We now enter the Sloss Furnaces complex, and walk around the public path on the southeast portion of the grounds. Above is a photograph of the furnaces before the 1930s refitting.
We walked by a tunnel that was unfortunately flooded the day we visited, but much of the material in the smelting process moved back and forth below.
We also walked by the southern furnace.
The circular towers below are blast stoves, where the air was superheated to break the ore apart, separating the iron from the slag.
Here’s a clearer photograph of those hot blast stoves, as they’re called.
Here at the northern blast furnace, we can see the pipes that lead from the stoves.
The structure below seems to be boilers where the coke was burned.
As a bit of a tangent, I would be remiss to not talk about the use of child labor at many of these industrial sites, such as the Avondale Mills, seen below.
Avondale Mills was a textile mill, very different conditions from Sloss Furnaces or any of the area’s steel mills. Readers should not get the impression that little girls were forced to work in blast furnaces in evil ol’ Alabama back in the bad old days. I am not sure boys even worked at Sloss Furnaces, though older teenagers certainly would have. Young children would not have worked anywhere at that time, anyway; Alabama did have a rudimentary child labor law which prohibited children younger than 12 from being employed anywhere other than in agriculture. Although I am not sure about Missouri’s laws in the early 20th Century, much of the country had child labor laws (or lack thereof) similar to Alabama’s.
Point taken. Including the children’s photos is a form of “contrapposto” to the steel mill, if that makes sense.