The Iron Furnaces of Cedar Avenue
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
Just south of downtown Scranton, four massive stone towers rise from a landscape of green grass and chain-link fence, looking like ruins from some ancient civilization. In a sense, they are. These are the Scranton Iron Furnaces, four blast furnaces built between eighteen forty-eight and eighteen fifty-seven, and they are among the most important industrial monuments in the United States.
Each furnace is roughly fifty feet tall, built from locally quarried stone, with arched openings at the base where workers once fed the fires and tapped out rivers of molten pig iron. At their peak, these furnaces were producing a hundred and twenty-five thousand tons of pig iron per year. That iron became T-rails, structural beams, and war material. When the Civil War broke out, these furnaces ran around the clock, supplying the Union Army with the steel sinew of modern warfare.
The raw ingredient was anthracite coal, the hard, clean-burning coal pulled from the seams beneath the Lackawanna Valley. Before the Scranton furnaces proved otherwise, most ironmasters believed anthracite could not sustain a blast furnace reliably. The Scrantons proved them wrong, and in doing so they demonstrated a technology that would spread across northeastern Pennsylvania and transform the American industrial economy.
By eighteen eighty, the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company had rolled more railroad rail than any other firm in the country. The company eventually evolved into the Lackawanna Steel Company, and the furnaces here were retired around nineteen hundred as newer facilities opened. They sat for decades. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission took over management in nineteen seventy-one, and the site is now part of the Pennsylvania Trails of History.
Walk among them and notice the scale. Each furnace could consume a hundred tons of coal a day. The men who tended them worked in heat that could blister skin at thirty feet. The Scranton Iron Furnaces are a National Historic Landmark, but more than that they are the physical signature of how this city was born.
