Hubbard native revisits Valley’s roots in steel industry

January 17, 2016 at 12:07a.m.

LIBERTY

J. Richard “Rick” Rowlands has a lifelong passion: the glory days of steelmaking in the Mahoning Valley, in general, and the equipment that kept the mills running, in particular. The Hubbard native has gone from railroad employee to founding and directing the Youngstown Steel Heritage Foundation and its museum on Hubbard Road.

“Life has been going from one thing to another,” said Rowlands, 42, during his “Memories of a Lifetime” presentation Saturday. “It’s doing what I can to preserve some of the equipment in the steel industry,” he told the standing-room crowd of more than 70 that packed the small meeting room at Kravitz Deli, Belmont Avenue.

To call Rowland’s knowledge of the Valley’s steel industry extensive would be an understatement. He regaled the audience, some of whom were steelmaking retirees, with statistics of everything from locomotives to cranes, the dates they were built and the long-gone companies that built them – and he used no notes.

“He is a walking encyclopedia of the local steel industry,” said Richard Scarsella, president of the William Holmes McGuffey Historical Society, which sponsored Rowland’s appearance.

Rowlands said his involvement began two decades ago with the unsuccessful attempt to save the last remaining Jeanette Blast Furnace in Youngstown. He then turned his efforts to saving the 260-ton stationary Tod Steam Engine that ran one of the rolling mills in the city. “It was so huge I didn’t recognize it,” Rowlands said about the engine that had been discovered at North Star Steel.

The William Tod Co. of Youngstown, which built the engine in 1914, went out of business two years later, but a descendant of the founder, the late David Tod of Youngstown, also a steel executive, pitched in to help Rowlands, as did other volunteers. The engine was disassembled and moved to the site of the Youngstown Steel Heritage Center at 2261 Hubbard Road. Rowlands bought the property with a $15,000 loan.

“It was the last time I was out of debt for a long time,” he said. “We’d be out of money, and donations would show up unannounced.” The director estimates that nearly $250,000 has been spent to create the museum.

Other steelmaking equipment at the heritage center includes a hot-metal Kling cart, a 23-inch gauge steam locomotive from a Jones & Laughlin Pittsburgh facility, an ingot mold and a teeming ladle.

“That ladle will be at the front, so we won’t have an architecturally nondescript building,” Rowlands said.

“It’s great that there are a number of people who appreciate this history,” said Tod’s son, David Tod II, who attended the presentation and has worked with Rowlands. “We want this to continue so [future] generations will remember our steel-industry heritage.”

“This is what I do full-time,” said Rowlands, whose next project is to reproduce an ingot-mold railway. “We want people who come to the museum to feel like they’re actually in a steel mill.”