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Iron manufacturing was one of Western Virginia's earliest industries, and the steel revolution of the late 1800s and early 1900s, created thousands of jobs and helped build Modern America.
Iron making was one of the first industries in Western Virginia because the area had an abundance of iron ore, wood, limestone, and water power. It began in 1742 when William Vestal built a small iron furnace, called a bloomery, in Jefferson Count...
The first iron furnace west of the Allegheny Mountains was built in the 1790s in Hancock County. It was later owned by and named for Peter Tarr. Located near Kings Creek by the Ohio River, it could make two tons of iron a day. The furnace made ite...
In the early 1800s, iron making grew in north-central West Virginia. Samuel Hanway built Rock Forge near Morgantown around 1798, and Samuel Jackson started a major ironworks at Ices Ferry in 1809. Another important site, Capon Iron Works, began in...
The Henry Clay Furnace was built around 1836 in what is now Coopers Rock State Forest in Monongalia County. It was the first steam-powered blast furnace in Western Virginia. It was built to produce pig iron for a nearby ironworks. The furnace chan...
The Northern Panhandle, especially Wheeling, became the center of iron and steel making in West Virginia. Wheeling’s first ironworks opened around 1834, and by 1860, it had several factories making cut nails, which were important at the time.The W...
Southern West Virginia’s modern iron making started in 1874 at Quinnimont in the New River Gorge. Investors built a coke-fueled furnace and hoped the area would become a major iron center like Pittsburgh. But they had to bring iron ore from far aw...
Coke is made from coal by heating it in special ovens to remove gases and liquids, leaving mostly carbon. It’s used in blast furnaces to help turn iron ore into pig iron, both as fuel and as part of the chemical process. While charcoal was once us...
West Virginia’s steel industry began on June 11, 1884, when the first Bessemer converter was started up at Riverside Iron Works in Wheeling. Before that, Wheeling was known as the “Nail City” for making wrought-iron nails. But by 1890, steel produ...
Making tin plate was different from most other metal work—it needed very skilled workers, which gave them more leverage in labor negotiations. They stayed unionized longer than other metal workers, even after a big union defeat in the deadly 1892 ...
Wheeling Steel Corporation was formed in 1920 when three companies merged together. It became the third-largest steelmaker in the U.S. and employed over 17,000 workers in the 1920s.Wheeling Steel made steel pipes, tin cans, lunch pails, stoves, an...
Ernest Weir built Weirton Steel into the world’s biggest tin plate maker and West Virginia’s largest employer. He also helped run the town of Weirton by providing water, trash pickup, and other services. In 1927, he became the head of National Ste...
In 1990, a major labor dispute began at Ravenswood Aluminum (Jackson County) when contract talks failed and workers were locked out of their jobs. The union, Local 5668 of the United Steelworkers, said the company refused to address safety concern...
Workers at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel went on strike for 10 months starting on October 1, 1996, making it the longest steel strike in U.S. history to date. About 4,500 workers from eight plants in three states walked out to fight for better pension...
Cheap foreign steel continued entering the U.S. market during the 1990s, hurting small companies and even major corporations such as Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel and Weirton Steel. They and the steelworkers' unions asked the government to limit impor...
This Exhibit has 20 Sections
Early Industry (Short Version)
This Exhibit has 10 Sections