiti and mystery.
As we headed back to the gate, we met an old man wearing a blaze orange sweatshirt and a white beard scraggling all the way down his neck, and his border collie named Duke. We asked him if he knew anything about the ruins, and he declared he sure did!
His is the only house on the nearby road, we learned. Duke thinks the whole property is his backyard, and the old man allowed that he lets him believe it.
He told us that the structures were from the 1940s when the place was open-mined for iron ore, and washed out of the ground. The berms were to retain mud from flooding away. But the earlier industry was logging to create charcoal the nearby Centre Furnace. In the 1880s, Andrew Carnegie purchased the land and was the first to employ steam shovels to dig an open pit for ore. (“Did you see the pit?” No? Well, follow me!”) Carnegie sold out to a local company in 1890, who eventually shut down operations in 1909. And within a few years, Scotia became a ghost town. Except for its brief respite in the 1940s to meet the World War 2 demand for iron, its days of being reclaimed by nature have continued ever since. The land is now preserved as Pennsylvania State Game Lands 176.
