Sparrows Point: The World's Largest Steel Plant

The peninsula jutting into the Patapsco River east of Baltimore was once home to the largest steel plant on earth. Pennsylvania Steel built the Sparrows Point works beginning in eighteen eighty-seven, and Bethlehem Steel bought it in nineteen sixteen, expanding it decade by decade until it covered more than three thousand acres and employed thirty thousand workers. The plant supplied steel for the Golden Gate Bridge and the George Washington Bridge cables, ships in the Second World War, and the girders of postwar American cities.

At its peak in the nineteen fifties, Sparrows Point was producing more steel than any other facility in the world. Decades of foreign competition eroded that dominance, and the plant closed in twenty twelve after one hundred twenty-five years of operation, taking an entire working-class world with it.