After acquiring the 57-acre Antes mill tract beside his Eagle Forge property in 1825, Roland Curtin expanded a small settlement of millworkers by building a workers village south of the mill pond, arranging one-story log-and-plaster dwellings around a circular green. In 1830 he rebuilt the mill dam and replaced the old mill with a four-story stone gristmill, which for the next century ground wheat into flour for the Curtins, village residents, and others nearby. After his retirement in 1844, his sons John and Constans built Pleasant Furnace across Antes Run and Curtin Road, and its opening in 1848 increased demand for housing, leading the Curtins to add more than a dozen two-story frame houses around the green and several more nearby. By 1850 this enlarged cluster on the west side of Curtin Road formed the core of Curtin Village, home to more than 200 people in 28 households. Census records show 39 village men and boys on the Eagle Iron Works payroll, including forge hands, furnace workers, blacksmiths, carpenters, drivers, a woodcutter, a collier, and general laborers, many still in their teens. Recollections of village life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries preserved memories of the blue slag-surfaced road, the furnace glow in the night sky, water lapping over the gristmill race, the evening train after 1864, the roar of the furnace, forge hammers, waterwheels, hard labor, the smells of livestock, charcoal, and smelting, and the persistent bugs and charcoal dust that made life both difficult and memorable.