500 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS lowed the example of Johnson & Tisdale in building a floating dock, and who in 1870 replaced it with a modern drydock, later enlarged and finally acquired by the Cleveland Dry Dock Company. When the historic firm of Quayle & Martin was dissolved by Martin's death in 1874, it had a new incarnation as Thomas Quayle and Son, building a series of famous wooden propellers, among them the Commodore of 2,082 tons, which when launched in 1873 was the largest ship on the Lakes. When the original Thomas Quayle retired in 1882, after 55 years of shipbuilding, the family name was continued with a third son in the firm, making it Thomas Quayle's Sons. Steel finally drove them out. They were ship carpenters, not structural ironworkers. Mention has been made of Frank E. Kirby of Saginaw, Michigan, son and grandson of sailing men, who foresaw the doom of the wooden ship and established the Detroit Drydock Company with shipyards at Wyandotte, on the Detroit River, to build iron steamships. There had come a swing toward this type of vessel because in the worst storm recorded on the Lakes, in 1869, when 97 vessels were lost or wrecked, and there were victims in every port, very few iron steamers were lost. In 1865 Cleveland was acknowledged as the foremost lake shipbuilding port. It was said by the Cleveland Herald in that year : "Her proximity to the forests of Michigan and Canada afford opportunity for the selection of the choicest timber, while the superior material and construction of the iron manufactures of the city give an advantage. Cleveland has the monopoly of propeller building, its steam tugs are the finest on the Lakes, whilst Cleveland-built sailing vessels not only outnumber all other vessels on the chain of lakes, but are found on the Atlantic Coast, in English waters, up the Mediterranean and in the Baltic." The big building boom naturally came with the Superior ore development. The first wooden steamships built expressly for the iron and coal trade were produced by Peck & Masters in 1872. Ten years later the Globe Iron Works of Cleveland began building iron steamers especially designed STEEL - 503 for the same use. From this time on, for a dozen years, the shipbuilding business prospered greatly and builders multiplied here and elsewhere on the Lakes. The census of 1890 showed Cleveland as the foremost shipbuilding center in America. An important shipbuilding institution had been started unknowingly in 1869 when Robert Wallace, John F. Pankhurst, John B. Cowle and Henry D. Coffinberry bought an interest in Sanderson & Company's machine shop on Center Street. The shop, expanding, became the Globe Iron Works. Stevens & Presley, in undertaking their drydock, persuaded the group to join the enterprise. So the Cleveland Dry Dock Company was organized, and soon the Globe Iron Works found itself building ships. Outgrowing its own shipyard, it built a larger one at the head of the old river bed. As the demand for iron ships increased, the Globe Shipbuilding Company was incorporated in 1880 by the four original partners. Its first product was the Onoko, Cleveland's original iron ship and pattern of the big modern freighters. It is hard to keep track of this company's name. In 1886 the Globe Iron Works reorganized as the Globe Iron Works Company, absorbing the Globe Shipbuilding Company. In 1890 came a new reorganization, with H. M. Hanna assuming the presidency. It claims the distinction of having been the first Cleveland shipyard to build a modern vessel complete and ready for service in its own plant, without dividing the work among several contractors. The Ship Owners Dry Dock Company, organized in 1888 by William H. Radcliffe, with Capt. Thomas Wilson president, M. A. Bradley vice president and H. D. Goulder treasurer, built a new drydock the next year and another in 1890. Its plant was bought by the Globe Iron Works Company in 1897 and united with the Cleveland Dry Dock Company, owned by the Globe interests. The Cleveland Shipbilding Company was started in 1886 by Robert Wallace, Henry D. Coffinberry, William Chisholm, J. H. Wade, Valentine Fries, Capt. Philip Minch and others, on the site of the old Cuyahoga Steam Furnace Company on 504 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS the river. They built another plant at Lorain, with the largest dry docks on the Lakes, in 1897. The situation was now ripe for a merger. The climax of this industrial development came with the organization, in 1899, of the American Shipbuilding Company with headquarters in Cleveland. It was dominated by Cleveland men and included John D. Rockefeller, who had gone into the ore-carrying business and acquired a fleet of freighters. The new company took over the Globe Iron Works Company and the Ship Owners Dry Dock Company, both of Cleveland, and the Cleveland Ship Building Company of Cleveland and Lorain. It acquired at the same time the following outside companies, which it operated as subsidiaries : The Detroit Shipbuilding Company of Detroit and Wyandotte, the Chicago Ship Building Company of Chicago, the Milwaukee Dry Dock Company of Milwaukee and the Superior Shipbuilding Company of Superior, Wisconsin. Shortly thereafter the company bought the Buffalo Dry Dock Company of Buffalo and the West Bay City Shipbuilding Company of Bay City, Michigan. It has since sold its Bay City, Detroit and Milwaukee subsidiaries. The properties now owned and operated by the company are the American Ship Building Company of Cleveland and Lorain, the Buffalo Dry Dock Company, the Chicago Ship Building Company and the Superior Shipbuilding Company. It was at the time of its formation, and has remained, the largest concern of its kind on the Great Lakes. It is managed by W. H. Gerhauser, president, and the chairman of its board is G. A. Tomlinson, both Cleveland men. It has naturally dominated the city's shipbuilding industry since its inception. The career of this industry from the beginning of the century until the World war was, on the whole, one of prosperity and progress. It has contributed vastly to the building up of Great Lakes shipping