Chapter 6: Mingo Junction
Mingo Junction, OH- west of Pittsburgh in Steel Valley.
The site is located in Mingo, Junction, Ohio, a small town on the Ohio River across from West Virginia. It is
a former steel mill which has undergone recent demolition of some significant structures, but retains smokestacks and hot air stoves, as well as warehouses, sheds, and other buildings- some of which date back to before 1899. The town has a rich history, but the identity is historically so rooted in the (now defunct) steel industry, both physically and mentally, as to have no other identifying characteristics. It is a place frozen in time, yet overwhelmingly different from what it was fifty years ago. Abandoned or inhabited, desolate or bustling, Mingo Junction’s culture lies in the vast, artificial landscape along the river.
Pre-Industrialization
Although Mingo Junction, or ‘Mingo Town’, was never a permanent Indian settlement, it was a base for a Seneca tribe called the ‘Mingoes’. The term ‘Mingo’ means “emigrant or absentee”, describing the migration of this group of Senecas from New York state to Ohio (Bicentennial 5). Jefferson County was the site of a number of violent battles between settlers and the Seneca tribe.
Mingo Town was one of the earliest villages settled in Ohio, and from the river to the top of the hill, early family farms were established that supported the small village. The first railroad, the Steubenville and Indiana R.R., was built in 1853. This was the first step in the transformation of Mingo Junction from a rural farming village into an industrialized town.
Industrialization
Since American settlement, Mingo Junction has been a factory town; industrialism is part of its DNA. In 1860, ‘Mingo Town’ became the site of Mingo Iron Works directly after the arrival of the railroad, marking the permanent shift from an agricultural to an industrial community. The mill went through many owners and incarnations- at one point in the 19th century it operated as both a bar mill and a nail factory. Near the turn of the century, Mingo Junction added a Bessemer plant, and shortly after, the mill was acquired by Carnegie-Illinois (U.S. Steel), allowing it to expand and produce steel more rapidly and inexpensively.
In 1945, Wheeling Steel purchased all Mingo plant facilities, including the homes at Mingo Bottom, allowing expansion of the steel works. Eventually merging into Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel, the company focused on producing intermediate products like pig iron, ingots and slabs that were sent to nearby mills for further processing.
Mingo Junction in 1899 with the steel mill in the foreground. Few buildings remain from this period, and the residential area south (left) of the steel mill has been completely industrialized.
The intense scene of the mill at its height of activity was witnessed by a traveler on a train in 1921, “thousands of lights, like fireflies, pick out the inky blackness. Along both sides of the river, for as far as the eye can reach, the scene is that of a vast summer garden, hung with Japanese lanterns. Here and there, great bursts of luminous smoke and vapor, copper-colored and pink and purplish white, rise into the air like huge flowered fireworks. A stranger to this locality might suppose it to be a spacious pleasure park until as he looked he would see a huge serpent of fire uncoil from some hidden nest and fling himself venomously up into the night, stabbing at the darkness with swift tongues of flame. And in the glare that lit up the scene for a moment, he could see that it was very far from being a garden of pleasure. He has been looking at the electric lights and the furnace fires of the mills and factories of Mingo” (Smith,Mason).
Mingo Junction was one of the earliest steel mills in the country, responsible for establishing the town plan and creating an identity and livelihood for the village and the community that resided there. According to a compiled history of the steel industry in Jefferson County, Ohio, the steel mill once accounted for 85% of the village of Mingo Junction’s budget. The site is very much defined by its industrialization, and it is imperative that any future development considers its rich history.
In addition to the steel industry, Mingo Junction was a mining town- Brettell Coal Company and Foote Mineral Company mined local resources which were then sent to the local steel mills. Harmony Tool and Die, a manufacturer of mine roof accessories, supplied coal industries throughout the Midwest, becoming the “Mine roof control capital of the world” (Bicentennial 53). These industries were still in operation when the 1970 Mingo Junction Bicentennial was published.
Deindustrialization
When owned by Carnegie Steel, the mill at Mingo Junction had 4 blast furnaces and numerous vast shed buildings. Today, the former Wheeling-Pittsburgh steel mill is a post-industrial site. This process formally began in 1985 when Wheeling-Pittsburgh filed bankruptcy. In 2008, a Russian-based company called Severstal purchased the plant and shut down the entire operation, and in 2012, a company called Frontier bought it and sold the old parts of the mill for scrap. For Mingo Junction, this meant that any hope of reviving the factory back to its glory days or preserving it vanished.
In 2014, Frontier exploded the ore bridge and demolished the two remaining blast furnaces and other structures on the older (northern) section of the site for scrap metal. On the south end of the site remains an electric arc furnace that was installed in 2004 and was purchased by ACERO Junction this year, putting it back into production for the first time since 2009.
Mingo Junction 1950’s (top), Mingo Junction 2000’s (middle), Mingo Junction 2017 (bottom).
