Some days I just have to follow rabbit trails. There I was, reading up on wolves and catching up on email when POW!
See that shocking fiery photo on the monitor? That is a wonderful image that photographer Melinda Green posted right here on Birmingham Weekly. It’s called Sunset over Sloss Furnace and it knocks me out. Go take a look at it.
I’m impressed with the Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark. I think it’s extraordinary that Birmingham, Alabama, would preserve the site to memorialize heavy industry and then go on to tell a good deal of truth about it.
We have a love-hate relationship with industrialization in this country. On the one hand, our ability to become The Arsenal of Democracy (that would be Detroit) or The Engine of the New South (that would be Birmingham) was a matter of considerable pride. On the other hand, having grown rich from it, we now prefer to celebrate the wealth and ignore the cost. Sometimes we pretend that our wealth came from Pure Merit and had nothing to do with filthy air or backbreaking labor. Sometimes we forget that we were ever a factory town at all.
That could be the way of it in Elk Rapids, Michigan . . . but it’s not. Everyone who lives there knows that once The Furnace was the reason for its existence. Elk Rapids was famous for its pig iron. The Furnace was featured on postcards.
Norton Pearl (born in Eastport in 1878) wrote on the back of that postcard: In the 1880s this was at one time the largest iron furnace in the world. My father has taken me up on the stack where they dumped in the ore many times, at least I always wanted to go up there every time went to ER. We could see the fire from EP when they opened the stack. I believe this was done every hour. They also dumped in lime rock if I remember correctly. The Co bought 1000s of cords of beech & maple wood for the charcoal for the furnace. The Chemical Works took the chemicals out of the wood. My father bought his drygoods, groceries, and drugs for his store at Dexter & Nobles which was later changed to “Elk Rapids Iron Co.”
Keeping in mind that Norton was possibly too credulous about the claims of northern Michigan boosters, it’s still an astonishing thing to think about. You know what that spot looks like now?
Sometimes the more things change . . . the more they change.
Torch Lake Views 
Martha
January 27, 2012
Girl, y’all hungry for COLOR. Blowie! And that’s color. The US is a complicated place, isn’t it. News about Pontiac MI today was very sad. Things change, but something has to take the place of what’s lost. Those poor people are just simply caught there.
Gerry
January 28, 2012
I’m sure a great many things happened in Pontiac today, but I haven’t heard about any of them. Heck, I haven’t even heard about anything that happened in Traverse City today. News and rumors of news seep into my ken slowly. I’m off to bed.
Fee
January 28, 2012
The area I grew up in had a rich history of coal mining – much of which wasn’t very meticulously mapped. We remember the history of the area every time some building in the wrong place starts to subside quite badly and has to be demolished.
Whenever I visit the old hometown, I pop in here;
http://www.scottishminingmuseum.com/
to have a browse and remember my grandad, who worked in that mine from the age of 14 to the age of 65, raising 8 kids along the way.
Gerry
January 28, 2012
Wuff! That’s one of the more compelling reasons I’ve ever heard for preserving local history. And what a grandad you had—more than 50 years a coal miner. He had to be a strong man in every way. Extraordinary, isn’t it, what people can endure, and what they can accomplish.
Gerry
January 28, 2012
Well I just spent an instructive couple of hours exploring the mining museum site and reading the “Learning Materials for Adults.” I hadn’t realized that there was an actual, statutory system of slavery in place in 17rh and 18th century mines. You always give me a lot to think about, Fee.
Dawn
January 28, 2012
Pontiac was on the national news with Brian Williams, about everything in the town being for sale now including the city hall, the cemetery and the library. As for Birmingham, my folks lived about an hour southeast of there for many years and they always said we’d go visit Sloss, but we never did. So this morning I took the virtual tour on their website. Very cool! Thanks for reminding me.
Gerry
January 28, 2012
Ah. Another of the benefits of having no television is that I am spared the media head-shaking over Michigan. I’m glad you enjoyed the Sloss Furnaces site. I was very impressed with it.
tootlepedal
January 28, 2012
Interesting post. The capitalists have just shifted the pollution and the backbreaking poorly paid jobs elsewhere and left (stunningly photographed) employment wildernesses behind. Meanwhile they successfully campaign to persuade those left behind to vote for the interests of the rich so that there is no chance of their wealth being used to promote better jobs in the deserted areas. It’s a clever trick.
Gerry
January 28, 2012
Why Mr. Tootlepedal! Such thoughts you think as you pedal about the countryside. Not that I entirely disagree with you of course. Anyway, what I thought was extraordinary about the Sloss Furnaces website is that it talked about race, class and exploitation in a pretty straightforward manner. That’s fairly unusual in my experience.
One interesting thing is that Birmingham, Alabama, has not been an employment wilderness at all, but a successful city with a considerably better than average economy. I don’t know enough about the place to know how they managed that. Of course right now the whole worldwide economy is nothing to celebrate. I expect Birmingham is having its problems along with the rest of us. And then a tornado on top of it.
