Historic Structures/Cultural Landscape Report: The Carty-Miller House
12606 Catoctin Furnace Rd, Thurmont, MD
Oxford Tree-Ring Laboratory
Report 2025/13
The Tree-Ring Dating of the Carty-Miller House at Catoctin Furnace, Thurmont, Maryland
by Michael J. Worthington and Jane I. Seiter
The Carty-Miller House is beginning to reveal some of its secrets including its probable construction date during or just following the winter of 1820/1.
Six white oak timbers provided felling dates of the summer of 1816, the winter of 1816/7, the winter of 1819/20, and the winter of 1820/1. The range of dates suggests that the timbers were cut over a period of several years and stockpiled in anticipation of future construction, with the Carty-Miller House being constructed in the winter of 1820/1 or shortly thereafter.
Three other workers’ houses at Catoctin Furnace—the Forgeman’s House, the Anderson House, and the Hoke House—have also been successfully dated by dendrochronology, providing precise felling dates for the timbers used to construct them (Worthington and Seiter 2014/11, Worthington and Seiter 2024/08). Two timbers used to construct the Forgeman’s House were felled in the spring of 1817 and the winter of 1820/1, while two other dated timbers from the Anderson House were also felled in the winter of 1820/1. Ten of the timbers from the Hoke House dated, providing a range of felling dates that spanned from the summer of 1816 to the winter of 1820/1, a similar pattern to that found in the Carty-Miller House.
When taken together, the dates from all four of these houses suggest a large building campaign was undertaken with stockpiling of timbers for several years prior to a number of houses being constructed at roughly the same time; this substantial building infrastructure project appears to have taken place during the winter of 1820/1 or shortly thereafter, coinciding with the purchase of the furnace by a new owner, John Brien, in 1820.
