In this case study, I focus on the discoveries and challenges with developing and implementing a new public tour at the Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark called “The Black Experience at Carrie.” I try to contextualize the specialized tour within the framework of how, as the nonprofit stewards of a National Heritage Area, Rivers of Steel engages, develops, and sustains economic relationships and creative partnerships between communities in the postindustrial Monongahela River Valley. I also wish to interrogate the intentional heavy lifting required from using the term “community” and inquire as to how equitable public humanities work can foster more long term engagement with the preservation of an industrial site like the Carrie Blast Furnaces.
A public industrial tour at the Carrie Blast Furnaces lasts approximately two hours. During their time on site, visitors walk with a guide and learn about the arc of the Carrie Blast Furnace Company’s history, the basic iron making process, and about the lives of mill workers through the industrial and postindustrial eras. The unscripted tour gives guides opportunities to tell a wide range of stories, many of which come from personal experience. The research-based, open-ended format also creates space for programs that explore specific historical moments and movements in greater detail.
When visitors tour the Carrie Blast Furnaces, they marvel at the sheer scale of the site and the glorious intricacies of rust and natural regeneration of a postindustrial landscape. Frequently, visitors imagine the level of physical labor demanded by an utterly punishing environment. Some visitors do not imagine, because they remember. Much of the facility’s history is still within living memory. Former ironworkers have visceral responses to the space which further underscores the fundamental necessity of preserving the furnaces. Sometimes I lead tours at Carrie. When I do I grapple with the terrifying sublimity of the space while recognizing the humanity embedded deep within.
In early 2022, I partnered with a fellow interpretive staff colleague to create a new public tour entitled “The Black Experience at Carrie.” The impetus for this tour came from two sources. First, the organization has a longstanding desire to engage with underrepresented communities in towns up and down the Monongahela River Valley with authentic and dynamic programming. Second, by expanding the interpretive perspectives of the Carrie Blast Furnaces, tour guides have more collected resources for discussing with visitors the roles industrial Pittsburgh played in the 20th-century’s Great Migration and its impact on the postindustrial 21st-century.
The project, which was to research, write, and deliver a new tour about the Great Migration, black laborers, and Carrie’s unique role in Pittsburgh’s industrial history, was superficially straightforward. Some of the foundational statistics contextualized our narrative with the furnaces not only as a backdrop, but as the focal point. For example, by the 1950s, 70% of the entry-level labor force at Carrie comprised black laborers, and more than 90% of the furnace department laborers were black. We then paired these statistics with oral histories from individual millworkers. Perhaps the most crucial oral history included in the tour is from John Hughey, an ironworker and later union leader who worked at Carrie from 1947 to 1982. In his oral history, Hughey remembers the relatively fluid social hierarchy at Carrie opposed to the exclusionary rigidity workers in other Mon Valley mills encountered. He recalls his experiences working the furnaces as a Black man compared to others’ experiences in other departments at Carrie and how he was able to amass influence in the local union. Hughey’s life and work are integral to understanding how the Great Migration shaped Mon Valley milltowns and subsequently the mill’s influence in the lives of people living in the towns surrounding it.
One additional project goal called for “The Black Experience at Carrie” to connect with the neighborhoods surrounding the National Historic Landmark site. These former mill communities, namely Swissvale, Rankin, and Braddock, are home to disproportionately marginalized groups who remain left out of the City of Pittsburgh’s plans for postindustrial economic reinvention. Community members often lack access to adequate means of transportation, food resources, and basic healthcare facilities. To put it plainly: while we wanted the tour narrative to recognize and include critical voices from Black history at Carrie, we were unprepared and unable to translate that narrative in a way that spoke to present and pressing community needs.
In 2022, Rivers of Steel offered “The Black Experience at Carrie” as part of Swissvale’s (an adjacent neighborhood) community Juneteenth celebration. Approximately 30 visitors attended. In 2023, Rivers of Steel offered the tour every Saturday in June. With expanded availability and marketing, which included promotion on The Confluence, a local (but now canceled) public radio program on WQED, attendance quadrupled. Local schools and other private tour companies are now able to book The Black Experience at Carrie, and those numbers continue to increase. There is an enthusiastic audience for this tour, and the organization expects growth in 2024. However, there are practical and ethical challenges to this intended expansion indicative of larger goals for the Rivers of Steel NHA: Who has access to our public programs, and how do we address structural shortcomings when it comes to that access? In other words, people want more from tours like “The Black Experience at Carrie,” but how do we address and then meet that desire by adhering to our commitments to community partners? Broadly, how do we define access not only on an individual program level but on an institutional/community level? And is that access enough to make a measurable difference?
