Johnnyb,
Is there cast iron pipe conduit at any of the branch crossings? If so, maybe this could be its namesake.
We too have a sand track that is sometimes referred to as an iron pipe road, so named for the embankments with old cast iron pipe water conduit. It was also called an ore road, maybe for the deeply weathered purplish ironstone dug at Pancoast pit. There was also meadow or “savannah” here (
see Cook/Vermeule 1889: Map 15), but I have no record of bog ore (aka meadow ore) actually being extracted. The road began at Pancoast Station (now Jennings pit) and ran to Weymouth Furnace:
This route provided passage through the Weymouth Furnace Lands, following Deep Run’s southern swamp-line. Champion's (
aka Campbells. later Pancoast) Mill was eighteenth century, predating Weymouth. As part of our poultry operation we owned a square mile of the woods here (“The Ponderosa”), purchased for $10 an acre following the 1963 fire for turkey range land. Here’s the bulldozed turkey-run lines in purple on the USGS quadrangle.
I would love to know if the cast iron pipe here could have been forged at Weymouth. It is perhaps three-feet in diameter, but I’ll go back and measure one when chigger season abates. Furnace pipe holds up balconies at Friendship and Piney Hollow Churches, but that pipe is much narrower and the sections are shorter in length. I’ll try to find a pipe photo, which escapes me at the moment. The wife (
below) is standing in the middle of the iron pipe road near the Townsend Savannah Branch crossing pipe. Much of the road beyond this point is overgrown.
S-M