I get a kick out of reading the martha furnace diaries, sounds like there was never a dull moment living back then. To me, its pretty damn funny.
This is taken from "Harvey Moores - an old jersey furnace"
Men get drunk, beat up their wives; fall in
the creek; break various and sundry bones; have "grand" fights with each other; lose
their cows in the woods; and have their teams run away, which usually take a couple of
days to recover.
Stray dogs roam through the town. "Michael Mick kills a rattlesnake". James Craig
returns to work "after enjoying the pleasures of matrimony and goes to chopping wood".
Jacob Ventling takes pot shots at a loon for two days, and then don't get it. Jane
Hamilton is tried by the synod of her church for drinking the "spiritual" liquor, and is
acquitted. James McEntire brings his daughter back from Half Moon "for fear her morals
will be corrupted". The floor boards of the bridge slip up and "Old Leather Jack falls in
the creek casouse." Walter Anderson "dreams ecstatically of kissing two handsome
girls". Sol Reeve gets drunk, breaks his nose, "throws Pink out of doors and breaks his
leg", and then goes about all the next day "grunting like a man 100 years old". Jesse
Evans, the ironmaster, makes surveys, lays out "crossways" (corduroy roads), builds
bridges, hunts for ore, checks cargo, makes out bills of ladings, goes to court, visits
Philadelphia, and once a year starts out with his wife, Lucy Evans, for "Schuley's
Mountain Spring".
The moulders all quit one hot August day and go "over to the beach" to cool off. "Old
Sore Toes departs this life" - he was a horse. Ed Ruffer gets "$3.00 per month for
wheeling cinders". Men dig for buried treasure. A "conflagration" destroys the furnace,
casting shed and warehouse, which are all rebuilt in record time. Bogs are cleaned out
and fresh ones opened up. The saw mill is rebuilt and so is the stamping mill. A new
hearth is put in the furnace each spring. The bridge house gets a new floor. The
"coaling" (charcoal) comes in good, bad, and indifferent, and occasionally catches fire
and damages the wagons. The ore boat runs aground in the pond coming down from
Sassafras. Fires occur in the pines. A gale of wind blows the roof off the carpenter shop.
Teams fall off the bridges; wagons collapse; the "pacer" breaks down; the bellows get
wrecked; the dam gives way; and all hands get hilariously drunk when the furnace goes
out of blast for the winter.
,
,
,
. The hotels, like the Dorincourt, Heath House, and Belmont Hall, all burned down or were demolished 70 or 80 years ago. The spring was buried when they blasted out a wider road down to Hackettstown.