and the development of the steel industry. The war was for it at the same time an opportunity and a misfortune. The American declaration of war found Great Lakes shipyards already busy on war work, with more than 100 vessels under construction, chiefly for other coun- STEEL – 505 tries. The government requisitioned all the shipyards in August, 1917, recognizing that except for large ocean craft they had the best manufacturing facilities in the country, and proceeded to deluge them with orders. The American Shipbuilding Company immediately began building ten ships for the government Shipping Board without waiting for a contract. Of 432 steel-built, seagoing freighters of 1,700,000 tons deadweight built in Great Lakes yards and put into commission for the war, this company built 176. It was acknowledged afterward that the District of the Lakes had made the largest ship contribution in America, with the smallest working forces, at the highest pay rates, doing it at less cost than any other district, and delivering the ships on an average nearly two months ahead of the contract dates. Naturally such a record precluded the profiteering that was charged later against various industries. Nearly all the lake shipyards figured, when it was over, that they had lost money on their war business. Because merchant fleets were found to be vastly over-built after the war, there was little use for their expanded plants. The industry has been in the doldrums a large part of the time since the Armistice. A new era of prosperity is expected with the upswing of the economic cycle and the completion of the St. Lawrence deep waterway, which should give lake shipping its greatest peace-time opportunity. St. Lawrence Seaway.—The many-sided story of Shipping would be incomplete without some reference to the Seaway project which has been for so long the dream of Great Lakes shipping men. Our water-borne trade, indeed, has never been barred altogether from the sea since the opening of the Erie, Welland and Ohio canals more than a century ago. But those early canals, leading to salt water by way of the Hudson, St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers, all required trans-shipment because of small locks and shallow channels, and in general there have been the same obstacles ever since, despite modern improvements in the Welland, St. Lawrence and Erie channels. It is recorded that in the "Golden Fleece" days of 1849 506 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS the bark Eureka of 350 tons, commanded by Capt. William Monroe, sailed eastward from Lake Erie for the California gold fields, and arrived there safely via the St. Lawrence and Cape Horn. In 1856 the steamer Dean Richmond sailed by the same exit from Chicago to Liverpool. Two years later the bark D. C. Pierce set the first example to Cleveland shipping men by clearing for a European destination, carrying staves and black walnut, and it was followed by many from this port. In the same year fifteen vessels left the Lakes with wheat and lumber for England. In 1860 some forty vessels reached the eastern seaboard by way of the St. Lawrence. A thriving transatlantic traffic seems to have been nipped by the Civil war. Afterward for some years the lake fleets had all the business they could take care of in their home waters ; and when foreign trade might have lured them again, the canals would not accommodate ships then considered adequate or profitable for sea voyages. The situation was shown clearly in the World war, when numerous freighters built on the Lakes, and wanted for war service, had to be cut in two to get them through the Welland and St. Lawrence canals. The first definite movement for access to tidewater started in 1904 when an appeal for a ship canal either across New York State or through the St. Lawrence was made to the congressional rivers and harbors committee at Washington. The leading spokesmen were William Livingstone, president of the Lake Carriers' Association, Harvey D. Goulder of Cleveland, counsel for the Association, and James J. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railroad. Hill, as always, was glad to cooperate with vessel men, believing that trains and ships made business for each other. He was as contemptuous of small locks and shallow channels as any lake captain. "Unless you construct a twenty-foot waterway," he said, "thus enabling you to carry a big load with little money, you might as well lath and plaster the bottom of the canal. "You must do something about this question of transportation from Lakes to tidewater. Build nothing less than a twenty-one-foot channel in this proposed canal, so big ships, STEEL - 507 modern ships, carrying 10,000 tons, can navigate it. The railroads can, and will, work with lake transportation in bringing about lower living costs for everyone, everywhere, in this nation." It was recalled that when General Poe was building the new canal at the Soo, he had said he was "making the lock big enough to accommodate the four largest ships on the Lakes." And before it was finished, Mr. Goulder reminded the congressmen, "we had ships so large that two together could not be locked through at the same time. We never got started early enough." Fortunately there has been a national awakening, both in the United States and Canada, to the need of such enlarged facilities for inland water traffic. The desired deepening of the St. Lawrence route, already half achieved by Canada alone in her new Welland Canal completed in 1931, is now assured through international cooperation, although somewhat delayed by the general business plight. Canada, as usual, will pay for the improvements required on her side of the boundary line, and the United States will pay likewise for its own, each deriving compensation from the waterpower incidentally developed. The shipping of each nation will be free, as usual, to make use of every part of the waterway without charge. This liberal and profitable policy, which has worked admirably for a century, and has served to strengthen American-Canadian friendship while promoting mutual commerce and industry, is said to be unique. By