Riddlesburg iron mines

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:27]Hey everyone.

[00:01:10]Heat.

[00:01:16]Heat.

[00:01:31]Hello everybody. Welcome back to the channel. And today we are going to go down to um around the Hopewell area right outside of Riddlesburg. And we're going to go check out an old iron mining site at a friend's friend's property.

[00:01:48]And uh we're going to go check out some mining sites that used to supply some iron ore to the Reynoldsburg iron furnace. So uh we're down here in Bedford County. This this should be a fun one.

[00:02:04]Okay, we're at a beautiful property here and uh right outside of Riddlesburg and we are at another iron mining site and this is a friend uh friend of mine's property named Don. I I met him last winter and he invited me up here to take a look at the property. And here's the old mining road. Okay, this road goes directly through the property. This property is sitting around 60 acres right along Tussy Mountain. And like we talked about in many of my uh other videos, Tussy Mountain had lots of iron mining. And here's some brown hematite iron ore. And this area is loaded with iron mines. And these are mostly iron pits. Um, open cut pit mines. And you can see a big spoil pile there. There's a big spoil pile here.

[00:03:03]And right here is actually another spoil pile.

[00:03:08]And if we come around here, we are going to find a cut that will go directly into the open pit mine. And this mine is pretty big, judging by the spoil piles.

[00:03:22]And they extracted a lot of iron ore uh from here. And this iron ore would go to Riddlesburg iron furnace.

[00:03:34]The Riddlesburg Iron Furnace was owned by the Kemell Coal and Iron Company. And this was in Bedford County. And Riddlesburg iron furnace operated from 1860, I think 1865, 1868, somewhere around there, to all the way till 1946.

[00:03:52]And they needed a lot of iron ore. So around Tussy Mountain, there was lots of supplies of iron ore. And if we're looking right here, we're looking at an access point to an open cut where they were taking out iron ore. So, we're going to walk back in here. They would have had uh dinky tracks set up here and they would have carted out the iron ore from the main iron mining site. So, we'll walk back in here and we'll go take a look at this iron pit.

[00:04:54]Okay, We're standing at the entryway of the mine. You can see where they they channeled through here. They brought their dinky carts in. Actually, this would have been probably flat. These are all spoil piles. So, they would they just left this area open uh to run their dinky carts out of here with iron ore.

[00:05:26]What's interesting about this is it's an open pit and you don't see many open pit mines on on the mountain. It's usually uh drift mines, but here's an open pit.

[00:05:37]You can see they started up there and chandled it out over here. And this is kind of like just a regular quarry. So they were like cing out rather than mining out of a tunnel. This was extracted um from an open pit. They would start at the top, gather up the iron ore, take it out of here.

[00:06:00]Okay, so we're standing in the old iron pit and you can see it's not that wide and it started up tall up higher here.

[00:06:10]So basically they found this vein of iron that came right through here. And it was probably this vein was probably up to, you know, 15 ft wide, 20 ft wide, as much as they took out of here. But they cleaned it up very well. And you can tell there's a lot of just sandstone and and mountain rock. And there's a lot of clay here. So the iron ore was was kind of there would have been a vein right here where they would have taken it out. You can see how it's cut out right here. So, it's a nice long trench here. They they took this iron out, which it's like I said, it's really unique to see different mining techniques and quarry techniques.

[00:06:54]You see a lot of open pit mining done around Morrison's Cove. And in the mountains, you typically see shaft mining or tunnel tunnel mining. right here. They just, you know, kind of opened it up and, uh, took it from the surface.

[00:07:13]When I'm exploring this pit, um, there's not a lot of iron ore left.

[00:07:20]There's some iron right there underneath that rock, but they extracted it very well. And you can see they they really knew what they were they were looking for. And so a lot of this sandstone rock is no value to them. So they left it.

[00:07:36]But you can see how much they ciried out of here. And all the spoils, all the no good stuff is mounted up around around this pit here.

[00:07:56]We're coming down towards a section of the mine that has a lot of water in it.

[00:08:15]You can see the big piles of spoils all around here.

[00:08:31]Okay, here's a larger section of the the mine. It's actually filled in with water. So, this is kind of a lower lower dig. Um not sure how deep this is.

[00:08:43]Probably not that deep, but they found a lot more iron in this section and it was dug down lower. So, naturally, there's some water laying in there. They might have hit a little spring or this just collects, you know, runoff.

[00:08:59]What's neat is you can see the the big spoil piles around it.

[00:09:05]What what I'm very curious about here is this how it's a lot it's a lot deeper here. Right up right up on the the top up there. There's a big vertical shaft and I think it came down. They they found a vein of iron and it goes straight down. And this obviously is deeper. So, they might have found a lot of iron right here. And I'll I'll go up there and show you what I'm talking about.

[00:09:38]Okay. We can see from up top here, there's the uh the water down in this mine. And this is cored out a lot larger right here.

[00:09:47]And this will continue on out that way.

[00:09:51]And there's another would have been an access point into this mine.

[00:09:56]And we are standing on some spoil piles right now. I'm going to go over here and show you this vertical shaft.

[00:10:10]Okay. This is pretty big.

