Catoctin Furnace is located at the base of the Catoctin Mountains in Frederick County Maryland. The Ironworks thrived until 1903 making stoves, wheel rims, cannons, and shot. The furnace created a village of molders, founders, finishers, miners, woodcutters, charcoal makers, and teamsters. The workforce to keep business running for 125 years first was worked by enslaved and free African Americans and later European immigrants. The furnace property is part of a larger tract of land now administrated by the Cunningham Falls State Park which borders Catoctin Mountains Park off of route 15. The Catoctin Furnace Historical Society has restored a double log house which they use as a museum.
While visiting the Furnace I was extremely surprised when walking the Catoctin furnace trail that there was a cemetery or was a cemetery at the end of the trail. I saw fieldstones in the underbrush. There is a marker that I failed to take a photo of names of those interned there. While doing further research I found that the remains were carefully removed from the cemetery in 1979 and 1980 when nearby Route 15 was being expanded. The graves were thought by some locals to be Native American. More than half the graves had to be removed. Dozens more are still there.
They were turned over to the museum and were studied in detail by the late Smithsonian anthropologist J. Lawrence Angel.
In 2014 they had identified at least 23 additional burials bring the total to about 58.
DNA and facial reconstruction were performed and two busts were constructed by artists from StudioEIS in Brooklyn, New York, The Catoctin Furnace Historical Society unveiled facial reconstructions of two people who were once enslaved at the Catoctin Furnace in at the Delaplaine Arts Center In June 2021. A woman who experts estimate was about 35 years old when she died and a boy believed to have been about 15. are now on display at the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society's Museum of the Ironworker once it opens.
The untouched part of the cemetery — which contains an unspecified number of intact graves, although 23 have been confirmed — sits on private property on Catoctin Furnace Road. The owners have allowed Comer (secretary of the Catoctin Furnace Historical Society and other visitors to come onto the land, and have left it largely as is.
They’re legally required to allow some access onto the land under Maryland laws, which state that any cemetery, even privately owned, must be accessible to people who have a blood relation or cultural affiliation with the people buried there.
The Catoctin Furnace Historical Society and the state of Maryland have both been trying to purchase the untouched part of the cemetery for several years. The property owners, however, have not taken their offers. See article Frederick News Post.
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