the general plan agreed upon by the two governments in the fall of 1931, as a basis for the necessary treaty and legislation, there is to be a channel twenty-five to twenty-seven feet deep all the way from Superior to Montreal, for vessels drawing twenty-four feet. This provision requires the deepening of one Canadian and three American locks in St. Mary's River to that maximum, with one thirty-foot lock provided by the United States, and the deepening of the St. Clair and Detroit rivers to twenty-seven feet by the United States. It calls for no further excavation or construction 508 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS in the Welland Canal from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, which already meets the specifications. From the outlet of the Welland there is a clear passage for deep-draught vessels, with occasional dredging, all the way to Prescott and Ogdensburg on the upper St. Lawrence. Then comes the forty-eight-mile section of the International Rapids, where four shallow canals on the Canadian side will be replaced by two deep ones on the American side, with two dams and three locks, and hydro-electric works developing about 2,200,000 horsepower. This is the section of particular interest to New York State. The rest of the river is entirely Canadian. The next section, extending for twenty-six miles and containing Lake St. Francis, offers no difficulty. Then comes the eighteen-mile Soulange section, with its obstructing islands and rapids, just above the confluence of the Ottawa River with the St. Lawrence. There the Canadian government is already engaged in the great Beauharnois Canal project, fourteen miles long, on the south side of the river, which will replace the Soulange Canal on the north side, having a dam and two locks and producing 2,000,000 horsepower. In the last section, the Lachine, twenty-four miles long and containing Lake St. Louis, the present Lachine Canal ending in the city of Montreal will be deepened for three miles, with three locks, producing about 1,000,000 horsepower. Montreal is the historic head of navigation on the St. Lawrence, beyond which deep-draught vessels westward-bound have never been able to ascend. To the east from that seaport is a channel which the Canadian government is dredging to a minimum of thirty-five-foot depth all the way to Quebec, where the big river broadens into an estuary onward to the Atlantic. Nature has provided that last thousand miles almost free of charge, as indeed she has nearly all of the 1,500 miles of water to the west of Montreal. And with the same abounding generosity Nature, with a little intelligent human cooperation, will pay nearly all the cost of the new works, in the form of electric power developed from the excess of impounded water that floats the shipping safely past the rapids. STEEL - 509 It seems likely that New York State, disappointed for the present in not having her modern barge canal from the Lakes to the Hudson used for a sea route, will realize her ambition eventually. The route down the Mohawk Valley, though far more costly to develop to a seaway depth than the St. Lawrence, has merits of its own, particularly in being "All-American," in providing a more ice-free channel than the St. Lawrence, and in having as a terminal our greatest national seaport. It is to be expected that in time, traffic will justify both. Meanwhile there is no question that another traffic outlet from the Great Lakes, for heavy barges, possibly surpassing in patronage the New York Barge Canal, will be provided soon from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi and thence to the Gulf of Mexico. At present the St. Lawrence waterway almost monopolizes national interest, having captured the American imagination as the Panama Canal did a quarter of a century ago. Through it, supplemented by the Mississippi Barge Canal, the people of the Great Lakes Basin and the whole mid-continent region, producing and consuming more than any other interior population on earth, will have their windows on the sea, the universal carrier. Every city on the Lakes, the Mississippi and their navigable connecting streams may then call itself a seaport. Cleveland will find itself virtually moved to tidewater, while gaining new advantages from its inland situation. The mid-continent will have such shipping advantages as came to the eastern and western seaboards from the building of the Panama Canal. The nation as a whole will be in position to work more effectively, live more cheaply and gain greater economic security. CHAPTER IV COAL It is coal that balances ore in the shuttle traffic of the Lakes, just as it is the application of coal to ore that produces iron and steel. And coal in its own right is a basic product no less valuable than iron, with uses and values that civilized man is just beginning to realize. Coming in vast volume from the mines of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, it normally provides a return cargo for ships which otherwise would travel light up the Lakes, giving them a profit both ways. This balanced traffic has benefitted both the ore and the coal business, enabling shipmasters to lower rates for each. Economically, also, the two lines of production have tended to balance each other, the coal marketed in the Superior region helping to pay for its ore, and vice versa with the ore marketed in the coal region. This has been true not only of the coal and ore areas as a whole, but of many business concerns which, noting early the twin nature of the two lines of production, have combined iron mines with coal mines under one ownership and control, often making the union complete by transporting both in their own ships. In this triple activity it was natural that Cleveland, strategically situated by geography and initiative as the crossroads of coal and iron, should play a dominant part. From this combination of luck and purposeful effort, more than any other cause, Cleveland has derived her prestige and wealth. And it detracts nothing from the credit of Moses Cleaveland that, in his prescient selection of the Cuyahoga site for an economic capital