Deep within the Pocomoke Forest sits a brick furnace that reaches to the sky between cypress trees and bog marshes. As the ivy slowly creeps up around the pipes that once recycled the hot air back into the furnace, apparitions seem to continue to load bog iron, oyster shells and charcoal into the structure.

Furnace Town, Maryland, just outside of Snow Hill, is now what is known as a living history museum, but at one time this place was exactly as this name suggests: a town existing for and around the only original structure standing today, the furnace.

Originally finished in 1832, the furnace, now on the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Historical list, operated for approximately eighteen years before it was finally decommissioned and abandoned. During the time of operation, the furnace was the heart and soul of the village surrounding it.

With the iron-master acting almost as the mayor and foreman, the people of Furnace Town worked day in and day out smelting the bog iron mined from the surrounding swamps. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year for eighteen years the then state-of-the-art piece of engineering produced usable iron. The iron ingots or pig iron was then shipped out to the world via the Chesapeake Bay.

Although the furnace itself is the only original structure, local buildings were transplanted and refurbished to replicate the old village.

Visitors can walk around the buildings imagining how it used to be. Sweaty, soot encrusted men walking back from the hot furnace. Women tending to their gardens near their homesteads.

Your imagination doesn't have to wonder too far as artisans are actually crafting goods as they would have been back in the late 1800s. A Blacksmith labors over the coals in the forge fashioning broom handles that will soon be used by the broom maker across the way. And down the road, the weaver sits in a small house creating mug rugs on her loom dating back nearly two hundred years. All the town's wares are then sold in the gift shop.

Furnace Town really is a blast from the past (pun intended as the reference to the blast furnace that sits there in the village) and deserves a visit. And who knows, you might even find a piece of history for yourself; the furnace waste, slag, litters the grounds even today.

*Stay tuned for Part II when we stroll down the Nassawango Creek as they did in the old days to transport the iron.