Henry Clay Furnace, one of eight anthracite-fired iron furnaces on the Susquehanna floodplain between Marietta and Columbia, was built here in 1845 by Columbia merchant Peter Haldeman. It produced pig iron that was sent to rolling mills to make railroad rails. Coal reached the furnace by canal from northeastern Pennsylvania, and remnants of the canal bed are still visible across the trail. Iron ore came first from the local Grubb mines and later from other sources. Rail lines began servicing the furnace in the 1850s. Although the site is partially buried under flood deposits and fill, remains of furnace buildings still survive, including remnants across Jones Creek of the casting house wall and the furnace's stone stack liner, as well as the foundations of Furnace Row, which housed the furnace office, the furnace manager, and furnace workers in a 98-foot-long, six-unit tenement house. In 1875 Clement Brooke Grubb, owner of the St. Charles Furnace near Columbia, bought the furnace and operated it until the late 1880s, and it was abandoned in 1889.