of the Western Reserve, he had foreseen neither the coal nor the iron. Coal was introduced to Cleveland in 1828, the same year - 510 - STEEL - 511 that brought the first iron foundry, though the two had no necessary connection. Henry Newberry shipped by the Ohio Canal a few tons of the fuel from a little "bank" mine he had opened on his property near Tallmadge, east of Akron. An effort to peddle it around town met with determined sales-resistance. Says a citizen of those primitive days : "No one wanted it. Wood was plenty and cheap, and the neat house-wives especially objected to the dismal appearance and dirt-creating qualities of the new fuel. Once in a while a man would take a little as a gift; but after the wagon had driven around Cleveland all day, not a single purchaser had been found. At length, after nightfall, Philo Scoville, who was then keeping the hotel known as the Franklin House, was persuaded to buy some, for which he found use by putting grates in his barroom stove." Very likely he thought it would interest his patrons as a curiosity. If this antipathy to coal be thought a quaint pioneer viewpoint, let it be noted that there is many a little town in Ontario today, more than a century later, whose housewives still prefer wood because of its cleanliness and the enduring charm of a wood fire. A year later George Fisher was offering coal regularly in his woodyard. But it was many years before the filthy stuff was tolerated in Cleveland homes. Industry had no such prejudices. The fuel soon met its inevitable destiny for small manufacturing and mechanical purposes. The price was low, only $2.50 a ton as late as 1851. It may be well here to pause a moment for a backward look. Coal is not thought of as romantic, yet its background is in some respects more interesting than that of iron. Coal is not such a novelty in human history as we usually suppose. It was known to the ancient Greeks. Aristotle wrote of a fossil stone which he called "anthracite," and which he said "is of an earthy character; nevertheless it inflames and burns like charcoal, and is used by the smiths." Thus coal was actually used industrially in southern Greece, and also in Genoa, more than 2,000 years ago. The Chinese knew of coal, as they seem to have known of nearly everything 512 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS modern at some time and place. The Romans appear to have been using it in Britain at the beginning of the Christian era, though not to any large extent, because timber was plentiful and easier to obtain. English miners have found old mine workings that must be of Roman origin. At the beginning of the thirteenth century land was granted for digging coal on the southern shore of the Forth. About the same time coal was gathered along the coast of Northumberland, washed up and cleansed by the waves. The term "sea coal" may thus be accounted for, although some authorities say it refers to the bringing of coal over sea in ships. Coal mining was common in the reign of Henry Third, despite the silence of romantic chroniclers regarding such matters. There is a Seacole Lane in London where coal was sold to lime-burners as early as 1228. In 1306 the air of London was so contaminated by coal smoke that Parliament petitioned King Edward First to forbid its use and destroy the furnaces and kilns. Shortly afterward, however, it was used to heat the houses of Parliament. Two centuries later, in the reign of Henry Eighth, fine ladies in London objected to the sulphurous smoke and smell of soft coal, just as Cleveland ladies were to do three centuries afterward, and refused to go to houses where it was used. In fairness it may be observed that fireplaces then were not suitable for coal. There was another attempt at prohibition under Queen Elizabeth. We should like to know what Shakespeare thought about it; but contemporary things seldom interested him. In the following reign King James First himself burned coal in his palace, and may have read before a coal fire the English version of the Bible that he sponsored. People began then to fear that coal would soon be exhausted, just as many generations of successors were to do. They had no means of knowing the almost boundless extent of British coal seams. They were greatly limited in their mining operations by having no means of pumping water out of the mines, and could only work near the surface. In 1611 the Earl of Dudley took out a patent for the use of mineral coal instead of charcoal for smelting iron. But STEEL - 513 it availed him little. Mobs destroyed his iron works because he was making iron so cheaply. No one knew how that strange black fuel came to be in the ground. Lord Bacon then, or Leonardo da Vinci a century before, might have made a shrewd guess, but it was not safe to guess about such things aloud. The coal was there because God had put it there when he made the world a little less than 6,000 years before. He had doubtless done it as a pleasant surprise for the godly and to confound the wisdom of the ungodly. However that may be, it is now agreed by geologists that coal goes back for unthinkable millions of years, to the preNoachian age known as Carboniferous, when the earth was so young and strange that grasses and ferns grew 80 feet high, and dragon flies with wings two feet across flitted over vast swamps and through forests of primitive cone-bearing trees. It was an era of mud, heat and insects, with amphibians wallowing in the slime and developing the lungs that would lead them eventually to dry land and human stature. That vast, coarse vegetation grew and fell and sunk into the ooze, in wide, flat areas here and there, beside lakes and seas not in our geographies. It grew and fell, lay and decayed, bacteria working their magic upon it, for thousands and millions of years. Waters washed over it, sand covered it. The earth heaved and sank. Layers were formed upon layers, with sand and mud between them. First the carboniferous ooze resulting from the decay became peat bogs. Then as it was submerged and pressed upon by heavy strata above, the peat turned slowly to lignite or brown coal, the overburden to sandstone and shale. From fermentation and rock stresses, too, came heat. Hot water boiled up from below. Volcanic eruptions overwhelmed these layers, or molten rock poured through crevices. Heat and pressure purified, hardened and blackened the woody fiber and fern spores. Moderate heat and pressure produced soft or bituminous coal, great heat and pressure produced hard or anthracite coal. In its purest form the stuff became graphite or diamonds. The soft coals still show woody structure, and fragments of bark and leaves. 