…until it is. From a recent site visit, a view of a piece of 1910s steel: The dark red is the beam web, the light strip at the top is the underside of the top flange, and the slightly darker strip below the web is the top of the bottom flange. Then there’s a piece of wood below that. It was dark and my flash lit the beam peculiarly. The word EASTERN is in projecting relief, rolled into the beam web when it was made in the mill a bit over 110 years ago. I’ve talked about this practice before and it was actually quite simple for the mills: cut the name into one of the rollers used to make the beams, and there it is in the steel. “Eastern” did not ring a bell, but that doesn’t mean much. The huge US Steel plant in Youngstown was officially named “The Ohio Works” but if I saw a reference to Ohio Steel it would take me a minute to realize that it mean US Steel in Youngstown. In this case, it appears to mean the Eastern Mill in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, which was founded as an independent…
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