Bellefonte Furnace - The Gephart Era

The Gephart Era

In a surprise announcement on May 5, 1899, J. Wesley Gephart, a prominent local businessman and sometime president of the Valentine Iron Company, announced that he had collected New York and Philadelphia capitalists to invest in and restart the furnace. Gephart assumed the presidency of the new Bellefonte Furnace Company, which owned the furnace and the ore leases at Mattern Bank and Red Bank. Furthermore, Gephart revealed that the company had bought the large ore deposits at Scotia from Carnegie Steel to augment the furnace's ore reserves. Gephart's Central Railroad of Pennsylvania was to build a trestle across Spring Creek to reach the plant. John Reilly was retained as vice president, and Tom Shoemaker was one of the directors. The furnace was relit on July 24, 1899, for the first time in six years.

Because of the removal of the Red Bank Branch in 1896, Bellefonte Furnace initially began receiving ore via a roundabout route, shipping over the Scotia Branch and Fairbrook Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad to Tyrone, and then north over the Bald Eagle Branch to Bellefonte. To shorten the route, the Bellefonte Central quickly laid a new Scotia Branch of 1.4 miles (2.3 km) from Graysdale to Scotia, where a narrow gauge line owned by the furnace company hauled ore from Red Bank to the Scotia washer. Ore from both pits was cleaned and shipped from Scotia, the first train leaving on October 31, 1899. The Bellefonte Central also rebuilt the Red Bank Branch from Graysdale to Mattern Bank, which opened August 11, 1899.

After a confrontation with the PRR's assistant superintendent for the Tyrone Division, Gephart's men began work on the Furnace Branch of the Central Railroad in May 1899. The bridge was completed and placed in service on July 17, 1899. With the new connection in place, Bellefonte Furnace could now ship pig iron either via the Bellefonte Central and the PRR or by the Central Railroad and the Beech Creek Railroad (part of the New York Central system), giving it leverage for better freight rates. It also gave the railroad easy access to a Gephart-owned lime quarry at Salona, on the Central Railroad.

Ominously, however, the furnace shut down for repairs during summer 1900. As before, the effects of the shutdown rippled through the economy of Bellefonte, with workers at the ore pits and the lime quarry at Salona and railroad crews being furloughed. The furnace did, however, return to blast on schedule on September 27, 1900. Valentine, now Nittany Furnace, was also closed at the time, but Gephart and another group of investors bought this furnace as well in December. It would, however, be managed separately from Bellefonte Furnace. Gephart announced that Bellefonte Furnace would be run more steadily than Nittany, which would only be operated at peak periods.

Despite Gephart's success in attracting investors, the iron markets remained weak, and Bellefonte Furnace closed down in June. Repairs were under way to bring it back into blast by September 1904. It was back in blast again by the end of October. Gephart's death the next year robbed his numerous numerous enterprises of leadership, although it brought Bellefonte and Nittany Furnaces under a single management. They were still owned by different parties, and Bellefonte Furnace benefited somewhat from being tied to the Central Railroad of Pennsylvania. However, the Panic of 1907 proved to be the final blow for the iron industry in Bellefonte. Bellefonte Furnace went out of blast for the last time on December 21, 1910. For the time being, its most remunerative asset was its pile of furnace slag, which was used by Tom Shoemaker in the construction of a PRR railroad yard in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. In 1914, the furnace and its ore holdings were sold to the John Lowber Welsh estate, one of its bondholders. The furnace was demolished for scrap in 1915, and the ore pits were shut down and the company houses there dismantled. The Central Railroad of Pennsylvania was dealt a mortal blow by the loss of the furnace traffic. Under the presidency of Gephart's son, it struggled on for a few more years before abandonment in 1918.