Salvagers collect Pa. steel-industry history

June 13, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

PITTSBURGH

Bounded on one side by a cliff and on the other by the Ohio River, what’s left of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Co.’s Aliquippa Works is an overwhelming stretch of emptiness punctuated by debris — metal scrap, concrete, office material and building detritus piled and strewn over miles of rutted clay.

Former mill floors are now platforms the size of football fields sprouting weeds, junk trees and twisted rusty cables.

A band of eight salvagers, six of them volunteers, arrived on a recent expedition to the last remaining building — the tin mill offices, where all of the plant’s records ended up. On a brilliant morning, they climbed to the third floor and propped open the door. Dusty amber rays shot into the entrance, where a message spray-painted on the paneled wall read: “Last one to die please turn out the lights.”

Moving about the room under bobbing headlamps and flashlights, opening file drawers that screeched, kicking aside ribbons of vellum, sneezing, and stepping around empty plastic jugs, an overturned chair and electric typewriters, they were undertaking one of the last outings to save remnants of Big Steel’s story for the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area.

Based in Homestead, Rivers of Steel is a nonprofit organization that for more than two decades has preserved and archived the region’s industrial legacy.

As the salvagers traipsed up and down the fire escape carrying entire drawers of microfiche punch cards plus file cabinets, boxes of maps, engineers’ reports, drawings, blueprints, binders and interoffice memos, cranes in the distance tore into concrete foundations and Canada geese flew overhead.

Near the fire escape door, inexplicably, a detailed sketch of a reinforced railroad spike from 1937 lay alone on a desk.

Saving records is strenuous work. Then there’s the challenge of moving tons of equipment — sometimes an entire shop.

Rivers of Steel has been trying to salvage as much of both as its archives staff — Ron Baraff and Tiffani Emig — deem worthy. They have salvaged and stored many large pieces, all from U.S. Steel operations: the carpenter shop from the Duquesne Works, the pattern shop from McKeesport National Tube, and the blacksmith shop, roll shop and 48-inch universal rolling plate mill of the Homestead Works.

“It was one of the last steam-driven universal plate mills in the country,” Baraff said. It operated from 1898 until 1979.

These industrial relics — which moving companies have transported at low or no cost over the years — give scale to the story Rivers of Steel hopes to tell someday in an interpretive museum on the site of the Carrie Furnace in Rankin and Swissvale. Carrie, also once part of the Homestead Works, is the last remaining pre-World War II blast furnace site in the nation.

“It’s a monumental site that tells the story on different levels,” Baraff said. “It could be a major attraction and [tourism] vehicle for this region.”