io8 F. W. TAUSSIG 



of it goes farther, through Lakes Huron and Erie, and meets 

 the coal at Toledo, Ashtabula, Cleveland, and other ports on 

 Lake Erie. The largest part is unloaded from the vessels 

 at lake ports, and carried by rail to the heart of the Pittsburg 

 coal district, there to be smelted by the coal on its own ground. 

 No small amount goes even beyond, — to the eastward in 

 Pennsylvania, beyond the Pittsburg district, even into New 

 Jersey and New York, almost to the seaboard itself. Hence 

 the cities of Erie and Buffalo have become important ore 

 receiving ports on Lake Erie. 



The iron producing region which depends on the Lake 

 Superior ores thus stretches over a wide district, the extreme 

 ends being separated more than a thousand miles. Close 

 by the iron mines are a number of charcoal using furnaces in 

 Wisconsin and Michigan. The still unexhausted forests 

 of these states supply this fuel in abundance ; and charcoal 

 iron, though long supplanted for most uses by the coke 

 smelted rival, has qualities which enable a limited supply 

 to find a market, even at a relatively high price. Next in order 

 come Chicago and some neighboring cities, among which Mil- 

 waukee and Joliet are the most notable. It is one of the sur- 

 prises of American industry that iron manufacturing on a huge 

 scale should be undertaken at such points, distant alike from 

 ore and from coal, and having no natural advantages what- 

 ever. The coke is moved hundreds of miles by rail from 

 Pennsylvania and meets the ore which has travelled no less a 

 distance from Lake Superior. Ease of access to the western 

 market gives these sites an advantage, or at least goes to 

 offset the disadvantage of the longer railway haul of the fuel. 

 Other iron producing points of the same sort are scattered 

 along Lake Erie. At each of the ports of Toledo, Lorain, 

 Ashtabula, Erie, Buffalo, especially Cleveland, ore is smelted, 

 and iron and steel making is carried on. 



But the coal region itself — western Pennsylvania and 

 the adjacent parts of Ohio — remain the heart and center of 

 the iron industry. Hither most of the ore is carried ; and here 

 the operations of smelting, converting into steel, fashioning 

 the steel into rails, bridges, plates, wire, nails, structural forms 

 for building, are performed on the greatest scale. 



