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…
Tag: Mills
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…
Byrne’s Mill, Jefferson County
Well, we discovered there’s not much left of Byrne’s Mill (not to be confused with Byrnesville, which wan named after a totally unrelated man) except a stone pier, but there is a nice write up at the city’s website about the historic site.
Bonaparte, Iowa
The next town is Bonaparte, which is named after Napoleon, of course. Many people don’t realize that many Americans admired the supposedly Enlightenment-inspired French emperor due to his conflict with ancient monarchies in Europe. The beginning of the town centered around William Meek’s founding of mills (he named the town) in 1837. The building above…
Southwest Avenue Between McCausland and Ivanhoe Avenues
So far out in the country that this section doesn’t appear in Compton and Dry, this section of Southwest Avenue, formerly Old Manchester Road or Market Street Road, was developed incredibly early due to its role as a major trail and highway out west. As can be seen in this fire insurance map from 1903,…
Alton Steel, Incorporated
Sadly, Alton Steel announced its closure the last week of January, 2026. Alton Steel is an interesting story that is a twist on the standard narrative of a legacy company going out of business, leaving behind a massive ruin for decades. It is actually the employee-owned successor company to the historic Laclede Steel Company, founded…
Leaving, Youngstown
After surveying the remnants of what had once been the workplace of literally tens of thousands of Americans, I worked my way out of Youngstown, passing through the neighborhoods where they once lived. I saw St. Nicholas Byzantine Catholic Church, which alludes to the Eastern European origins of many of the immigrants who once flooded…
Steel, Long Gone, Youngstown
As I mentioned before, the glow from the furnaces in Youngstown could be seen at night in Akron, around fifty miles away. Perhaps more than anything that fact sums up the giant crucible that was one of the greatest industrial powerhouses in America for one hundred years. And it’s all gone now, except for a…