Rankin and Swissvale
Carrie Furnace
Furnaces 6 and 7 in Rankin, 1907–1978
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On the north bank of the Monongahela, in Swissvale and Rankin, two blast furnaces of the Homestead Works are still standing. The first furnaces on that ground went up in the 1880s. Andrew Carnegie bought the works in 1898, and in 1901 they passed into U.S. Steel. Furnaces 6 and 7 were built in 1907. Through the 1950s and 1960s each of them made on the order of 1,000 to 1,250 tons of iron a day. They went cold in 1978. By 1984 the rest of the Carrie plant had been phased out and mostly scrapped. These two were left. They were named a National Historic Landmark in 2006, and Rivers of Steel has had the site since 2010.
Blast furnaces were given women’s names. In 2023 Rivers of Steel settled this one from an item in the Pittsburgh Daily Post in 1884: Carrie Clark, daughter of an early owner, lighting the fires.
A blast furnace smelts iron from ore. The iron left Carrie still molten, carried in ladles across the Hot Metal Bridge to the steel mills on the Homestead side of the river. Those mills are the ones locked out in the strike of 1892, and the pump house from that week still stands on the Homestead bank. Men were killed in the furnaces in the ordinary course of the work. The ghost stories came later, after the furnaces had gone cold and the site sat unused.
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