514 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS In the course of infinite ages some of these flattened, pressed and carbonized forests were heaved up into hills or mountains, and the rain and ice wore valleys where black seams cropped out. This makes easy mining in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. Elsewhere, as in much of England, man must sink holes and crawl, mole-like, a mile or more below the surface for his dirty fuel, in which are not oy heat and light but all the colors of the rainbow, and speed for his feet, and power for his hand, and medicine for his headache, and Heaven knows what else. And all from the sunlight of 100,000,000 years ago, enabling trees and grasses to take carbon dioxide from the air and store the carbon. It is curious how things hang together. Coal was responsible for the invention of the steam engine, whose first pur, pose was to pump water from mines and enable the miners to go deeper. The locomotive was invented to haul coal out of mines, instead of continuing to let women drag it out in tubs, on their hands and knees, with chains running from belts around their waists. Coal moved the locomotive and the locomotive moved the coal. It was the same with steamships. Coal made possible the age of steam and the age of steel, as it was later to make possible the age of electricity. Nearly everything valuable in the ground, except Mesabi ore, is hard to get out. It has usually been so with coal. The seams or veins ran deep, luring men far into the bowels of the earth, burrowing in the dark beneath menacing ledges. There were perils of falling rock and rising water, perils of wandering without light in black labyrinths, perils of suffocation from creeping black damp which puts out a light, of being seared and blasted by fire damp which gives no warning. The worst of these perils were faced and largely conquered by the English pioneers before the beginning of our own coal industry. Men learned how to timber, or leave coal pillars supporting, the overhead rock as they worked forward. They learned how to drive tunnels to carry off the dripping or gushing water, and eventually how to pump it out with Watt's steam engine. They learned to sink air STEEL - 515 shafts for ventilation, then to use power-driven fans bringing fresh air and carrying away the gas. From crude flares and tiny candles which hardly relieved the pitch-darkness, and yet threatened explosion, they came to have adequate oil lamps, and finally in 1815, the safety lamp of Sir Humphrey Davy—greatest of miners' benefactors—which, surrounding the flame with wire gauze, showed the presence of explosive gas without setting it off. They learned that coal dust itself would explode—a fact that was destined to be of industrial value—and that they could fight it with rock dust. They adopted gunpowder to blast the coal loose and steam to hoist or haul it from the mines. Mining became much safer, far less unhealthful and inhuman, and far more efficient, with the introduction of mechanical power. The first coal mining in America, said to have been in Virginia in 1750, must have been more primitive than the first iron smelting. There was not much demand for coal in this country until the nineteenth century. No anthracite is known to have been produced before 1793, and extensive mining of that fuel did not begin until 1820, eight years before Cleveland saw and scorned its first bituminous. The full story of coal in America has never been told, though surely worthy of an industrial volume. Little has been told of coal in the region of immediate interest to Cleveland. Operators are engrossed in business details, miners are inarticulate. Literature has hardly touched the mines. Coal and collieries are not beautiful ; yet doubtless, in an era which holds other industries romantic, someone will arise to find romance in them. Then the opening of the first little "coal bank" at Tallmadge for commercial shipment on the canal to Cleveland, the discovery of a coal vein at Mineral Ridge near Niles above a black band of iron ore, and the finding of the deposit at Brier Hill of coal that could be used in its raw state for blast furnaces, may rank almost with the tales of Superior ore discoveries. It may be remembered then that the Mahoning Valley was known for coal before it was known for steel. Local iron, smelted with charcoal, called for coal; and local coal 516 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS production brought more iron. Youngstown, before the Mesabi began pouring out its red ore, lay in a black ring of coal shafts and tipples, and modest ore mines, with four-horse teams trucking the fuel and ore down into the valley in creaking wagons over dusty highways. By the close of the century Welsh miners with blue-spotted faces and gnarled fingers were carrying their dinner pails to the steel mills. The coal ring had bulged southward to new regions. There were no more blasting-powder cans for schoolboys on the Fourth of July. The refuse heaps went to make roads, or to level real estate allotments. Today the mine shafts are filled up and perhaps mansions and garages are built over them. One may find an old-timer saying, as he points downward : "Such-and-such a vein had been worked about to here when they quit, after a cave-in. There was plenty of coal beyond. There should have been another shaft." ' Little by little, settlers had become aware of the vast soft coal deposits in southeastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The Mahoning Valley awoke to its opportunity. The Brier Hill mine near Youngstown was opened in 1845 by David