Oct. 16—SCRANTON — Fire roared once again at the historic Scranton Iron Furnaces on Saturday.

The Bonfire Fall Festival was the 10th edition of what had been an annual event until it was paused in 2020-21 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The bonfire was a big pile of pallets set ablaze on a far end of the lawn.

A fundraiser for Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum and Scranton Iron Furnaces, the Bonfire Fall Festival drew hundreds of visitors to the 4-acre site at 159 Cedar Ave.

Richard Edwards of Jermyn grew up in South Scranton and attended the bonfire with his daughter, Angelica. He recalled frequenting the site in his youth.

"I used to come down here as a kid, ride my bike around, meet some friends, sit up top and we had fun," Edwards said.

Sandy Rosado of Moosic, whose father owns Performance Kia in Moosic that was one of the event sponsors, visited the iron furnaces for the first time Saturday night with family members.

She had often driven past the furnace site but never noticed it before and likened it to a hidden historical gem.

"I think it's incredible. It's really, really interesting," Rosado said. "I didn't even know this was here. I didn't know this was a place you could come and discover something so amazing."

Dating to the mid-19th century, the iron furnaces helped forge the Industrial Revolution.

Remnants of a bygone era, the stone-block furnaces with several-feet-thick walls were originally operated by the Lackawanna Iron and Steel Co. between 1840 and 1902. It was the site of the first mass production in the United States of iron T-rails for railroads.

Owned and operated by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the furnace site is administered by the Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum and Iron Furnaces.

According to the museum's website, the four surviving stone blast furnaces are remnants of an extensive plant of the Lackawanna Iron & Steel Co. and represent the early iron industry in the United States. Started in 1840 as Scranton, Grant & Co., the firm had the largest iron production capacity in the United States by 1865. Historical accounts state the blast furnaces were constructed between 1848 and 1857.

"Anthracite coal fueled the iron furnaces here very early on," said John Fielding, curator of the Anthracite Heritage Museum that oversees the iron furnaces. "They burned the furnaces for about three to six months at a time. At one point in time, this was the third largest producer of iron and steel in the United States."

A building called a casting shed sat in the area that is now the lawn. Molten iron poured from the furnaces into molds in the sand floor of the casting shed. The resulting products called iron pigs were taken to rolling and puddling mills about 400 yards upstream along Rolling Brook for reheating and forming into T-rails or other wrought iron products, Fielding said.

By 1880, the furnaces poured 125,000 tons of pig iron, which was converted in the rolling mill and foundry into T-rails and other end products. In 1902, the company dismantled the plant and moved it to Lackawanna, N.Y., to be closer to high-grade iron ores.The rolling and puddling mills in Scranton are long gone. Industrial sites often got repurposed or dismantled after their initial uses, so to have the bulk of the iron furnaces still standing is notable, Fielding said.

"It's almost a miracle that it remains as intact as it is, as the iron furnaces, from just the way industrial sites are used and then repurposed," Fielding said. "And this is a good model. It's a good example of pre-Civil War iron furnaces."

jlockwood@timesshamrock.com; 570-348-9100 x5185;