McIntyre Township
McIntyre Township was formed from territory taken from Lewis Township by the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1848. It is named for Archibald McIntyre who was one of the founders of the Williamsport and Elmira Railroad.
The first pioneers arrived in the McIntyre Township area in 1794 near what is now the village of Ralston. John Smithkontz cleared a parcel of land along Lycoming Creek near the mouth of Pleasant Stream on 1805.
The New York Iron and Coal Company created the first business venture in what was to become McIntyre Township in when they constructed a sawmill on Lycoming Creek. The New York Iron and Coal Company also built an iron furnace near the mouth of Frozen Run in 1831. They began to make iron using iron ore that was mined nearby. The company also established a charcoal making operation for the fuel that was needed to keep the furnaces fired. The iron industry had little success in McIntyre. The ore was difficult to clean, it could only be separated from the dirt that was mixed in when it was frozen. And the ore that they did manage to extract produced iron that proved to be very brittle. The reason that several companies attempted to succeed in what proved to be a failing enterprise was the fact that the furnace was within easy distance of the Williamsport and Elmira Railroad which connected the industrial centers of Williamsport and Elmira, New York.
The McIntyre Coal company was founded by Jervis Langdon in 1870. He set up a coal mining operation in the mountains in the northeastern section of McIntyre Township. Coal mining had taken place on a small scale in the earlier years of the township, but Langdon was the first to open a large-scale operation. The coal company constructed a steep (45 degrees) and long (2,300 ft) incline plane to get the coal from the mine to the waiting railroad cars. The village of McIntyre sprang up around the coal mines. At one time it was home to 300 households, had a church, school, store, sawmill, a boot and shoe shop, and a public hall. The McIntyre Coal Company ceased operation in 1886. The mine was abandoned and the town was abandoned shortly after the mine.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Townships Of Lycoming County, Pennsylvania
Famous quotes containing the word township:
“A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)