Published: July 02, 2009 05:08 pm      

History comes alive during travels through America’s steel cities

Within a few weeks of driving a tractor-trailer, the dispatcher from the New Kensington, Pa., office of Daily Express, sent me to pick up a load out of a steel mill in Carnegie, Pa. I was green at the time, so green that just two weeks earlier, I got out of the driver’s seat of the Freightliner I was driving and asked a loader at a York, Pa., air-conditioner manufacturing plant to back my trailer into the slot where an overhead crane could load my truck.

Of course, the guy wouldn’t do it, and I had to overcome my inexperience and frustration by the oldest method in the book: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again and again and again. I was glad to have a job and I was traveling to places like Iowa and Wisconsin.

My early errors were educational and costly, and included a big fine for overloading an axle on my trailer, running the Pennsylvania Turnpike from Ohio to New Jersey and making the mistake of buying a “re-grooved” trailer tire in Fort Wayne, Ind.

However, the thought of going to Carnegie, Pa., to pick up a load of steel headed to Chicago was exciting to me.

I paid attention in my high school civics class, and I knew the importance of Andrew Carnegie in the history of southwestern Pennsylvania. I knew he was a philanthropist because I went with my class on a field trip to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh to see dinosaur bones. I also knew he was a rich industrialist and that he made his fortune in the steel industry. The opportunity for a small journey back into history excited me and I found myself looking forward to it.

Of course, the anticipation of work rarely measures up to the reality. The streets in Carnegie were small, and the place I loaded out of was a warehouse section of a mill, and not in the mill itself. The load was light and as a result, the payday had to be short. I don’t even remember where I hauled it. I only remembered that I hauled a load of steel out of Carnegie.

Every load of steel I hauled became a history lesson. Loaders at each steel mill always made sure truckers had plenty of time for personal reflection. Plenty of time.

I enjoyed walking through the pulverized, powder-dust floors and looking at the industrial-sized discharge pipes that fed the unique aquatic life that thrived in the rivers or lakes near steel mills.

I recall looking in awe at a small maple tree growing from a huge pile of slag refuse near the coke ovens of one of the U.S. Steel mills in Gary, Ind., and wondering how that small plant could grow in such a desolate place.

My visit to Carnegie turned out to be the only load I got out of there, but I hauled lots of steel out of mills that became part of Andrew Carnegie’s empire before he sold them all to Judge Elbert Gary and J.P. Morgan to form the foundation of U.S. Steel. I remember the flashy sign with stainless steel letters that marked the entrance to the J. Edgar Thompson Steel Works as well as the gritty social and urban truth that surrounded and shrouded the Homestead Steel Works.

Even then, I knew the importance of the Edgar Thompson Works — then and now a U.S. Steel operation — in the introduction of the Bessemer process of making steel. Also, I was freaked out the first time I drove a tractor-trailer over the Homestead High-Level Bridge that connected Second Avenue in Pittsburgh to Homestead, with Allegheny County moorings not too far from the plant entrance.

The name of the bridge was later changed to the Homestead Grays Bridge honoring the great Professional Negro League baseball team that called Homestead home, but when I was riding high off the pavement in a cab-over truck, the Monongahela River looked like it was a long way down.

Visiting sites throughout the eastern United States brought American history alive for me. Somehow, just knowing that I walked where “Mad” Anthony Wayne, General Edward Braddock, George Washington and Ben Franklin had walked made me feel closer to the history they helped shape.

Hauling steel put me in direct contact with a very tangible part of American history and whetted my appetite to learn more.

Bill Archer is a senior editor at the Daily Telegraph. Contact him at barcher@bdtonline.com