Iron and Steel Manufacture at Chicago. [Volume: 8, Issue: 6, 1890, pp. 336-338]

No. 6.]

CHARCOAL IRON WORKERS.

337

to those at the Union works and North Chicago works was built
and put in operation.
" In 1880 the North Chicago Rolling-Mill Company finding its
capacity too limited, and its machinery growing out of date, began
the construction of a large and modern steel rail-plant, at South
Chicago, which began operations in June, 1882. This plant consisted of four large blast-furnaces; a Bessemer plant and rail-mill,
which were then the largest of their kind in America.
" In 1889 the consolidation of all the works in Chicago, Milwaukee and Joliet, under the name of the Illinois Steel Company, was
effected.
" The small iron rolling-mill of 1857, making 300 tons of iron rails
per week, we find expanded in thirty years to a mill capable of making 6000 tons of steel rails per week, or just twenty times the capacity of the original mill. Three hundred tons of rails, which was
the weekly capacity in 1857, have actually been rolled in a modern
mill, in the hours included between 6 o'clock in the morning and
12 o'clock noon; thereby doing in six hours what it once took six
days to accomplish.
" Equally great strides haveebeen made in the producing capacity
of the blast-furnaces. The same furnace which in 1869 was making 250 tons of iron a week, in 1889, with absolutely no change
whatever in the furnace or in its equipment, but simply with the
improvement derived from better knowledge, was made to yield
over 700 tons per week; and the same blast-furnace, with the
single addition or a single change in its hot-blast stoves, from ironpipe stoves to modern fire-brick stoves, is made to produce 1100 tons
per week.
"The most remarkable feature of the history of the iron and steel
trades is the rapid progress in the position occupied by the Western
States, particularly the State of Illinois, and more particularly the
city of Chicago, among iron-producing localities in America.
"Previous to 1870 it was hardly recognized that any iron was produced in this locality. Pennsylvania and Ohio were the great iron
manufacturing States, and the city of Pittsburgh has ever been looked
upon as the iron producing centre of America. It is noteworthy,
therefore, to find the statistics showing that the city of Chicago, in
1887, produced more steel than the county of Allegheny, in which