Tod, along with Daniel P. Rhodes of Cleveland. It produced the satisfactory quantity of fifty tons a week, increasing its output as the market expanded. This coal was mined close to the furnace stacks, and was hauled direct by mules up a raised roadway for barrow-dumping into the furnace. Later coke was mixed with it. As there was scarcely any local market near the mine, the surplus production was brought to Cleveland by canal and sold mostly to lake steamers. The growing use of coal for this purpose helped to postpone the depletion of the forests. Completion of the Cleveland & Mahoning Railroad in 1856 gave the coal field its opportunity. Numerous mines were opened in the vicinity, and coal was a leading source of wealth in the Mahoning Valley for half a century. Much of the product was consumed in local industries, especially in the iron and a steel works as they developed, but the bulk continued to go to Cleveland. The Brier Hill "splint block," long since a memory, is still in theory the legal fuel standard in Ohio. STEEL - 517 The adjacent coal fields in Columbiana County were opened by the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railroad. In 1860 mines farther west, around Massillon, added their output to the black flood which poured into Cleveland and neighboring Lake Erie ports for local industry and, in growing quantity, for shipment up the Lakes. More southerly fields were tapped by the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad. Cleveland capital was interested from the first in developing the eastern and central Ohio coal fields. A notable instance is the Hocking Valley, organized to exploit coal lands south of Columbus, which built the Hocking Valley Railroad to give its product an outlet. The best known names of the early Cleveland coal trade are James Corrigan, Charles Hickox and Judge Stevenson Burke. Names readily associated with coal production and trade in more recent decades are Jonathan Warner Sr., Col. Evan Morris, Chauncey H. Andrews, all of Youngstown ; Sen. Marcus A. Hanna, Leonard C. Hanna, S. H. Robbins, W. H. Warner and the Paisleys. Latterly there has been less individuality in this field. The tendency is, more and more, to operate the coal industry in conjunction with other industries, particularly steel, shipping and the manufacture of coke and by-products. The Mather interests have been particularly active and extensive in this sort of industrial combination, with their coal mines in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The Hannas have long been large producers of hard coal in Pennsylvania and soft coal in the Massillon district, supplementing their pig iron production. The Corrigan-McKinney Steel Company, lately absorbed by the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, has been heavily interested in Kentucky mines. Though Cleveland interests have spread fan-wise far into the neighboring coal states, so that the coal brought to this center now comes from a distance of 90 to 250 miles, Ohio is by no means out of the picture. It ranks today as fifth among bituminous states, Pennsylvania leading with 142,000,000 tons a year in 1929, West Virginia second with 138,000,000, Kentucky and Illinois with about 60,000,000 518 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS each, and Ohio just short of 24,000,000. Indiana and Virginia come next. A recent War Department publication, "Transportation on the Great Lakes," has graphs which picture the many streams from these coal states converging at the southern Lake Erie ports, forming a great, thick, black worm from the head of the lake past Detroit and up Lake Huron, then splitting and spreading to the receiving ports of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, with the latter getting the lion's share and most of it pouring into the twin cities of Superior and Duluth. Here is the situation at a glance. The Erie ports are represented as shipping in 1928 a total of 34,670,000 tons of coal, of which all but a million and a quarter was bituminous. Of the soft coal Toledo handled nearly one-half, 15,327,000 tons. Sandusky had 6,763,000, Ashtabula 3,305,000, Lorain 2,102,000, Conneaut 1,844,000, Fairport 1,765,000, Buffalo 1,670,000, Cleveland 970,000, Huron 750,000. Buffalo, being nearest to the anthracite fields, ships two-thirds of the hard coal, with the rest passing through Erie and Ashtabula. Cleveland will not overlook the progressive absorption of this traffic by the city at the western end of the lake. Toledo's location is advantageous, as the active coal field shifts westward, and it possesses admirable railroad facilities. Its pre-eminence, however, comes largely from its intelligent and enterprising development of a naturally poor harbor and its creation of adequate dock facilities. Most of the Lake Erie coal comes from West Virginia now, that state's shipments in 1928 for the lake traffic being 18,802,000 tons against Pennsylvania's 9,102,000 tons of bituminous. Pennsylvania produces all the anthracite. The largest West Virginia movement is from the Kanawha district, which sent 7,162,000 tons to the Erie ports. The Pocahontas district, whose semi-hard coal is used largely in this section for domestic purposes, was next with 4,832,000 tons. Ohio mines contributed 1,053,000 tons. The figures given, it should be remembered, apply only to coal received at these ports for trans-shipment by water. STEEL - 519 In a city like Cleveland which is not only a port but a populous manufacturing and trading community, there is naturally a much larger volume than the figures show, received from the mines for local use, industrial and domestic. In 1929, the last year of big-volume business, the upward-bound coal movement, furnishing power for the industries of the Northwest and keeping its people warm in their long winters, was 39,383,842 tons. The first season's shipment through the Soo, in 1855, had been 1,414 tons. The giant's imagination that has made play-work of the ore traffic has likewise mechanized the handling of coal. In mining, the primitive pick-axe, hand drill and blasting powder have given way to the cleaner, safer and