York Iron Company Mine
Near York, Pennsylvania
Beneath the fields of southwestern York County runs a chapter of Pennsylvania's industrial past that few people know today.
Iron ore was discovered nearby in the eighteen fifties, and a mine opened here soon after. York Iron Company eventually took it over and expanded operations until a number of mines were running across this corner of the county. At the industry's peak, many skilled miners recruited from England and Wales worked these deposits, sending ore to the furnaces and forges that built nineteenth-century America.
But the economics shifted. Rising costs and cheaper iron produced elsewhere made the local ore uncompetitive, and the mines closed by the late eighteen hundreds. The English and Welsh mining families who had shaped these communities stayed on, and their influence lingered in the churches, fraternal societies, and surnames of the region long after the mines themselves went silent.
