If you've ever hiked a quiet trail in a US national forest and stumbled on a strange stone pyramid buried in the trees, you've probably found an old iron furnace. The 2008 study, ‘Legacy of Charcoaling in a Western Highland Rim Forest in Tennessee,’ published in The American Midland Naturalist, led by Justin L. Hart, then at the University of Alabama, and colleagues at the University of Tennessee, found that a typical charcoal furnace in the eastern US burned through roughly an acre of forest for every single day it ran. That is the strange, quiet history hiding inside the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest in Virginia, one of the largest blocks of public land in the eastern United States.
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