park: The long Hill, Delaware

Old School Baptist Church.

Human activity in the area of Iron Hill goes back many centuries, well before Europeans arrived. Lenni-Lenape Indians used jasper from the site to make arrowheads. Iron Hill is not far from the border with Maryland and

Iron Hill

Continued from Page 65 was first identified in print by Augustine Herman in 1670, labelled as “Yron Hill.” The Welsh miners who came in the early 1700s knew how to work the land. They quickly commenced open pit mining on the hill. Iron was important for making barrel staves, nails, tools and numerous other items. Iron Hill became an important source of ore for the forges which produced these items. George Washington considered the hill critical in doing a reconnaissance of the area. He climbed Iron Hill to observe enemy troop movements leading up to the Battle of Cooch’s Bridge on September 3, 1777. The Battle was more of a skirmish than a large-scale conflict. It was the only battle in Delaware during the Revolutionary War.

Mining continued on Iron Hill until the late 1800s, but demand for the relatively low-grade ore had been declining, making some of the extraction operations unprofitable. J.P. Whitaker operated the last mine there, and he shipped the ore to Principio Furnace in Maryland for smelting and turning into final end products. Some of the mine workers, many of them African-Americans, remained in the area for decades after mining ceased. In 1923, Pierre S. du Pont funded construction of Iron Hill School No. 112C to educate their children. This is a one-room, wood-shingled schoolhouse, 24 feet by 48 feet, which served the area until schools were desegregated in 1965. Afterwards, the schoolhouse turned into the Iron Hill Museum, which held the collections of the Delaware Academy of Science from 1967 to 2016. The schoolhouse was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. In the years following mining operations, local citizens wanted to use the land for a new pursuit— so they turned the area into a park. Iron Hill Park has several hiking trails, including the MasonDixon Trail, a playground, a disc golf course, a pavilion and a “bark park” for dog owners, along with historic sites. Within Iron Hill Park are the remnants of the Indian Jasper Mine, the Iron Hill Hand Dug Mine and the Whitaker Ore Pit. Visitors can also see an old still used to make bootleg liquor and a Revolutionary War era