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| Wade Klaffer posted Mclouth Steel Trenton Mi in the late 50’s |
Joie Vivre posted two photos with the comment: "I've got some pictures here from when they were building McLouth Steel in Trenton Michigan. The first was labeled 'McLouth Steel 1940'. The second has info on the bottom. Want to give credit to the Trenton Historical Society facebook page. That's where I got them from."
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This plant was once the fourth-largest steel producer in the USA. It was closed by 2005 because this article has interior photos taken by "urban explorers." McLouth Steel was founded in 1934 with a strip mill using slabs from other firms. He bought a couple of electric furnaces. But in the 1950s the scrap steel market slowed. (All of WWII surplus had been cut up?) So he started making his own steel using the first BOF in a America, and the fourth worldwide. (The BOF was developed in Austria.) In 1964 he became the first American integrated producer to base all of his production on continuous casting. He filed for bankruptcy in 1981. Chinese exports must have been a big issue for the steel industry because this plant did not fail in the 1980s because it was slow to adopt new technologies. In fact, he was bleeding edge. The reference that was cited: "The Technology Century, the Engineering Society of Detroit, edited by Mike Davis" From that reference, we also learn: "It also talks of the dawn of Detroit steel making.... In 1856, on the shore of the Detroit River across from Belle Isle, Dr. George B. Russell built the first American iron blast furnace west of Pittsburg. It operated ‘til 1905. As a matter of fact, the first steel produced in America by the Bessemer process was made by Dr. Eber Brock Ward’s Eureka Iron Company at Wyandotte, Michigan in 1864. (You may recognize the name of modern-day Eureka Road)." [nailhed1] A map of the plant
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| Raymond Boothe posted Aerial view-McLouth Steel Corporation plant south of Detroit , Michigan-7/5/1964 (McLouth photo/Dr. Raymond Boothe collection). |
This was from his second visit, which was legal. Note the line of synchronous electric motors along the right side. I presume these motors are part of the 6-stand 60" hot strip rolling mill that was installed in 1954.
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| nailhed2 |
This is one of the first three 60-ton BOP furnaces that were installed in 1954. These were the first installed in North America. [nailhed2]
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| Street View, close up |
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| Wikimedia, License: CC BY-SA, Transkohr |
Of course the gear and the shaft size is the first thing that caught my eye. But then I noticed the control panel in the left background. After the 1981 bankruptcy, the employees took over 85% of the ownership. I guess they were not interested in automating the controls with computers. Or did they piggyback computer monitoring on top of the old wiring?
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| nailhed1 |
Computer control was one of the many technologies that McLouth pioneered.
The year 1958 marked even more expansions and upgrades for the McLouth Trenton mill. The Number Two blast furnace was put online, as well as two more 110-ton basic oxygen furnace vessels and two Rust Furnace Co. slab reheat furnaces to handle stainless steel. A few years later another 110-ton basic oxygen furnace vessel was added.
The Ironmaking and Steelmaking article notes that McLouth pioneered the first use of computer control in steelmaking:Online computer control of steel making processes became a reality with the first use of computers on a hot strip mill in 1962. McLouth Steel used a General Electric 312 computer for gauge control on the finishing train of a semi-continuous mill. The aim was to set up the initial roll gap and then establish correct gauge as soon as the head end of the strip emerged onto the runout table.[nailhed2]
I recommend looking at the photos in nailhed1 and nailhed2 and reading the history in nailhed2. Nailhed's coverage is so good that I'm not even going to bother to look at the results of some Google Searchs because they are full of the financial and environmental issues of the 21st Century.
Mike Delaney posted two photos with the comment: "Demolition of what was supposed to be both furnaces of McLouth Steel in Trenton, Michigan but the south furnace defied the attempt and stayed up for several more days. Some of the stoves stayed up for years but this past year the entire plant was razed to the ground including the original BOP vessel standing guard by the front gate"
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I got a closeup of the BOP vessel while I still could. Does a developer want to erase all evidence that this was brownland because he doesn't plan to clean it up? I do hope this area doesn't end up being just a parking lot.
