Duquesne Steel: Where Carnegie Built His Empire
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Duquesne Steel Works opened in eighteen eighty-six, and Andrew Carnegie soon acquired it, folding it into the industrial empire he was assembling along the Monongahela River. Carnegie's engineers pushed the plant hard, implementing advances in rolling mill and blast furnace technology that set the pace for the entire American steel industry before nineteen fourteen.
United States Steel absorbed the plant in nineteen oh one when J. P. Morgan bought Carnegie out for nearly five hundred million dollars. At peak production, blast furnaces roared here day and night. The plant ran into the nineteen eighties, when the collapse of American integrated steelmaking shuttered it along with most of the Mon Valley mills. The jobs never came back.
