Museum opens 'Steel: Made in Pennsylvania' photo exhibit

Photos of active and abandoned steel mills across the state of Pennsylvania are featured in a new photo exhibit, "Steel: Made in Pennsylvania," which is now open to the public at the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.

Museum staff photographer Don Giles spent over a year taking the 60 color photos that are on display in the new exhibit space through April 29, 2007.

"This extraordinary exhibit details the heat and danger of a working steel mill and also presents a stark beauty in mills that have long been closed," said Barbara Franco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

The pictures were taken at the closed Bethlehem Steel Corp. in Bethlehem and the Carrie Furnaces in Homestead. Working mills featured in the exhibit are Koppel Steel Company factories in Ambridge and the Koppel and Mittal Steel USA plant in Steelton.

Dramatic shots of Bethlehem's huge blast furnaces, abandoned mills floors and ironic scenes of plants growing in buildings where flame and molten steel once ruled are featured in the exhibit. The photos are framed from rusted steel made by Vance Packard, who was the founding member of the Society for Industrial Archaeology.

Pennsylvania led the nation in steel production for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its mills made steel that built the Empire State Building, the gates of the Panama Canal and the armaments used by the U.S. in two world wars.

The State Museum produced the exhibit in cooperation with the National Museum of Industrial History and the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area. Later in 2007, the exhibit will travel to the Payne Gallery at Moravian College in Bethlehem and to the Bost Building, the headquarters of Rivers of Steel in Homestead.

The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission is the official history agency of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.