Just outside of Pittsburgh’s city limits along the Monongahela River stand the Carrie Blast Furnaces. They are two of the seven blast furnaces that were here, opened in 1907 and closed in 1978. The site is a national historic landmark managed by Rivers of Steel. Ron Baraff is their Director of Historic Resources and Facilities.
“It presents this wonderful opportunity to really see that relationship between the natural environment and man’s built environment,” Baraff said.
Here, iron ore, limestone and coke were used to make iron. That iron was turned into steel, which then went into the Panama Canal, the Empire State Building, and the USS Missouri. Now, people come to visit the rusty machinery towering 92 feet over the landscape. Baraff said this U.S. Steel complex would have stretched much farther along the riverfront, part of an almost unbroken 22 miles of industry along the Monongahela River into downtown Pittsburgh.
The Allegheny Front’s Kara Holsopple spoke with Ron Baraff along the banks of the Monongahela River, behind the furnaces, to learn about the relationship between the industry and the river.
LISTEN to the interview
Kara Holsopple: What would it have been like here about 100 years ago or 120 years ago?
Ron Baraff: It would have been a constant clatter of noise and banging and trains and machinery moving. There’s a line that I was told a number of years ago in an oral history interview with a guy named Don Sullivan, who actually worked on that device right behind us here, a stationary car dumper. I asked him a question I ask a lot of steelworkers: How noisy was this? What was it like? Don was a big tall guy who took his time to answer you. He just kind of looked at me, took a breath, and said, “Well, I never realized how noisy it was until it all stopped.”
So it’s noisy. It’s smoky. Keep in mind, every one of these factories was using coal as a fuel source, whether it was coked or not. And coal, especially the coal in this region, which is a bituminous coal, is a wonderful fuel, but it’s very dirty. It burns exceedingly dirty. It was noxious. The Pittsburgh that my father and grandfather grew up in was a Pittsburgh that was dark at noon. This was a spot where you had constant barge traffic. It would have been very gray, very industrial, and harsh.
Kara Holsopple: How did the industrialization and commercialization of the river begin?
Ron Baraff: You’re talking about a story that goes back a few hundred years. You know, beyond that even. Native Americans were using these rivers and living along these rivers, finding alluvial plains such as this, which we know are not common in this part of the state. It’s the flat regions along the river. But [it started] really with the fur trade early on.
Then the first real kind of heavy industry that started to develop is the glass industry. That’s happening around the point because they have a direct source of fuel – coal – and then a way to ship. That grows into the iron industry and eventually into the steel industry, and now, where we are with biomedical and engineering and research along with the rivers.
There’s a very famous line: Where there’s smoke, there’s prosperity. That’s what mattered more than anything else.
The railroad is building along these riverfronts. Why? It’s the flat areas. It’s a path of least resistance. And along with those railroads starts this massive growth of industry that we’re seeing. And they’re building in those flat areas right along the river. So many other cities you look at, they’ve settled along the rivers. In this region, it’s industry.
Kara Holsopple: The river was not only used in transportation, but it was also used in industry itself. How would industries use the water from the river?
Ron Baraff: Water is really being used for cooling. Carrie Furnaces, at their height, and that’s in the late ’40s into the ’50s, are pulling in five million gallons of water a day. Across the river from here, where we can see the Homestead Works, the pump house over there [was pulling] 17,000 gallons of water a minute. I’ll let you do the math. That’s just with one pump house. There were three of them doing that, because that water was being brought in and used for cooling machinery, but also for cooling the steel plate. It’s coming in during the summer months, probably at 65 or 70 degrees. It’s going back out about 120 degrees. So just imagine what that will do to the ecology of a river, what that’ll do to the aquatic life of the river.
Kara Holsopple: And I imagine that the water came in clean and went out with some pollutants in it.
Ron Baraff: It came in clean-ish and went back out with a whole lot more in it. I mean, it’s picking up scale off of plate. They had salts that they would use to help descale. All of that’s being carried back out. They would put it through some lime treatment and some other things to try to neutralize, but it really was going back out in a very unhealthy way. It isn’t until the ’60s and really into the ’70s that you start to see water treatment plants being built in these facilities. There are stories of people swimming in these rivers, and you always knew where the mills were because you wanted to be upstream from where an outfall was.
Kara Holsopple: I was going to ask what people who lived and worked here 100 years ago, 150 years ago, thought about pollution created by industry and how it affected the river, or did they?
Ron Baraff: I think for the most part, they didn’t. There’s a very famous line: Where there’s smoke, there’s prosperity. That’s what mattered more than anything else. Did we have jobs? Were we able to feed our families? Now, I don’t think it was a conscious effort of polluting these rivers, but it was another commodity to use to get to that endpoint of having a very marketable, saleable product and a product that’s going to employ a few hundred thousand people in this region.
Does this region develop the way it does without this river? Absolutely not. But we’re no longer viewing these rivers as the back door. This is the front door.
That’s not to say that there wasn’t recreation on these rivers. There was, and people would fish and people would have their swimming holes. There’s a very famous picture of the Homestead swimming pool, which is not a swimming pool at all, but a swimming area about where the Grays Bridge is now. But they knew.
Kara Holsopple: How important was the Monongahela River to the economy of the region and to the economic growth?
Ron Baraff: The Monongahela River has been known and is still known as the hardest working river in America. Stand here for a few minutes. You’ll see a barge full of coal still come up here. Does this region develop the way it does without this river? Absolutely not. But we’re no longer viewing these rivers as the back door. This is the front door. This is a beautiful gateway to all of these communities.
Ron Baraff is Director of Historic Resources and Facilities for Rivers of Steel. Its annual Festival of Combustion is Saturday, October 4.
