Pine Grove Furnace

Pine Grove Furnace is at the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains near my home in south-central Pennsylvania, and is a beautiful wooded area that feels remote — as of this spring in 2024, it doesn’t even get cell phone reception — yet, it’s only a 20-minute drive from my suburban dwelling. In fact, there is a legacy of Pine Grove’s reputation as an accessibile wilderness get-away that goes back 120 years to when a forested amusement park was built here for urbanites to get a taste of the forest. Pictured here, on the bottom photo, you can see the ruins of a cement slab that had been a dance floor back in the day.

Jay Cooke and William Fuller were deeply involved in the mining business in the late 1800s, but their South Mountain Mining Company was losing business to other areas with better drilling technologies and easier access to their ores. In an attempt to make up for their declining profits, they built Pine Grove Park, an amusement center in the woods, which ran from 1878-1900. You can see an advert for the Park in the top right-hand corner.

Besides the dance pavilion, Pine Grove Park had a baseball field, a water-powered merry-go-round, a bicycle race track, a shooting range, a restaurant, and tree-canopied walking paths. The small Mountain Creek was actually dammed to make a shallow lake to paddle boats around. The park was popular, averaging 21,000 visitors a year by 1880. It was also free — but you had to buy a train ticket to gain access. The upper left image shows the prices for tickets.

Like the mines, Pine Grove Park went into decline by the turn of the century. Several devastating forest fires were partially to blame. By 1900 the amusement park’s services came to an end. But the forest, built up by the CCC and other conservationist groups, is a place of accessible wilderness once more.