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| Street View |
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| Edward Szabo posted This is the famous first BOF vessel in the United States, it was own by McLouth Steel located in Trenton Michigan. Fun fact McLouth was the first Steel Mill in the United States to have plc controlled processes. James Torgeson: Scrapped, unfortunately. Nicholas Snider: Completely cleared , just drove to sibley Gardens for dinner. David Bussell: They had one of the first slab casters in the US as well. Casting stainless and carbon grades. A series of greedy owners drove one of the most innovative producing mills into the ground. Haiko Hebig: This was NOT an actual converter though. It was a replica made on the occasion of some anniversary. The actual converters have had - to name the most prominent visual difference - a slightly differently designed mouth. Plus, this one obviously never saw a single charge of hot metal. Richard Bone: Gone but not forgotten. McLouth went through many changes from about 1980 on until it's final demise. It was really painful to watch as I had friends and relatives working there. One reason was that it was originally family owned and the profits were spent and not put back into it (from what I heard) then a series of selling to owners that took the money and bled it, then employee ownership and chapter 11. All at a time when better run facilities were also struggling. I worked at Great Lakes Steel, few miles up river from it and went though much the same, but we were much bigger and was a division of National Steel which had several other facilities and weathered the storms a little longer until we were finally on the ropes ourselves and was bought by US Steel and this saved our ass. For a while. We were well positioned in the market and supplied steel to the auto and building industries. We are located on the Detroit River just south of Detroit and across the river from Canada. There's an international bridge, built around 1930, north of the mill and carries a massive amount of commerce both ways. Plus it's also important for national security for both countries. So another bridge is being built between it and Zug Island where we have 3 large blast furnaces. You can't have those BFs running right next the bridge, so we were shut down. We weathered all the storms and sunshine of the industry but was cut down by a bridge. |
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| Mike Delaney posted McLouth Steel's landmark that stood by the front gate for decades. Last time I saw this was in cut up pieces laying in the middle of a large field of scrap iron a year or so ago. Phil Little: Torn down and scrapped during the demolition of the plant. Unfortunate, it was a symbol of some important industrial history that occurred at that location. Similar artifacts in Pittsburgh have been kept as monuments. Mike Delaney: Phil Little Thats what got me was it was already mounted and displayed and didn't even need to be moved. The property could have been sold and it took up so little space. Would have been a fitting monument to the plant. Whoever made that decision can KMA. Phil Little: Mike Delaney I agree. I'm sure the PM for Crown Enterprises (i.e., the Maroun family) told the demo contractor "take it all down." My family has a lot of history with that plant, and a monument to what McLouth meant to downriver would have been appropriate. Maroun posse and Trenton/Riverview have been at each others throats for years so the idea to save it was possibly not even discussed or they flat rejected it. [Maroun is the family that owns Ambassador Bridge and did own Michigan Central Station. I've also seen some comments that imply they own much of Downtown Detroit. They seem to be the personification of greed.] |
I used Google Earth to find the images that show a change in the 21st Century.
If it is shut down in Mar 1999, it was rather recent because it still has piles of raw materials.
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| Goggle Earth, Mar 1999 |
It has been shutdown because there are no piles of raw materials.
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| Goggle Earth, Apr 2002 |
Last image with the blast furnaces.
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| Goggle Earth, Jan 2004 |
The BFs have been torn down.
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| Goggle Earth, Mar 2005 |
The remaining buildings stood for more than a decade.
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| Goggle Earth, Apr 2019 |
But they also are now going away.
