Duluth Works
The Duluth Works primary purpose was to make steel for the expanding Midwest prairies and far west plains.
In 1922, after going over what products would best serve the plant's existence, U.S. Steel decided to expand its Morgan Park operation and build a new wire, rod, nail, and fence post fabrication facility.
U.S. Steel bought more land when it built the facilities with the ultimately futile belief that more subsidiaries and other steel-related industries would move to the unoccupied site to consume the plant's products.
A smaller company, Priola and Johnson, took open hearth and blast furnace slag and granulated it for other uses on the plant property.
The Duluth Works featured a ten-furnace open hearth steel production facility, two blast furnaces, 110 oven byproduct coke plant, a benzole and toluol plant, a byproducts refinery, coal and coke conveyors and crushing and sizing towers, a pig iron casting facility, a blowing house powerhouse, a Heine boiler house, fresh water pumping inlet station, a hot gas-soaking pit and stripping building, a massive rolling facility consisting of a blooming mill, 28" rolling mill, billet finishing department, hot gas re-heating beds, bar finishing department, fence post fabrication unit, merchant mill, wire, nail, fence and welded fabric mesh building, machine repair shop, three massive materials yard crane bridges and loading/unloading docks, locomotive engine repair and servicing building, its own railyard, a lab, an ore thawhouse, a coal thawhouse and various warehouses and other structures.
The Duluth Works was an integrated steel plant which took several raw materials and combined them in furnaces to make a product.
The limestone from Michigan, needed to purify iron ore in blast furnaces and used for cement making, was hauled by lake carrier to Duluth by the Bradley Transportation Company.
Finished and semi-finished products from the Duluth steel works were taken by rail through the Steelton Yard over the Oliver Bridge through the south end of Superior, Wisconsin and brought to loading docks at Allouez Bay just south of the Superior entry for loading by ship to other markets or further finishing.
The blast furnaces, coke ovens and open hearths were idled at times, leaving only the finishing mills operating.
The main problem was still the lack of a regional market big enough to justify U.S. Steel making multimillion-dollar improvements to a facility that was never really needed.
Rather than deal with the issue of spending millions of dollars to improve the Duluth Works, U.S. Steel announced in September 1971 that it would shut down the "hot side" of operations, including the blast and open hearth furnaces and the pig iron shop, which affected 1,600 steelworkers.
In 1976, the Universal Atlas Cement Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel at the Duluth Works operating since 1916, announced it would close, despite previous assurances to the contrary.
In April 2008, the Duluth-based photographic enhancement company, Ikonics, announced it would develop 40 acres (160,000 m2) on the property to build a warehouse and move its West Duluth headquarters operations to Morgan Park at the former Atlas Cement site.
On February 5, 2009, the State of Minnesota awarded the Duluth Port Authority a $50,000 investigative grant to determine the feasibility of redeveloping 123 acres (0.50 km2) of the former steel plant site as a 35,000-square-foot (3,300 m2) warehouse and light industrial park for storage of energy creating windmills.
In 1984, following an inspection by the Pollution Control Agency, the former Duluth Works steel plant site was put on the National Priorities List for the federally funded "Superfund" program.
Under the Great Lakes Legacy Act, it was agreed that the United States Environmental Protection Agency would pay 49% of the $165 million cleanup cost and U.S. Steel 51%.
