12 Comments Posted by Carolyn

Homer Research was located on what is now Lehigh University's Mountaintop Campus. They had scaled down furnaces and a rolling mill up there!

Thank you for allowing me to revisit these places. What a pity so much more of this plant was lost forever. The Basic Oxygen Furnaces were state-of-the-art in their day, and are long gone. While visiting Vienna four years ago, I saw one in their Technical Museum. It was quite thrilling to see!

I remember walking through this building while the plant was still in operation. It was beautiful! So many shiny brass fittings, huge flywheels and linkages, ceramic tiles, and on such a grand scale! It's rather sad to see these places in a state of decay.

Videos are great to watch. Thank you!

Actually, the slag floats to the top of molten iron, not steel. The iron produced by the blast furnaces was used in the production of steel. Steel was produced by open hearth furnaces or basic oxygen furnaces. The steel was poured into ingots, which were then rolled into blooms, billets and slabs. These semi-finished products were then rolled into various structural shapes in the mills.

During my employment in the Plant Engineering Department of Bethlehem Steel, I was fortunate to see a blast furnace being tapped. It was fascinating to see the molten iron run into the ladel cars.

I had climbed to the very top of "C" furnace in 1981. It provided quite a view of Bethlehem!

The blast furnaces were indeed designated by letters. While employed as a draftsman, I had worked on the re-line of "C" furnace back in 1981.

I just want to clarify: the previous owner did not give us permission to explore the Pines.....he allowed us to walk in his yard and enter the property. He made it clear that as former owner, he didn't have the right to ALLOW us or anyone to walk around the property.

my sister and I walked around the grounds and in many of the buildings about ten days ago. The former owner lives in the house next door, and allowed us to enter the grounds from his property Its much the same as in the pictures. We had the feeling we were not alone, there might be some homeless people living there.

They're actually called "stops"...like in the phrase, "pull out all the stops". It's a reference to the organ.

i was wondering if anyone who chats on this site happened to work at Pilgrim in the early 1950s, specifically 1950 to 1953. i just found out that my mother was an inpatient here for those three years. I would love to chat with anyone who might have known her. Her last name was Gleason, she would have been about 18 yrs old or so when admitted. I would appreciate any info you might have. Thanks,