By 1954, Wheeling Steel owned 11 mills within 30 miles along both sides of the Ohio River. Everything on the Ohio side of the river has been demolished except at Mingo Junction, and many buildings have been demolished on the West Virginia side or face an uncertain future.
There is a clear distinction between the north and south end of the Mingo Junction steel mill site; on the north side there remains a discontinuity of structures- a hopeless cluster of buildings and smoke stacks that exist in a ruinous state. On the south side, there is another cluster of buildings with an electric arc furnace between them that has given the community a new sense of hope after a series of discouraging demolition efforts. However, when I was in Mingo Junction, there seemed to be little activity anywhere in the town, let alone near the riverfront where the steel mills sit.
As I recorded in my journal, “being in the ruins of the former Wheeling-Pittsburgh steel mill in Mingo Junction piqued my curiosity. What did this place look like when it was at its height of production? What was the circulation pattern of employees and materials? Why was the east wall of this building built at such an odd angle? Was this abandoned stock of bolts, pipes and miscellaneous pieces of metal manufactured locally? What was the reaction of the town when the blast furnaces were demolished? Do they want everything to be demolished?
Sites like these arise so many questions about the history and the future of a place. The blast furnaces used
to dominate the view from literally any vantage point in the town for well over a century, but have suddenly been reduced to nothing, not even a heap of dust. There remain two hot air stoves and six smokestacks on the north end which were inspiring in themselves but I imagine what it was like to be among the blast furnaces and I feel disheartened. This place is emotional, dramatic- it’s desolate and hopeless and the only businesses open downtown are anonymous bars, unwelcoming and nameless. It’s not a happy place, but the vibrant colors of the steel mill’s painted buildings and components could almost, taken out of context, evoke a sense of happiness.
This entire riverfront was ravaged by industry, and remains so, but much of the signs of industry have been removed, leaving a riverfront that is simply ravaged, without apparent reason. There is something very sad about a landscape ravaged without reason- it is vandalism, it is blasphemy. We destroy without planning for the future, but we must actually do at least as much planning in destruction as we do in construction- otherwise we are left with something completely meaningless and completely useless. There is still meaning at Mingo Junction! This is perhaps even more apparent in light of recent demolition. (We demolish, but for what?!) The south end of the steel mill is now somewhat operational, but for how long? What happens when it closes again? Such beautiful, functional conglomerations! Undeniably tied to place, built with steel almost certainly sourced from Pittsburgh or somewhere local.
Now the landscape is fragmented; I’m not sure how the hot air stoves relate to the smokestacks, or the smokestacks to the sheds and warehouses. I don’t know what the crumbling brick walls on the edge of the water once held, or why the disconnected pipe lay, disconnected, one half suspended in air, rusty, the other on the ground, injured, plants growing up around it. This small town on the edge of downtown (a city within a city) makes one wonder why anything is the way that it is. How do we make places like this accessible, so that everyone can safely experience the ambiguities of ruins, and so that the town of Mingo Junction no longer has to turn its back on the omnipresent, ghostly steel mill?
‘There is beauty in abandonment’, as urban explorers like to say, but there is also curiosity in abandonment, romanticism even in these untimely ruins, history and memory and identity so palpable in a place like this, that it can no longer be ignored. Time has seemingly stood still, but nature never stops encroaching. Where else can this be experienced? Only in mills and grain processing have we built such unique, sculptural places, so indescribably complex and unquestionably man-made, and we no longer build these things. Why do we reduce our creations to dust when we can actually reincorporate them so they can continue serving us, albeit in a much different capacity, all while reactivating the riverfront? We let everything resolve to the simplicity of economics, an eventuality we will inevitably regret, and this all-to-familiar disheartening feeling re-emerges...”
The ground was littered with iron ore pellets. I didn’t know what they were at the time, but I recall picking them up, curiosity piqued, and later came across the answer while conducting other research. This is the ultimate artificial landscape; vegetation or dirt can’t be seen anywhere near the railroad tracks because the land is littered with raw materials that have been heated and shaped into uniform pellets, in some areas perhaps layered up to a foot high.
Significance
“Mingo Junction gives us as good a cross section of the Valley as any we could have” (Smith, Mason). To have something left of this “cross section” of the Ohio River Valley is significant in itself, for, driving through the towns Steubenville and Yorkville, Ohio, and Follansbee, West Virginia, there is no indication of the industries that put the towns on the map in the first place. For some reason, Mingo has managed to retain pieces of its industrial heritage, meaning that it continues to be identified with the steel industry to some extent.
Context/Community
Mingo Junction was settled in 1860. The population has been steadily decreasing since the 1980’s, when the steel mill began suffering financial trouble. As established in Chapter 3: Deindustrialization, other industries and businesses followed; Commercial Street, with the blast furnaces towering in the background, was once lined with numerous successful businesses.
