Carrie Blast Furnaces: Surviving Landmark of Pittsburgh’s Steel City Legacy
Along the Monongahela River just outside Pittsburgh, two rusted steel furnaces rise 92 feet into the sky, the last of their kind left standing anywhere in the region that was the Steel Making Capital of the World.
Nearly everything else around them, from the mills to the workers’ housing that once made this valley the center of American steelmaking, is gone.
The furnaces themselves survived almost by accident at first, followed by a dedicated preservation effort, and today operate as a public destination for tours, workshops, and exhibitions.
Homestead Steel Works and the 1892 Homestead Strike
The Carrie Furnace site began in 1884, before becoming part of Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Works in 1898. Homestead itself was already infamous by then.
In 1892, the works was the site of one of the most violent labor conflicts in American history, a monthslong strike and lockout between the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and Carnegie’s business partner, Henry Clay Frick, that ended in gunfire between strikers and private security agents.
The union was crushed, and the American steel industry stayed largely non-union for the next four decades.
Carrie Furnaces No. 6 and No. 7
U.S. Steel built furnaces No. 6 and No. 7 in 1907, part of a Homestead Works that would eventually employ more than 12,000 people across 430 acres. Each furnace stands 92 feet tall, built of 2.5-inch thick steel plate lined with refractory brick.
At its peak around 1910, Pittsburgh’s mills were producing more than 60 percent of all the steel manufactured in the United States, and Homestead was one of the largest single contributors to that output.
Why the Furnaces Survived When the Rest of Homestead Didn’t
Furnaces No. 6 and No. 7 operated until 1978, as foreign competition and the rising cost of running aging steel infrastructure made mills like this one increasingly difficult to sustain. The broader Homestead Works followed the same pattern playing out across the Monongahela Valley and the wider Rust Belt, and closed entirely in 1986. Most of its structures were demolished in the years that followed.
A handful of other fragments of the larger Homestead Works survive, such as twelve smokestacks and a restored gantry crane now stand as landscaping inside The Waterfront, the shopping center built on part of the mill site in 1999.
These Carrie Furnaces were left standing largely because dismantling them would have been more expensive than simply leaving them in place.
In 1988, a coalition of local citizens organized specifically to preserve the furnaces and the industrial culture they represented, rather than let them be scrapped along with everything else.
Carrie Blast Furnaces Today: A National Historic Landmark
That preservation effort eventually led to federal recognition. In 1996, Congress and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania created the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area, and the Carrie Blast Furnaces were designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.
Rivers of Steel calls them “extremely rare examples of pre-World War II iron-making technology.”
Rivers of Steel offers guided tours of the site from May through October, along with occasional art installations and events like garden tours exploring how plant life has grown back around the rusting structures in the decades since they last operated.
Next up: For another “last of its kind” industrial landmark which unfortunately met a different end, read our article about Buffalo’s Great Northern Grain Elevator.
Sources
Rivers of Steel, “Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark“
Library of Congress, “U.S. Steel Homestead Works, Blast Furnace Plant, Along Monongahela River, Homestead, Allegheny County, PA” (HAER PA-649)
Carnegie Mellon University, “Carrie Furnace Brownfield Case Study“
