By Bruce Hodgdon
Media Liaison, Forest Preserve District of Will County
To this day, Joliet
is known as the City of Steel and Stone, a slogan that dates to the
nineteenth century. Rich deposits of dolomitic limestone,
discovered in the first half of the century, provided employment for
hundreds of workmen. Joliet limestone was used for building throughout
the region,
and many examples are still very much in evidence today in Joliet,
Lockport, and Lemont buildings from that time. Then, in the decade following
the
Civil War, a group of investors built an iron-making facility that
would become
the foundation for Joliet’s largest employer for the next sixty
years.
Joliet was chosen for the foundry because of its abundant supply
of nearby coal for power and limestone for building. The factory
was sited beside
the I & M Canal and the Des Plaines River to transport raw materials
in and finished products out. However, Joliet was quickly becoming
a railroad hub, and this form of transport soon overtook shipment
by water.
The original site included two blast furnaces, which could
produce 700 tons of iron ore a day. These were hand loaded, requiring
the
complicated coordination of 250 workers at each furnace. From the
beginning the
plant
focused on producing iron rails, a perfect choice for manufacture.
The railroad industry was expanding rapidly, with markets growing
dramatically not only
in the east and the Midwest, but with the great westward expansion
of the time. So successful was the plant that it soon was operating
24 hours a
day, seven days a week.
The Joliet Works (as it was known) was among the premier sites
in the country to incorporate new technologies. Two Bessemer
converters were added
around 1880 to convert iron ore into steel. This technology,
invented in England, could produce steel in far more abundant quantities
that
was previously
possible, and at much less cost. Now stronger, more durable steel
rails were used to replace iron rails as well as orders for new
rail lines. These
Bessemer converters were among the first used in the United States.
By
the end of the 19th century, the Joliet Works came under the ownership
of United States Steel. By this time Illinois was second
only to
Pennsylvania as the largest manufacturer of steel rails in
the world. By the year 1900,
the plant employed more than 2,000 men and had an annual payroll
in excess of $2 million.
Two additional blast furnaces were
added to the site early in the 20th century. At the pinnacle of the
plant’s
life, it had become a sprawling complex that covered nearly 1 mile
in size.
While work at the mill was dangerous, with asphyxiation being
the leading cause of factory deaths, management showed
a keen interest in employee safety.
The Joliet Works signed on to the Safety First slogan of
the National
Safety Council. Moreover, the company newsletter, The Mixer,
begun in 1913, continually
emphasized employee safety, reporting on the safety records
of the various shops within the complex.
World War I saw the plant’s greatest output of iron and steel production
in its history as orders for military weapons and vehicles
poured in. Soon thereafter, however, came the Great Depression. The plant,
now
60 years old, had become aged, and markets for its products
dried up. U. S. Steel
began to dismantle the facility, using all salvageable
materials, including the four blast furnaces and Bessemer converters,
at other company facilities.
In 1936, the stacks of the two oldest blast furnaces
and the Bessemer converters
were dismantled. The remaining furnaces were removed
in 1937. This backbone of the Joliet economy ceased to exist during the
hardships of
the 1930s.
For sixty years, the site of Joliet’s illustrious
industrial past lay all but forgotten. Then, in the early
1990s, an open space organization,
CorLands, began negotiating with U. S. Steel, which still
remarkably owned the land on which the Joliet Works existed.
U. S. Steel agreed
to donate
the land, 52 acres, to CorLands if it could be developed
as a memorial to the factory and the thousands of men who
worked there.
CorLands approached the Forest Preserve District of Will
County to see if the District could develop the site.
Even though the Forest Preserve
District is most known for its preservation of natural
areas in Will County,
its mission includes cultural and historic preservation.
Knowing
nothing of the industrial history of the factory, the
District hired a consultant, Dr. Jack Bergstresser,
from the
University of Alabama. For three summers Dr. Bergstresser
cut his way through
the
underbrush that
had completely taken over the site to identify the ruins
that still
existed. These ruins were the foundations of the structures,
including the four blast
furnaces that once stood there. Dr. Bergstresser issued
a report, including graphics, to the Forest Preserve
District, which
provided the material to
interpret the site.
The District applied for, and won, a bikeway grant that
provided 80 percent of the funding for the site improvements.
The
Joliet Iron Works Historic
Site opened to the public with a Grand Opening ceremony
in 1998.
The site was developed for self-guided tours.
A 1.5-mile concrete walkway extends through the linear
site. Beside
each of the
foundations is a wayside
exhibit, which utilizes text to describe what originally
stood there and how this contributed to the iron-making
process, and a graphic showing
the
structure or explaining the smelting process. Each interpretive
exhibit also includes a description of the job that was
required by the worker
of that job.
This was because the Forest Preserve District of Will
County strove to tell the factory’s human story as
well as the manufacturing one. In many ways, the Joliet
Works stood as a microcosm of what was happening throughout
the nation during the Industrial Revolution. Thousands
of immigrants, having
entered the country through Ellis Island in New York,
found their way to Joliet and took the menial labor jobs
that the Joliet Works offered. Laboring
12 hours a day, six days a week, these workers were paid
little, between $2 and $9 a day, but from those meager earnings
they were able to buy a
home and raise their families. All of their children
born in Joliet entered the world as United States citizens—the
grandfathers and great grandfathers of us all.
As time passes
and Joliet’s steel industry falls further into the
past, the Joliet Iron Works Historic Site will survive
to tell the story of the City of Steel.
For Further Reading
Forest Preserve District of Will County. http://www.fpdwc.org.
Sterling, Robert E. Joliet Transportation & Industry: A Pictorial History,
Vol. 1. St. Louis, MO: G, Bradley Publishing, 1997.
Sterling, Robert E. Joliet: A Pictorial History. St. Louis, MO: G. Bradley
Publishing, 1988.
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