enormously more efficient pneumatic and electric drilling, cutting and loading machines. Subterranean as well as surface transport is modernized. Hoists are largely automatic. Coal is washed, sorted and prepared for market as carefully as many a more dainty article of commerce. The soft coal mine has its tipple equipped with shaking screens, picking tables, conveyors and elevators, its chutes for loading railroad cars. The hard coal has its breaker, a massive steel and concrete structure for sizing, cleaning and handling, where raw coal enters at the top and passes down by gravity through various stages, with the scoured product assorted in bins at the bottom ready for shipment. At every step work is done better and labor is saved. There is even some coal mining resembling the scoop-shovel method of the Mesabi iron basins. Where soft coal lies near the surface, the overlying soil and rock are ripped off and the black layers are stripped from their beds like so much soft ore. In any case, when this freight is once laden on trains the process is simplicity itself. Movements of coal trains and ore ships are adjusted to prevent congestion at the docks. No sooner has the ore been pulled out of the hold than the coal is poured in. The fifty-ton railroad cars roll by gravity to a track pit, are drawn up by cable to a dumper platform, clamped to a huge cradle, raised and turned through an arc 520 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS of 160 degrees as if they were nursery toys. The load falls into the dumping pan, and slides down a narrow chute into the waiting vessel's hold. The car is returned right side up, set back on its track and allowed to roll out of the way to the "empty" yard while another takes its place. The operation requires less than two minutes per car. Some coal is carried in box cars; and even for these there is a mechanical unloader Which raises them and pours the coal out of them. Most of the upper lake docks have facilities for rapid unloading from the vessels. It is accomplished usually with clamshell buckets thrust through the hatches, or with endless-chain buckets operated in much the same fashion as the familiar ditch-digger. The first electrified equipment of this kind anywhere was installed at Duluth in 1901. The most modern type is the man-trolley coal bridge. Coal cars are also ferried on great floats across Lakes Erie, Ontario and Michigan and the St. Lawrence River. On Lake Erie 740,000 tons were exported in this way during the season of 1928 from Ashtabula and Conneaut. Mention should be made, perhaps, of the huge piles of iron ore and the occasional piles of coal, almost as huge, which are so familiar a sight at the ore docks on the Cleveland waterfront and on some of the wharves along the river. The ore piles grow as winter approaches, and the coal piles toward spring. There is no mystery about this phenomenon when it is remembered that furnaces and coal mines both operate —or should operate—continuously through the year, whereas navigation on the Great Lakes is necessarily suspended every winter for four months. Thus ore has to be stored for winter consumption and coal for summer shipping. A few words about the scope and prospects of the coal fields. Our coal supply comes from the "Appalachian trough" and the anthracite area of eastern Pennsylvania. The Appalachian field is called the greatest fuel storehouse in the United States if not in the world. The northernmost extension of this coal reserve lies in Pennsylvania just south of New York State, paralleling the boundary line, and its west- STEEL - 521 ern extension reaches nearly to Cleveland. The field runs in a southwesterly line roughly parallel to the Atlantic coast, down into Alabama, a distance of 800 miles. Its maximum width is at Pittsburgh, a fact which helps to explain Pittsburgh. It covers the eastern third of Ohio and nearly all of West Virginia. At Huntington it begins to narrow gradually, and at Chattanooga it is less than 40 miles wide. In Alabama it ends in a roughly circular deposit about 100 miles in diameter, in miraculous conjunction with great iron and limestone deposits, a fact which may make Birmingham a second Pittsburgh. There are many districts and smaller divisions varying in quality, thickness of seams, etc. The bituminous fields of Pennsylvania cover nearly all the western half of the state. The anthracite fields are a limited area in the northeastern corner, producing about 99 per cent of the country's hard coal. The Ohio coal fields lie in the eastern part of the state. The important districts are the Northern Ohio, Number Eight, Cambridge and Hocking. Of these the Number Eight or Belmont district, not far from Pittsburgh, ranks first. The Hocking Valley region to the southeast, in Muskingum, Perry, Hocking, Athens, Vinton and Jackson Counties, is the oldest of Ohio fields. The principal West Virginia fields are in the northern and southern parts of the state. In the north are the Wheeling, Fairmont and Upper Potomac districts, of which the Fairmont is the largest and oldest. In the southern section are two important districts, the Pocahontas and New River. Tributary to these are the Kanawha, adjacent to the New River field, and the Tug River, Thacker and Kenova, near the Pocahontas. The largest tonnage comes from the latter section. The important Virginia fields are in the Olinch Valley, in the southwestern part. A small part of the Pocahontas district lies in Virginia, and furnishes nearly all of the "smokeless" coal used by the United States Navy. The Kentucky coal is found in two separate basins. The eastern field belongs to the Appalachian and the western to 522 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS the interior basin. Coal from eastern Kentucky finds a market largely in the West and Northwest, through the lake routes, some of it coming to Cleveland, while the western coal moves to Chicago and the western states by rail. The United States is far ahead of the rest of the world in its coal production and its supply of this invaluable fuel. In 1929 it produced 552,206,000 metric tons, against 338,604,000 in Germany, 262,046,000 in Great Britain, 54,923,000 in France, 46,310,000 in Poland, 38,423,000 in Russia, 33,800,000 in Japan and 26,931,000 in Belgium. Our country forged ahead during the war and will doubtless keep its lead. The peak of production was 596,747,000 tons in 1926, during the British coal strike. There are vast areas in our mid-continent region scarcely touched. The coal reserve of the world is estimated at seven to eight trillion metric tons. Of this North America has more than half. The United States and Alaska alone have about 3,500,000,000,000 tons, of which more than one-third is good bituminous and the rest sub-bituminous, lignite and anthracite—the last a mere 16,000,000,000 tons or so. If we figure on an average consumption of 1,000,000,000 tons a year, which is nearly twice as much as we have yet been able to use, there is enough known coal in the ground to last us as far into the future as it is from the present back to the first Moses. By that time perhaps we shall have tapped the atom and either made ourselves omnipotent or blown up the earth. In either case we shall not miss the coal. About one-fourth of the nation's coal production is burned by the railroads, one-fourth of it by public utilities—gas and electric companies, water works, .street car lines, etc.—and nearly all the rest by industries. The domestic consumption, important as it seems to a householder in the winter months, is a small factor when the coal business is considered as a whole, and it grows steadily less with the increased substitution of oil and electricity. Gas.—After heat, the first generally useful product of coal was gas. Coal gas as an illuminant is usually credited to William Murdoch, the brilliant Scot who made the first STEEL - 523 high-pressure locomotive. Men had long observed methane or marsh gas in swamps and coal mines, and in the latter locale were inclined to connect it with coal. Much like young Isaac Watt with his steaming teakettle, Murdoch when a youth in Ayrshire turned a teapot into a coal still. Smoking a pipe before a coal fire, and observing a spurt of burning gas, he had a sudden idea, emptied the tobacco from his pipe, put a bit of half-burned coal in it, closed the top of the bowl, found gas coming from the stem, touched a lighted taper to it—and it burned ! That pipe stem was the first gas jet. Soon he had a beautiful flame from the spout of his mother's teapot. He filled a bag under his coat with gas, and went about at night with a lamp lighted from it, to everyone's amazement. Years later, when living in Cornwall, he distilled gas from coal in a retort in his back yard, ran a pipe into the house and had a gas chandelier suspended from the ceiling above his table. He proposed to Watt and Boulton, his engineering associates, that they take out a patent for such lighting, but they paid no attention to it. Experimental minds were getting "warm" just then in their quest for unknown latencies in coal. One of them was the very modern Lord Dundonald of Scotland, who in 1787 took out a patent for the production of coal tar and built a set of ovens for the purpose. He conducted the tar fumes through pipes from the ovens to condensers, and thence to brick cylinders, each with an opening in the top for the escape of gas. He burned the gas as a waste product, and later used it to light the works. Taking his cue, perhaps, from Murdoch's boyish tricks, he filled a large tea urn with the gas and brought it in to light the hall when he had company, astonishing his guests. But no one took the gas seriously. Note what this Murdoch did next. In 1791, about the time when George Washington was starting his first term as President, he obtained a patent for "the art or method of making from the same material (coal) , and by processes entirely new, copperas, vitriol, and different sorts of dyes or dyeing stuffs, paints, colors, and also a composition for the preserving of all kinds of vessels and all wood requiring 524 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS to be immersed in water, from wormweeds, barnacles and every other foulness that does or may adhere thereto." Here may be seen the prescient beginnings of the ultra-modern art of coal distillation and reduction, the vast possibilities of which are only beginning to be grasped by twentieth century chemists. Coal tar dyes were not destined to acceptance for more than half a century. It was to be a full century until Germany developed the anilin dye industry, and it required a world conflict to bring that industry to America, where awaited its greatest opportunity. Murdoch does not seem to have gone far with his ambitious patent. He built a gas plant in his native village in Ayrshire, built another to light the Watt and Boulton works in Birmingham, and soon did the same for a cotton mill in Manchester. It cost only half the price of oil lighting. Coal gas was established. It was a half century, then, until Cleveland, newly converted to coal for fuel, was using it. In 1846 the Cleveland Gas Light and Coke Company was organized to provide illuminating gas for the village. The plant was completed by Moses G. Younglove in 1849. Pipes were laid through the streets, and homes and public buildings rejoiced in the splendor of the new illumination. The company originally operated only east of the river. In 1856 it applied to the city for a right to supply the West Side. In 1866 appeared a rival, the People's Gas Light Company, which took over the whole field west of the river. It was long until the shale of Cuyahoga County was pierced for native gas. The two companies continued supplying artificial gas to their respective territories until 1910. At that time they were consolidated with the East Ohio Gas Company, which had obtained a franchise in 1902. Artificial gas was forced to yield to the cheaper and more efficient product of nature, piped from West Virginia. No one has ever succeeded in ridding gas of its bad smell. Murdoch tried, but gave up when he found that the better it smelled, the worse it burned. As an illuminant, coal gas has now been generally superseded by the electric light. It is still widely used, however,