Elk Rapids remade itself largely on the strength of a whole community working together. It’s such a pretty little “tourist town” now that most visitors know nothing about its industrial past, or about how deeply the Depression scarred it. Now there’s another rethinking in process: how to turn the feast-or-famine of tourism into a balanced economy where a person can make a living for a whole year, and the kids can stick around to raise their own families. What a concept. But it’s beginning to gather traction. Stay tuned.
Sybil
January 28, 2012
Lovely photo and interesting bit of local history. There was a time when we Canadians would brag how the environment and our treasured social safety net trumped all else here. Now, thanks to our majority Conservative government, we’d fit right in at a Republican Convention. BTW — in Canada — you get to have a majority government with 37% of the vote as our “left” vote is split between two parties. Sigh … sorry. Had to vent.
Gerry
January 28, 2012
I expect that every election is carried by considerably less than 50% of the whole adult population. So long as people can tolerate the results, they go along as usual. Every now and then, the populace begins to feel an itch, and then we have Interesting Times.
Ralph Edwards
January 29, 2012
I’ve visited the Sloss Furnace site with my son, by the end I knew how they made steel. Also why Birmingham AL used to be so smokey. The most interesting part was a hall the size of a large gymnasium that contained bellows for the furnaces, and next to it the centrifugal pump that would fit in a bedroom that replaced the huge long ago disused bellows. When I first came to B’ham in the 60s, the night sky still lit up when they tapped the furnces on the west side of town.
Gerry
January 29, 2012
Hello Ralph – Thanks for another perspective. I was surprised to read Norton Pearl’s remark about being able to see the fire from the Elk Rapids furnace all the way up in Eastport. (I was surprised, too, on a road trip to Pittsburgh, passing through a valley with one abandoned steel mill after another. Huge things, sitting there with the weeds growing up, like Mayan temples.)
Joss
January 30, 2012
What a great post, Gerry. I love that sunset picture, looking all hellish and industrial. And that was maybe the feel of the iron works in its heyday. And now it has luxury waterside apartments on the site, with all evidence of history obliterated. You’re so right about change!
Gerry
January 30, 2012
Ah. I see I have been unclear. I swear I need an editor. Anyway, the fiery sunset was over the Sloss Furnaces in Birmingham, Alabama. That was definitely the feel of the works–any of them–back in the day. That particular furnace, or at least a large part of the complex, has become a historical park where a person can learn a great deal about industrialization and its cost. Very impressive effort.
In Elk Rapids the works came down and the condos went up, although nowhere near so quickly and tidily as all that. One day I will have to ask Glenn Neumann to educate me on the subject.
shoreacres
January 31, 2012
My paternal grandfather worked in the coal mines of south-central Iowa until he was injured in a slate fall. It was the tradition then that when the father no longer could work because of death or disability, the oldest son would go to the mines. That would have been my dad, but Grandpa forbid it.
Instead, Dad graduated from high school, moved on to John Deere and finally to Maytag. It was a wonderful, prosperous company town for decades. Then, about a decade ago, things declined and Whirlpool bought the company, shutting down its operations. When I went back for Mom’s funeral in October, it was unbelievably sad to see what had happened there. On the other hand, it’s on the way back, one step at a time. I did some shopping on the old town square – not because I needed anything, but just to spend some dollars there.
Truly? You have no television? Nor do I. I got rid of mine about a year ago. I expect I’ll miss it one of these days. Or not.
Gerry
January 31, 2012
I wish Iowa well, in spite of its political peculiarities. (That is not a partisan statement–Iowa is peculiar in every imaginable direction, as if it’s making up for its bland national image by being as contrarian as possible. Now that I think of it, I have to like that about it. I digress, even more than usual.)
Good for Grandpa. Interesting that “tradition” demands that when a father has been sacrificed a son must be sacrificed too. (I say, with all due respect, that if I’d been Sarah and had given birth to Isaac when I was 90 years old for crying out loud that I would have had something to say to Abraham when he set off for the altar on the mountain. Yes indeed.)
Towns come back or go on or make a sharp turn and go over there. When a whole community makes up its mind to do something, it generally happens. Buy Local Stuff Whenever You Can, that’s my motto. That and, Television? They still make those?
Some dozen years ago I had a TV antenna on top of my house, a TV that received the signals from two stations, and a bad case of the flu. I was wrapped in quantities of comforters when my crew of handy guys, Darryl and Darryl, arrived to chop the ice dams off my roof. They chopped, I sank deeper into the comforters and watched something on the TV. Then nothing. Stump-stump-stump. Knock-knock. “Um,” said Darryl. “We accident’ly chopped through your antenna lead. But don’t worry. We’ll fix it.” And so they did. Duct tape. We use duct tape for everything up here. The reception wasn’t much worse to tell the truth. Anyway, the next year I had to have the whole roof re-done–it was time–and I told them to take the antenna away. I don’t miss it a bit. I love to watch TV when I go to other people’s houses. I have no desire to watch it at my own. (I am, however, a compulsive radio listener.)