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| Goggle Earth, Mar 2020 |
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| A Jun 2021 Satellite image still had some buildings left. |
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| Wade Klaffer posted Check out the water discharge into the river from McLouth. Edward Szabo: McLouth was at one time the most advanced steelmill in the world they were the first to have plc, first for bof, first for slab casting, first for induction reheating, and one of the first mills to go bankrupt. Sad to see one of the great fallen mills people don't understand what has been lost and what we keep losing every time a mill shuts down we are losing our industrial might. |
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| Wade Klaffer posted McLouth steel Trenton Michigan. |
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| Douglas Ridenour posted The blast furnaces at McLouth Steel Trenton, Mich plant right before implosion. Wade Klaffer[Additional comments say to fast forward to the 8 min mark.] Douglas Ridenour  First Basic Oxygen Furnace in North America Edit McLouth Steel was the first company in North America to use the basic oxygen process, a process now common in the steel industry. The original vision for the Trenton Plant included Bessemer furnaces to supplement its electric furnaces.[5] Trenton's city ordinances against pollution would not allow use of a Bessemer furnace, forcing McLouth to take a different approach.[5] McLouth turned to the rest of the world to search for a solution, finding in Austria the basic oxygen furnace. The technology not yet operating on a scale large enough for American steelmakers, McLouth gambled on an attempt to scale the unproven basic oxygen process to its needs.[5] By 1954, McLouth's original 60-ton furnaces were in action.[5] As the process was refined and perfected (and larger furnaces were added), this technology enabled McLouth to average 30% higher profits than its competitors between 1960 and 1966.[6] The process was adopted by many large steelmakers in the years following McLouth's venture. First Online Computer Control Edit Online computer control of steel making processes became a reality with the first use of computers on a hot strip mill in 1962. McLouth Steel used a General Electric 312 computer for gauge control on the finishing train of a semi-continuous mill. The aim was to set up the initial roll gap and then establish correct gauge as soon as the head end of the strip emerged onto the runout table. The finishing train started running under continuous computer control on November 1, 1962. "Probably the most exciting application of the GE 312 was to the hot strip mill of McLouth Steel Co. in Michigan. It was a difficult design inasmuch as each step in the process had to be varied on the basis of the measured values of the previous step. This required continuous high speed feedback to set the six different hot stands with absolute accuracy and reliability being essential; an error at one point could be magnified at the next, causing an entire process to go out of control. Fortunately, the GE 312 met the challenge." H. Oldfield, General Manager of the GE Computer Department. The Solid State circuitry of a GE 312 computer was composed of 2500 diodes, 2500 transistors, and 12,000 resistors, but no magnetic core memory. There were 20 binary digits per word or per instruction. All arithmetic was fixed point. Numbers were 19 bits plus the associated positive or negative sign, not a very big number range when expressed in decimal form, just -524,287 to +524,287. The GE 312 was designed by A. Spielberg of the GE Computer Department, newly formed in 1957.[7] First Continuous Caster Edit McLouth Steel was the first plant in North America to cast 100% of its steel by the continuous caster method, a method now commonly used in the steel industry. In May 1962, McLouth personnel visited the Dillingen Steel Works in Germany, where continuously cast slabs larger than 100 square inches were first cast. Some sixteen months later, McLouth was operating a "straight stick" casting machine, the first in the United States. |
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| Nolan Skip Raspbury LaFramboise II commented on a post Until about 30 - 40 years ago (don't hold me to an exact time frame) that area along West Jefferson, what was called River Road when I was young, was a straight mile or more of chemical plants and factories. Chrysler Chem, Monsanto and McLouth Steel, among them. It was also the boonies, not the 'burbs. I worked at the McLouth plant as a steel inspector during a summer home from CMU, c late 1960s. I was based at the Detroit plant, now gone for the Gordie, occasionally sent downriver. Below is the former McLouth Steel finishing plant on Jefferson just beyond DTE. |
Donald Lezotte posted two photos with the comment: "The once sprawling McLouth steel complex in Trenton Mi. Now razed, save for two ovens. Sad. I grew up not far from here."
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| Comments on Donald's post |
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| Comments on Donald's post nailhed |
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| Phil Little posted McLouth Steel Trenton Plant, before Edward Szabo: Was once the most technological steel mill in the world. They were the first in many things first to have a BOF in North America, first in North America to have a continuous caster, first in North America to have plc controlled processes, and one of the first to go out of business, let's not forget they were the first for induction reheating as well. Phil Little: Edward Szabo I worked in the McLouth engineering department in the early 70s. I was involved in a number of caster projects, including scheduling the tap times for the EAF and BOP so we could do the first continuous - continuous cast, doing flying ladle and tundish switches without stopping the cast. I remember going home at the end of the day with a cast underway, and coming in the next morning with it still going. I believe the record at that time was 17 consecutive ladles without interrupting the cast. The design of those machines by Concast, and the combined BOF/EAF steelmaking shop, made this kind of sequencing difficult. |
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| Phil Little posted McLouth Steel Trenton Plant after. [Some comments indicate that the stoves are probably still standing in this photo because of asbestos.] Phil Little: The stoves are down, too. The site has been completely cleared. Now the debate centers on what's going to be built there. The property is owned by the late Mattie Maroun's company, and early discussions were about a transmodal port facility. That rightfully got local citizens up in arms (traffic, roads, trucks, trains, noise, pollution, etc.). I believe it is now been zoned mixed use to allow a range of development, including some light industry. |
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