Old Steel: Upper Ohio

The Midland Steel Works is the largest remaining steel plant on the stretch of the Ohio downstream from Pittsburgh, 35 river miles away.

It is part of ATI’s Allegheny Ludlum’s specialty metals operations, and makes around 400,000 tons of raw steel a year.

25 miles further downstream is the Weirton Steel Works, a large mill that recently shut down.

The Weirton Works was founded in 1909, and was one of the largest producers of tin plate in the nation, with 12,000 employees at its peak.

With the collapse of the industry the plant shrank through the 1970s and the 1980s, and was sold to its employees. At the time it was the largest employee-owned company in the nation.

In 2001, it was bankrupt, and bought by ISG, which is now part of Arcelor Mittal.

The plant, which once produced 3 million tons of raw steel annually, stopped making new steel in 2007.

The facilities are slowly being demolished. The coke plant, located in the middle of the river on Browns Island, has been leveled. Some of the blast furnaces have been scrapped.

The property is listed as for sale by the commercial real estate firm CBRE.

A couple of miles downstream from Weirton, also on the West Virginia side of the river, is a large coke plant.

Operated by Mountain States Carbon, the plant was built in 1917, and supplied coke to two steel plants across the river.

Now that the steel plants are closed, the future of the coke plant is uncertain.

The coke plant is visible from the old steelworks at Steubenville, Ohio, across the river.

This plant produced 1.1 million tons of raw steel annually, but is now closed.

A rail bridge connects the plant to the coke works it shared with the nearby Mingo Junction plant.

The plant was bought by RG Steel, which soon went bankrupt and sold the property in 2012 to the River Rail development corporation for $4.3 million.

The new owners are expected to demolish the steel plant, and redevelop the site for other industries.

A mile downstream from Steubenville is the Mingo Junction steel plant.

Mingo Junction and Steubenville were the largest of a network of steel production sites that operated for years as Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel.

Starting with a small iron plant here in 1872, Mingo Junction grew to produce more than 1.3 million tons of new steel a year.

RG Steel acquired this facility in 2010.

After RG Steel announced its bankruptcy in the summer of 2012, the Mingo Junction plant was sold at auction for $20 million.

Its new owners are the Frontier Industrial Corporation of Buffalo, New York, which demolishes industrial sites and sells their scrap.