Charcoal burner, occupation

[gary]

Is a charcoal burner a man who takes raw coal and make charcoal?

What's the difference between that and someone who works at a coke oven?

 

[Lampasas Bill]

No, he burns wood with low oxygen to make charcoal.

 

[Joe Whitworth]

Information Panel: Charcoal Making on Maryland Heights (U.S. National Park Service)

Information Panel: Charcoal Making on Maryland Heights

www.nps.gov

 

[gary]

I owe my enlightenment on this subject matter to you gentlemen.

 

[Peace Society]

Information Panel: Charcoal Making on Maryland Heights (U.S. National Park Service)

Information Panel: Charcoal Making on Maryland Heights

www.nps.gov

Seems odd that they don't mention that charcoal burns hotter than wood, which is why forges needed charcoal.

 

[7thWisconsin]

That was a lonely, dirty thankless job.

 

[Joe Whitworth]

Seems odd that they don't mention that charcoal burns hotter than wood, which is why forges needed charcoal.

Sadly fine details like science are frequently omitted to make shorter reading for today's shorter attention spans

As "7thWisconsin" said it wasn't much of an existence, camped for weeks with bare essentials while building up the stack and attending to the smoldering pit. My place 1/2 way up the mountain has produced a relic or two and has two old charcoal roads running across it but no pits. I've stumbled over a couple of charcoal pits while metal detecting higher up on the mountain. My metal detecting efforts in and around them produced a few iron bits and one lone Yankee Eagle button.The people working these were poor folks or slaves with little to lose but bone or wooden buttons, these long since decayed and returned to Mother Earth. Horseshoes, pieces of chain, wedges and axe heads scattered about the mountain are the rusty relics of harvesting the vast amounts of timber needed for producing charcoal to fuel the furnace of the nearby Antietam Iron Works.

 

[Dan Kohli]

Here's a video made by Colonial Michilimackinac on their experiment with the process of making charcoal that I found a few years back, If anyone is having a hard time picturing the process.

 

[gary]

Thanks. Never got to Fort Michilimackinac and know that the Royal Americans under Major George Etherington garrisoned it when it was captured by the Ottawa(?) or Objibwe during Pontiac's Rebellion.

 

[7thWisconsin]

Thaddeus Steven's owned a foundry west of Gettysburg. The foundry made its own charcoal and lumbered the mountain behind the foundry. Eventually the property was sold at a nominal price to the state of Pennsylvania. That's how Caledonia State Park came to be.