Ironworks that produced cruiser engines and railroad wheels

The Katahdin Iron Works operated from 1845 to 1890 in a community that included a 100-room hotel and a railroad. By 1888, the mill was converting 10,000 cords of wood to charcoal annually, a process that exhausted the local forests. Production eventually ceased in 1890 because charcoal costs became uncompetitive with Pennsylvania's coke.

The site's industrial history began earlier when Moses Greenleaf found a mountain of orange and red iron oxide pigments in 1820. By 1845, the gossan became the primary source of mined ore. David Pingree organized the works and built a puddling refinery to produce wrought iron when pig iron sales were slow. In 1877, a Swedish mining engineer was hired to reduce the silicon content of the iron.

Stonemasons built a 55-foot high rock blast furnace with water-powered blowers and eighteen stone beehive kilns to produce about 2,000 tons of pig iron annually. A company town was built for 200 families, featuring a sawmill, boarding house, cooperative store, town hall, school, post office, stables, and homes. In 1882, a hurricane fanned sparks from the kilns into a fire that caused major damage. By 1885, the rebuilt plant sold iron for railroad car wheels and cruiser engines for the United States Navy.

Today, the state has restored the blast furnace and one of the beehive charcoal kilns. The blast furnace, one beehive charcoal kiln, and some foundations are all that remain of the mill and village. Records from the mill can be found at the University of Maine's Fogler Library.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons