Lenore Embick Flower's History of Pine Grove Furnace was first presented in 1933 and is now in a 4th edition printed by the Cumberland County Historical Society. This seminal history of the local iron industry contains an apparent error: Flower's confusion about the destruction of the ironmaster's mansion at Pine Grove Furnace.
In her text, Flower discussed the various sales of the Pine Grove Furnace business as fortunes in the iron industry waxed and waned. After describing an 1864 sale of the" 'Pine Grove Iron Works,' buildings and improvements," she commented that:
No mention is ever made specifically of the "Big House" which was the name always used at the iron works for the mansion house in which the owner or manager lived. Some years later the original Big House of Pine Grove Furnace was destroyed by fire caught from a spark from a mountain conflagration. It was rebuilt - the present structure.
Note the context in which she mentions the mansion fire. By first describing an event in 1864 and then saying the fire occurred "some years later," she must mean a fire in the years after the Civil War. Further, she specifies a forest fire as the proximate cause of the mansion's destruction.
The Society's current edition adds the following endnote:
The property was surveyed in the 1970s when state commissioners were considering abolishing (this is the word used in the original source) the building. Ed Lafond, head of the Historic Site Survey, John Tyler and others determined that the building was erected between 1827-1829 and that there was no evidence that the building ever burned.
Why does Flower err in reporting that the mansion at Pine Grove Furnace burned during a forest fire some time after the Civil War? I suggest Flower confused two different fires: the loss of the Big House at Pine Grove Furnace in 1819, and a forest fire which burned the manager's residence (also sometimes called a "Big House") at nearby Laurel Forge in 1872.
The 1819 Mansion Fire at Pine Grove Furnace
Prominent ironmaster Michael Ege died in August 1815. His children spent months disputing who would inherit the four local iron operations he owned (the Carlisle Ironworks in Boiling Springs, the Mount Holly Ironworks, the Cumberland Furnace at Huntsdale, and Pine Grove Furnace). When the legal dust settled in 1816, Peter Ege emerged as sole owner of the operation at Pine Grove.
At the time Peter Ege became owner of Pine Grove, the ironmaster's residence was presumably the same one listed in a 1795 business ledger. As detailed by Nancy Van Dolsen, the ledger describes a "two-story wood house either 32 feet by 24 1/2 feet or 28 feet by 22 feet, not including the kitchen" which is "large by the period's standards" and "very well furnished for the late eighteenth century.” While we cannot say with certainty that the large wood house in the 1795 ledger was the same one occupied two decades later by Peter Ege, his wife Jane Arthur Ege, and their growing family, it seems the simplest explanation.
Van Dolsen does not note the ultimate fate of this wood building. The documentary evidence does not help us determine whether it was at the exact same location as the current brick mansion or somewhere else along the hill above the furnace stack. (Ironmaster mansions were typically built atop a hill where the proprietor or manager could readily observe ironmaking operations, but not too close to the roaring combustion of the furnace stack.)
Three years after Peter became sole owner in 1816, disaster struck. From the American Volunteer in Carlisle, February 4, 1819:
FIRE! - We are informed, that the dwelling house of Mr. Peter Ege, at Pine Grove, was entirely consumed, by fire, on Friday night last; and that the greater part of his furniture was thereby lost. We have not heard any particulars.
In the summer of 1863, the Cumberland Valley was awash in fear and excitement as General Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia came northward, culminating in the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd. Much has been written since then, 'indeed perhaps too much- by one estimate more than 5000 books and articles have been written about the Gettysburg Campaign of June and July 1863.