Iron manufacturing at Centre Furnace launched Centre County industry and settlement and helped lead to the establishment of Pennsylvania State University. In 1791, ironmasters Samuel Miles and John Patton bought over 16,000 acres to found Centre Furnace, using local quarries and forests for the iron ore, limestone, and charcoal needed to produce metal for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Those lands would today cover much of State College and University Park, as well as parts of Benner, College, Ferguson, Halfmoon, Harris, and Patton townships. Centre Furnace Village included the still-standing ironmaster's Mansion and furnace stack, while houses for iron and farm workers, along with a church, post office, company store, school, blacksmith shop, gristmill, and sawmill, have disappeared. This community of a few hundred people began at Thompson Spring across East College Avenue near the Duck Pond and extended along Thompson Run to Millbrook Marsh about a mile east. Successors James Irvin and Moses Thompson later gifted 200 acres of Centre Furnace to the Pennsylvania Agricultural Society after a dinner at the Mansion in 1855, and the Society built the Farmers High School there, now Pennsylvania State University. In 1842, ironmaster Moses Thompson moved into the Centre Furnace Mansion with his family. Although Centre Furnace stopped production in 1858, a member of the Thompson family lived in the Mansion until 1912. The historical significance of Centre Furnace Village reemerged in the early 1980s after the Centre County Historical Society inherited the home, and ongoing projects interpret the last half of the 19th century, when furnace operations declined but the Mansion remained the family home of Moses and Mary Irvin Thompson, the county's largest landowners.