I realized I had never photographed the TUMS factory in downtown St. Louis. It is noteworthy for many different reasons. Rob Power of Built St. Louis calls it the first major industrial building in the Modernist style in St. Louis, and I also feel like it has the stylistic underpinnings of the Art-Deco and Streamline…
Tag: Factories
Crunden-Martin, Advanced State of Demolition
Crunden Martin, which was gutted and partially destroyed by a fire back in November of 2025, is now being demolished in earnest. Demolition had begun back in June. In fact, by the time you see these photographs, much more of the buildings will be gone. I suspect they didn’t save any of the iconic letters…
Crunden Martin, Demolition Begins
Ever since the fire that largely destroyed the Crunden-Martin complex on Thanksgiving of 2025, the buildings have largely stood in ruins. But the demolition of the multi-block former manufacturing company is commencing. Millions of brick must make up the walls. Unfortunately, there probably won’t be a way to save the Crunden-Martin signs on the bridge…
Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, Alabama, Part Four
This will be our last day looking at Sloss Furnaces. The bridge above has an interesting story; it was built to take traffic above the giant piles of slag the furnace dumped on the ground (it’s been cleaned up, obviously). Above, as you can see, the ingots of pig iron, which is not pure enough…
Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, Alabama, Part Three
We continued on our way through the Sloss Furnaces, looking at the smokestacks for the massive boilers that burned the coke to produced the superheated temperatures that broke up the iron ore. I was curious how these molten iron cars look different compared to various parts of the country. They are of type not seen…
Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, Alabama, Part Two
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…
Sloss Furnaces, Birmingham, Alabama, Part One
As I mentioned on our first day introducing Birmingham, all three of the components for making steel was readily available in close proximity to the city. Iron ore, in fact, could be found at Red Mountain, which is about a mile south from downtown. The iron ore was taken to blast facilities such as the…
Bluestone Coke and Environs, Birmingham, Alabama
There is still plenty of industry alive and well in Birmingham. We went by Bluestone Coke, which manufactures one of the components of producing steel. Coke is a carbon substance created by heating coal in an airtight furnace that removes impurities. The coke that is left behind burns extremely hot, perfect for smelting iron. It…
Excel Bottling Company, Breese, Illinois
Found St. Louis arranged a tour for us of the Excel Bottling Co. in Breese, Illinois. It was quite the experience, and we had as our guide the owner of the company, Bill Meier. As a licensed bottler of Ski Soda, they actually still use a historic bottling line, which you can see below. However,…
Stupp Brothers
Like many industries, Stupp Brothers moved out to more suburban surroundings in the Twentieth Century after being located in the city. The story of the Stupps is fascinating, having been founded in 1856 by Johann Stuppd and his sons The company is still privately held and has built steel components for bridges, pipelines and even…