This site importantly disrupts several ‘taken-for-granted’ notions about the industrial working class in America, and especially its 20th century history. During that time, management in basic industries such as steel, rubber, and transport, tended to assign Black workers to the more difficult and dangerous jobs, a division that was then amplified in racialized / white supremacist notions, and that fractured worker solidarity and perpetuated social segregation. Notably, the USWA was complicit in that process. Racial divisions were significantly challenged, at least in some places, during the social upsurge of the 1960s and early 1970s, and insurgent union initiatives during that period made equality an important focus. Notably, that same upsurge broadened ideological vistas as well – e.g. the African Liberation support movement of the 1970s was very much centered in an urban working class in ‘rust belt’ cities (which perhaps influenced at least some of later anti-apartheid efforts of the 1980s). Collecting oral histories from steelworkers while it’s still possible seems like an urgent need, as is collecting oral histories of those in the surrounding neighborhoods. Both would be opportunities for co-creative participation, could be instrumental in conveying a sense of historical continuum, and counter a denatured working class history (e.g. ‘once upon a time’).
This is such an encouraging case study, Kirsten, and an important one. It reminds of something that is happening currently in Akron with the efforts to remake a now abandoned highway through downtown that was part of so-called “urban renewal” of the 1960s and 1970s. Sections of a now mostly African American neighborhood were wiped out, and the city is working to reconnect with current and former residents. One part of that is collecting oral histories of people whose houses, churches, and businesses were destroyed in the process. In the city’s push to remake itself, those histories and those people were forgotten by white leaders. It seems that to sustain and enrich your program, the continued efforts to collect those stories will be important, (as Kevin suggests) as will maintaining strong connections and buy-ins from local residents and community organizations and schools.
Similar to the Packingtown Museum, I think this case study brings up the question of the kinds of service an organization primarily meant to preserve and interpret history can provide to the local community. For people still living with the consequences of deindustrialization and economic disinvestment, being recognized as part of an important historical narrative doesn’t make the kind of material difference in their lives they might be looking for. Are we simply bumping up against the limitations of historic sites, or do we need to reimagine historic sites to allow for more community services, similar to a local library? What are the outcomes of getting non-local visitors to care about the history?
I would also love to hear more about the use of John Hughey’s oral history. How was it shared with visitors and what are the future plans for oral histories like Hughey’s?
I like that you’re interrogating the use of the term “community.” At the most basic level, “postindustrial communities” simply refers to cities or towns as units of study. But you help us see that a municipality may not be a community because the experiences of various groups in that place may vary widely. The story of Black workers at Carrie is distinctive and deserves the visibility you’re giving it. You effectively tie the question of “community” to the present-day economic and social realities in the region. Just as the experience of industrial work may vary along lines of race, class, and gender, the issues you’ve mentioned regarding transit access to the site impede its potential function as a builder of community.
Your eloquent account of the visits by former ironworkers brings out the important place of memory in our interpretive work. The personal memory of the workers is, at one level, the source material for our interpretation, but at another level is the remedy for promotional or trendy portrayals of industrial history.
My visit to Carrie during the recent Urban History Association conference was a powerful and enlightening experience. The interpretation by your colleague Ryan Henderson was perfectly pitched to the needs of professional historians while driving home viscerally the day-to-day experience of the workers.
I just finished reading the chapter on Carrie in Daniel Campo’s new book, Postindustrial DIY. The chapter is worth more discussion than we can accomplish here, but as an example, I appreciated his first-person account of attending the Festival of Combustion at Carrie. He returned to his hotel covered in furnace dust, smelling of burned coke and with the irritation of the dust in his nasal passages. He writes, “A healthy person like myself … can take a day at the furnaces, but it was hard not to think about the workers exposed for decades or those who lived in the boroughs nearby–or across the region, who would breathe a lifetime of this dirty air in a more diffuse but potentially still toxic form … These iron pour events … are thrilling in their exuberant present and speak to what Pittsburgh is today as much as what it used to be. At the same time, they provide vivid reminders that the good old days of industrial production were never as good as we remember them.”
I would only add that his final point may be equating the hip version of the industrial past with community memory. As you point out, the former workers don’t need to imagine what life at Carrie was like–they remember it.
Kirsten, thank you for sharing! I was so upset that I was unable to go check out the Rivers of Steel NHA last time I was in Pittsburgh. I think that this piece raises not only the great work being done to appreciate the nuance of history but also a great question about community and accessibility. I wonder if this becomes an opportunity for us to consider two potential avenues. First, the idea of traveling exhibits. My colleagues in the Calumet Region did this with the Calumet Voices, National Stories exhibit, which is currently opening in its fifth location on the tour on the 18th. Would distilling down exhibits to manageable, touring exhibits be a possibility? And then I wonder if working with Humanities and state-level historical societies can become another. To invite in a variety of experts and stakeholders to think through “Okay, now how could we communicate these themes to K-12 and college educators?” These conversations should/could prioritize collaboration and accessibility (possibly through digitization?) I think this case statement opens us for us to think about these pressing issues across public humanities work generally.