[00:10:14]That's no I mean I don't think that's a test hole. That's pretty large. So I mean it goes from here all the way across and it's very large.

[00:10:29]So my indicator here is just a vertical shaft that went straight down.

[00:10:35]They probably had a some kind of hoist right here and they were probably, you know, there's probably a vein of iron that they were going under underneath right here.

[00:10:49]So that that would be my theory, but it's a pretty large sinkhole and I'm going to say that would have been a vertical shaft.

[00:11:04]We're standing up here and you can see the large spoil piles and they're all all down there and that's all coming out of this big open cut back here. And there's a big the vertical shaft that we found and there's another large spoil pile over there. But they must have got a fair amount of iron out of here.

[00:11:27]Here's another look at look at this vertical shaft up on top here. Um, they cleaned up the iron pretty good here, but you know, here's a couple pieces of small iron that was on the spoil pile.

[00:11:51]Always enjoy the landscape of an old iron mining site. It's always nice and clean and see the big spoil piles. I'm going to walk over there and we'll see what's on this other side. My buddy Dawn up there, uh, it's really nice. He's driving me around the site here and and letting me check out this property. So, you know, it's nice when people will help me out with the these projects because a lot of these old industrial sites are on private property and it's just awesome to check them out and then document them.

[00:12:25]So, as we come along here, there's a a nice roadway. So, this was probably the main transportation and would have been a uh would have been probably a dinky line and they would have put the iron ore on these dinky carts and and they would have taken them down and, you know, ran them to the iron furnace at Riddlesburg.

[00:12:48]And as we get over here, we see another large spoil pile. So, we'll go check that out.

[00:12:55]Wow. By the indication of these spoil piles, there's a lot of mining going on.

[00:13:01]Big one here. Here. There's a cut uh cut back into the main open cut. And you can see they they left a lot of junk here, a lot of spoils. And that tells me they were sorting through a lot of of not good iron. But, you know, they had a the uh spoil piles was, you know, they had to sift through that to to find the good stuff. So, I mean, they they left a lot of mess.

[00:13:34]Okay. So, here's a here's another cut here on the other side of this this mine. And this will take us down to the the area that's pretty wet. And you can tell they took a lot of material out of here by the the spoil piles.

[00:13:56]We'll walk down here and see if we can find anything here.

[00:14:13]Just a just an empty, you know. I guess this would have been at end of the vein here. Like I said, they took the iron out of here pretty well. It's cleaned up very well. And they left all the sandstone down here.

[00:14:28]Talking to the property owner here, Riddlesburg mined up uh they they ran their iron first till 1946.

[00:14:38]And I'm going to say this this mining site was probably early 1900s, maybe 1910, 1920, because these spoil piles are so large.

[00:14:50]And I think they did all this by steam shovel. So typically on Tussy Mountain, a lot of the the mining that was going on 1870, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890, they were going underground in tunnel mines.

[00:15:06]And that was very dangerous.

[00:15:09]So, you know, as things progressed and they got steam shovels, they would have just found this pocket of iron and they started scooping it out. That's why these cuts are so big. That's why these spoil piles are so large. And uh you can see all the the red clay.

[00:15:27]So my theory is this mine is probably, you know, early 1900s.

[00:15:43]Here's some nice iron ore.

[00:15:46]Really nice. And when you look down in here, you see a lot of sandstone and but there's still a lot of iron mixed up in here. And so they took as much out of here as they could, extracted almost all of it, and they left. So, you know, iron ore around Tussy Mountain was very abundant.

[00:16:10]So, here we are on the other side of that that water hole. And this open cut, open pit probably went a lot deeper here. And this is kind of the the main area. But you can see how much they took out of this just this big area. So there again, these big spoil piles are very large to tell how much they took out of here.

[00:16:34]I learned something new each time I visit a mining site. And today, this is a unique site on Tusy Mountain. You know, for time frame wise, Riddlesburg ran until 1946, the longest, latest iron furnace in the Jun Iron District. Um, so even towards the end of the the Riddlesburg iron furnace, they were taking iron ore from like Msabi Range, Lake Superior. It was a lot cheaper to get it out out there by rail by railroad. And mining was slowing down pretty aggressively in the Juniata region.

[00:17:12]That's why there's no more there. The the blast furnaces, they left Jun, the Juniat iron district.

[00:17:19]This is history here. And uh I'm I'm really amazed with what these men did to help build America.

[00:17:43]We found this trench right here. This could have been a tunnel sha tunnel mine right here.

[00:17:51]This is leading back towards that main open cut.

[00:18:02]There's some loose dirt down in here.

[00:18:06]I think this could have been opened up.

[00:18:09]This might have been an entryway to a mine, underground mine. See all this clay?

[00:18:18]Here's another trenchway that looks like could be a drift mine. We're finding some signs of drift mines down here.

[00:18:53]Yeah, I'm going to say this was a drift mine.

[00:18:57]Found this iron ore right at the entrance to this drift mine.

[00:19:08]Thank you for watching this uh short video here. It's a interesting mining site here on Tussy Mountain uh that supplied Riddlesburg iron furnace with some iron. So we will catch you on the next video. Thanks again for watching.