Mingo Junction’s economic stability depended on the steel mill. Like many small towns, the industry was the reason the town existed in the first place, so when the steel mill began to close, the population began to leave, along with all of the other businesses in the community. Commercial Street had shockingly little activity on a Saturday afternoon and only slightly more when I visited on the following Friday evening. The only activity I saw on Commercial Street consisted of a few cars driving through and people loitering outside of the Townhouse bar.
As I was leaving town after my first visit, I followed signs to ‘Pestas Country Store’ up the hill from the river. The vibrant colors, friendly service and quaint, clean store was a welcome contrast to the grittiness of Commercial Street and the steel mill. The store has been there for 86 years and is today the only store I saw in the area. They were happy to answer questions that they have probably been asked countless times, the most obvious being “what was the town like when the steel mill was operational?”. It was booming. Retail, hotels, barber shops, and restaurants populated Commercial Street and made it a fun, exciting place to be. Pestas Country Store has seen the drastic changes throughout both industrialization and deindustrialization.
As mentioned, the site is on the Ohio River, along which there has been little, if any, development for community use. Like most rivers, it has been neglected and polluted by industry, making it previously undesirable for habitation or activity along it. It remains one of the most polluted rivers in the country, but part of changing the outlook of the river lies in convincing communities of its value, both ecologically and recreationally.
The site runs parallel to Commercial Street, and there exists a pedestrian bridge that employees of the mill used to walk across to go from downtown to work or vice versa. Access to the pedestrian bridge is currently prohibited, but remains a strong connection between the site and the main street in Mingo Junction. Beyond the physical connections to the site, there is a strong visual connection, even after the blast furnaces have been removed. The smokestacks and hot air stoves, despite sitting at the bottom of the hill that the town climbs, can be seen from everywhere, their simple silhouettes towering above the modest homes that themselves seem to exist at an impressive altitude.
Surrounding Mingo Junction are other post-industrial steel towns whose populations have followed the same trend- Steubenville, Ohio lies 5 miles north with a population of 18,000 (down from 26,400 in 1980 but was around 37,000 at its peak), Follansbee, West Virginia is directly east with a population of 2,800 (down from 4,000 in 1980). Pittsburgh is 40 miles east, a city large and diversified enough to have effectively survived the effects of deindustrialization.
Existing Conditions
Site boundaries. Image from Google Earth.
The site is approximately 38 acres, consisting of 13 buildings with a combined area of 126,650 SF. The existing buildings vary in age- a few of them were built pre-1899, and all of them were constructed before 1950. The buildings contain objects, completely undisturbed by vandals or explorers, giving the impression that operations were halted and moved to the south side of the complex rather abruptly.
Objects are also scattered around the landscape, both broken and in tact. Train cars, pipes, signs,
and unidentifiable objects exist as fragments of memories- some utterly unexplainable, some able to be pieced together from historic photographs or aerial views. The under-documentation of the site, specifically of its transformations and technological progressions, requires a certain amount of research to piece together, and many mysteries remain ambiguous.
The object fragmentation is mirrored by the fragmentation of the buildings themselves; buildings are scattered, seemingly arbitrarily, among the landscape. Upon a closer look, foundations can be spotted, and rectangular outlines of crumbling concrete begin to help tell the history of the site. The following sections document some of the existing structures and objects found on the site.
Monuments which somehow escaped demolition continue to tell passersby that this was once a prosperous place. They loom over the village, although they are only a tiny fraction of the monuments that were once surrounding it.
Ruins of the steel mill as seen between Pestas Country Store (right) and Pestas Gift Shop (left).
Smokestacks towering over Commercial Street.
View from under the employee bridge on Commercial St.
Building key.
1) 44” Blooming Mill - shed left over from demolition.
2) Boiler shop with attached sheds - one of the oldest buildings on the site.
3) Power house - one of the oldest buildings on the site.
4) Pipe shop - one of the oldest buildings on site with angled, window-less wall which shows that there was once an adjacent building.
5) Power house/ blower building
6) Heat treating plant
7) Employee bridge
8) Main office
9) Office/Storage
11) Storage
10) Lab
12) Smokestack left over from demolished blower engine house
13) Hot air stoves left over from blast furnace demolition
14) Smokestack left over from blast furnace demolition
15) Blast furnace ruins
16) Ore yard remnants - muddy landscape
17) Access road - overgrown
18) Semi-operational steel mill
19) Downtown - Commercial Street
20) Uphill - residential area
Interior conditions - a found composition of rubber spacers and rings inside building 4.
Switcher car inside building 6.
Interior of building 6 with safety signs stating, “Metatarsal Shoes Save Feet”, “Hard Hats Help Heads”, “Safety Glasses Save Eyes”, and “Safety Belts Are Mandatory”. Layers of change can be viewed in the paint and different tones of steel cladding on the walls.
Objects in the landscape - a series of abandoned switcher cars which once operated inside the steel mill lie overgrown and abandoned.
Elevated pipes are terminated near the river’s edge.
A weathered piece of machinery rests in the landscape.