Originally Posted by
john m flores
What I liked about the GAP was the industrial and labor history near Pittsburgh, the mining memorials and other remnants of our industrial and coal-fueled past. The GAP is a rolling history lesson in many ways. Plus the tunnels and bridges were very cool too; I'm always amazed at human ingenuity.
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And the bridges and tunnels too. Lots of interesting things to observe ponder.
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I saw the mention of the coke ovens along the trail.
38,000 of them! The area must have been a nightmare of smoke, eroding land, and coal waste. It's hard to believe now.
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For fifty years, Pennsylvania's steel industry depended to an amazing extent on a skinny strip of land, scarcely two or three miles wide, running some fifty miles through Westmoreland and Fayette counties in southwestern Pennsylvania. Here, a seven-foot-thick seam of high-quality coal poked up its head, ready to be carted away and baked into coke, a valuable industrial fuel.
At its peak in 1913, the Connellsville district's 38,000 ovens provided fully half the entire nation's supply of metallurgical coke. It took 2,000 railcars each day to haul it away. Most of the coke was used in blast furnaces to smelt iron ore into molten pig iron, the raw material for steel.