The two companies were unable to come to terms until July 1892, when a meeting between Reilly and Frazer in Philadelphia persuaded the latter to grant the furnace a rate of 20 cents per ton from nearby banks and 25 cents for those further up the line. With this assurance, Reilly began to repair the furnace, rehire workers, and raise money for payroll. It went back into blast in April 1893. With the furnace starting back up, Shoemaker, who was also running a mining company at Graysdale, found himself overwhelmed with responsibilities and resigned from the railroad in May 1893 to devote his time to his other enterprises. However, shortly after his departure, the Panic of 1893 rattled American industry. In the financial shock that followed, Bellefonte Furnace once again found it impossible to make iron at a profit, and went out of blast again in July 1893. With Bellefonte Furnace out of blast and Valentine Furnace operating only sporadically, the Bellefonte Central began to remove some of the ore mine branches. The Oreland Branch had already been removed in 1892 to lay track into State College, the siding to Johnson Bank was removed in 1894, and the Red Bank Branch beyond Graysdale in 1896. The railroad considered buying the furnace, but found John Reilly's terms unsatisfactory. In a surprise announcement on May 5, 1899, J. Wesley Gephart, a prominent local businessman and sometime president of the Valentine Iron Company, announced that he had collected New York and Philadelphia capitalists to invest in and restart the furnace. Gephart assumed the presidency of the new Bellefonte Furnace Company, which owned the furnace and the ore leases at Mattern Bank and Red Bank. Furthermore, Gephart revealed that the company had bought the large ore deposits at Scotia from Carnegie Steel to augment the furnace's ore reserves. Gephart's Central Railroad of Pennsylvania was to build a trestle across Spring Creek to reach the plant. John Reilly was retained as vice president, and Tom Shoemaker was one of the directors. The furnace was relit on July 24, 1899, for the first time in six years. Because of the removal of the Red Bank Branch in 1896, Bellefonte Furnace initially began receiving ore via a roundabout route, shipping over the Scotia Branch and Fairbrook Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad to Tyrone, and then north over the Bald Eagle Branch to Bellefonte. To shorten the route, the Bellefonte Central quickly laid a new Scotia Branch of from Graysdale to Scotia, where a narrow gauge line owned by the furnace company hauled ore from Red Bank to the Scotia washer.