Carrie Furnaces
The abandoned Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, PA, before work to clear and restore the property
Updated August 4, 2022 | By Matthew Christopher
For quite some time, the Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, Pennsylvania were open to anyone intrepid enough to hike there. After making your way through an overgrown employee parking lot, down an embankment and back up onto an elevated railroad track, they loomed up above you in the distance like a steampunk mirage. As you neared them, the enormity of their scale seemed impossible; the empty field around them both exaggerated their scale and isolated them, as though they were an industrial island, perhaps an odd growth that sprouted from a bolt or gear someone had planted there a century ago.
Built in 1906, the furnaces themselves tower 140 feet above the grassy plains around them, with plants and trees of all kinds weaving their way in and out of the gigantic pipes and ladders like sinews. Several of the buildings still stand, their own substantial size dwarfed by the furnaces. On the side facing the waterfront, a segment of the elevated railway remains, no longer connected to anything except a gargantuan gantry crane that has been rusted in place for decades.
For all intents and purposes, it seems like the last vestiges of a civilization of giants. Rather than flaking frescoes or cracked religious reliefs adorning the walls, there are indecipherable graffiti tags from over the years. It is hard to imagine that man ever inhabited such a place, or that the furnaces once roared. The silence is nearly absolute, save for the rustle of the wind in the leaves or an occasional deer bounding through the grass.
Inside one of Carrie's massive abandoned blast furnaces
The Homestead Steel Works, once a significant part of Andrew Carnegie’s Pittsburgh steel empire, and one of the most important parts of the region’s history, closed in 1986. Originally purchased by Carnegie in 1888, and integrated into the Carnegie Steel Company, the steel plant was the site of the Homestead Strike, one of America’s bloodiest labor disputes, in 1892.
While the majority of the complex was razed to make way for a waterfront shopping center that opened in 1999, the Carrie Furnaces, on the other side of the river, were left untouched, largely due to their inaccessibility. The Hot Metal Bridge, a truss bridge that carried crucibles of steel from the blast furnaces to the rolling mills on the opposite side of the Monongahela River, still stands and will be converted to a bicycle and pedestrian bridge.
The Carrie Furnaces were left to the elements for years, and it seemed inevitable that they would also be torn down to make way for some form of new development. However, in 2005, the furnace property was sold to Allegheny County, and the next year, furnaces 6 and 7 were designated as a National Historic Landmark. Three years later, Rivers of Steel Corporation became caretakers of the property. Rivers of Steel began offering guided and unguided tours of the property, and have been working on raising community support for their stabilization and renovation that will “allow visitors to climb a series of walkways around these industrial giants and see at close hand the furnaces that set world records in the production of iron.” Now fenced off and inaccessible to the curious wanderer (save through these limited tours), the Carrie Furnaces are becoming one of the hottest attractions in Western Pennsylvania.
The Carrie Furnaces are a chapter in my book, Abandoned America: Age of Consequences.
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