Homestead Steel’s Furnaces Facing Meltdown : History: Earliest artifacts of industry are disappearing. Towering structures at Pennsylvania site may be recycled into new products. But some hope to turn it into a ‘heritage park.’

Two 100-foot-tall, black blast furnaces that once darkened the sky with soot are virtually all that’s left of U.S. Steel’s hulking Homestead Works.

The rest has been reduced to skeletons and sold for scrap.

The 430-acre mill site on the banks of the Monongahela River shows the imprints of hundreds of structures that stood here until the plant shut down in 1986.

Soon, the Homestead furnaces could be “harvested”--dismembered, fed into other mills and recycled into new steel products.

As dozens of American steel mills like this one near Pittsburgh are closed or modernized, the earliest artifacts of the mammoth industry are disappearing.

But “there seems to be a tremendous interest in what is now called heritage tourism; people have gone from old battlefields to the industrial sites,” said historian Steven Humphrey, executive director of the Hugh Moore Historical Park and Museums in Easton, Pa.

In 1989 Congress appointed the Steel Industry Heritage Corp. to study regional steel-industry preservation.

“Unlike all the places that say, ‘George Washington slept here,’ the steel industry doesn’t work that way,” said Doris Dyen, director of cultural conservation for the heritage corporation. “U.S. Steel can’t afford to save something just because it’s historically important.”

The heritage organization now leads the Homestead effort. If saved, the two blast furnaces would become the centerpiece of a six-county regional heritage area. Historic facilities and exhibits would evoke the entire steelmaking process, along the lines of the National Park Service’s textile museum in Lowell, Mass.

The steel-heritage area also would feature steel-related industries such as coal mining and coke production. All parts of it would be linked by rivers and railways.

Heritage areas combine geographic, historic, cultural, economic and social components of the “national experience.”

Congress has designated six such areas in the last decade: the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the Delaware and Lehigh Canal, the Blackstone River Valley in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the Quinebaug and Shetucket Rivers in Connecticut, the Cane River in Louisiana and America’s Industrial Heritage Area in Johnstown, Pa.

New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have state heritage programs. At least 75 smaller jurisdictions have set up their own local ones. They include a pig-iron furnace in Birmingham, Ala., coal mines near West Virginia towns and cotton mills in Texas, according to the National Coalition of Heritage Sites, based in Washington, D.C.

The immensity of steel mills makes them the most difficult to preserve. Designed by Scottish-born industrial magnate Andrew Carnegie, the Homestead Works alone took in six municipalities and operated like a small city, with its own police force, firefighters, hospital and water and sewage treatment plants. During the peak production years, 30,000 men worked there.

The Homestead site had seven “Carrie” blast furnaces that towered above the rest of the mill and became an icon of the steel industry. Traditionally, the furnaces were named after the wives and daughters of mill owners.

Led by Carnegie, Pittsburgh had become the nation’s largest steel producer by 1900.

The Homestead mill, which opened in 1881, produced steel girders for the world’s first skyscraper, Chicago’s Home Life Insurance Building; the Empire State Building; United Nations complex; New York’s Rockefeller Center; the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge; and the Panama Canal.

But by the early 1970s, foreign competitors, making the most of the latest technology and lower labor costs, were capturing an ever-greater share of the world’s shrinking demand for steel.

Can the preservation of Homestead be justified?

“It’s a terrible liability and that’s the real problem,” said Robert Vogel, curator emeritus of the National Museum of American History.

“It’s one thing to preserve a grand old house, but another thing to preserve a steelmaking site that size. It’s not feasible,” contended Vogel, who helped save some of the Homestead Works’ steam-driven machinery.

Saving the blast furnaces and nearby areas alone would cost $30 million. But two bills in Congress would create an official federal Heritage Parks program. The six existing federal sites now operate independently. The bills would designate seven new sites, including the Homestead Works.

For Randolph Harris, who helped form the steel-heritage corporation, the Homestead mill’s national importance equals that of other places in American history.

“The Carrie furnaces and surrounding facilities can be the significant tourist destination for the entire region,” he said. “They can be the Washington Monument or Independence Hall of Pittsburgh.”