HOMESTEAD, PA.: Big Steel is dead, and streetlights no longer burn at midday in Pittsburgh, but residents of the area are realizing that the smoke-laden past must not be allowed to vanish completely. Sobriquets like “Steeltown” live on long after they have ceased being descriptive; it’s like calling Boston “The Hub” or New York “Fun City.” Now the Steel Industry Heritage Task Force (SIHTF) is working to make sure that future residents will have more than just a nickname to bear witness to the world of barges and girders and showers of sparks that once defined their city.

Almost a century ago the men of the Homestead steelworks defended their labor union against armed Pinkerton thugs. Today their descendants are programming computers and flipping burgers for a living, but the mills they worked at remain strung along the Monongahela River (“Mon” in local parlance), most of them closed. The SIHTF is concentrating its efforts on restoring sections of two history-laden mills.

The structures the SIHTF hopes to preserve include a forty-eight-inch rolling mill, the last in the country driven by steam; the Pinkerton landing site; and, across the Mon, a portion of the Carrie Furnaces with associated cast houses and ore yards. If all goes well, there will be exhibits, tours, and demonstrations of working equipment, aimed at drawing visitors from around the country while preserving a focus on local history.

The sticking point, as usual, is money. As of early summer the task force had raised more than $1.25 million, which will be used to purchase land and perform the inevitable surveys that go along with government involvement. Millions more will be needed to put the plan into effect, but the task force is hopeful. Similar projects in Lowell, Massachusetts (see “Notes from the Field,” Winter 1990), and Birmingham, Alabama, have shown that good history can draw tourists as well as scholars—and can revitalize rundown communities. Thanks to the SIHTF, the Pittsburgh area’s steel mills may last as long as the beams and cables they once produced.

PHILADELPHIA, PA.: The Society for Industrial Archeology (SIA) is a bunch of people who love the sight of a trolley, or even a trolley wire, and who collect pictures of bridges the way some people collect baseball cards. At the group’s nineteenth annual convention this spring, manufacturing mavens and engineering antiquarians from across the country spent a weekend savoring Philadelphia’s ample supply of old factories.

Industrial archeology is the study, cataloguing, preservation, and renewal of artifacts from our technological past. In keeping with this broad definition, the society attracts a wide range of enthusiasts: rail fans, architecture buffs, economic and labor historians, and so on. The members of SlA are proud of its down-to-earth reputation, and it enthusiastically welcomes contributions and ideas from amateur scholars as well as university and museum professionals. While speakers at the convention occasionally strayed into the thicket of “sociopolitical and economic factors” and “diachronic analysis,” much more common was nutsand-bolts talk of charcoal hearths, steam engines, and grain elevators.

One difficulty for industrial archeologists is that the things they like to study tend to be junked, abandoned, built over, or simply lost once their usefulness has ended. A walking tour of Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood, in addition to drawing puzzled stares from the locals, illustrated both the problems and the pleasures of IA.

The former site of the A. J. Reach sporting-goods company is now a drab warehouse with a few forlorn stacks of tires scattered about. Another site on the tour had successively housed a bottling plant, an industrial laundry, a soap factory, and a glassworks. Now it, too, is being reused as a warehouse. And one building dating from the 1830s underwent a similar series of modernizations until, in a supreme architectural irony, it was torn down to make room for neo-Colonial town houses.

But much remains. The Delaware station of the Philadelphia Electric Company, now partly closed, has a magnificently imposing facility for unloading coal from barges, still mostly intact. The plant, formerly the Neafie & Levy Shipbuilding Company (where the U.S. Navy’s first destroyer, the Bainbridge , was built in 1902), can be seen from Penn Treaty Park, which also affords a nice view of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. (Everything in Philadelphia seems to be named after either Franklin or Penn.)

The Jack Frost sugar factory, closed in 1984, is another survivor. The Environmental Protection Agency won’t let anyone near it these days, but viewed through a chain-link fence and across a helicopter landing strip, it presents a quirkily appealing sight, a haphazard agglomeration of boxy wings and additions, topped off with a forest of tanks and smokestacks. Around World War II the plant employed a thousand workers, but eventually it fell victim to changing economics and demographics as the vertical manufacturing process, in which different stages of production took place on different floors, gave way to more efficient horizontal production, in plants built on cheap land in the rapidly growing suburbs.

The mixed industrial and residential character of the neighborhood is evident throughout. Simple, unassuming houses (some less than twenty feet square, crammed onto tiny, oddly shaped patches of land) are now home to fifth- and sixth-generation descendants of the workers who ran Fishtown’s mills and furnaces and lived right in their midst.

In addition to walking, conventioneers did a lot of talking. Diane Kallman of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission presented a paper on the Pennsylvania Steel Company, which in the 186Os built America’s first commercially viable Bessemer converter on the Susquehanna River. The mill survives today by concentrating on railroad parts, and much of its equipment from the early part of the century is still in use, providing a treasure trove of living steel history. Adam L. Gruen, a historical consultant, applied the methods of IA to a much more recent event, NASA’s effort to build a space station. Artifacts from the program usually remain in space or burn up on reentry before industrial archeologists can get at them. But Gruen’s studies of engineering drawings, memoranda, and other documents show how goals and schedules kept changing as designers weathered sudden political shifts and bureaucratic jungle fighting.

At the group’s annual luncheon-business meeting, the announcement of a future convention in Buffalo, New York, drew appreciative oohs and ahs. But the high point for many was an evening reception at the Fairmount Waterworks. For almost a century Fairmount pumped Philadelphia’s water from the Schuylkill. In its day the complex was not only a technological marvel but one of the world’s loveliest parks, with fountains, trees, and sculpture in abundance. Besides the scenery, the water itself drew raves back then. By contrast, today’s Philadelphia water tastes as if it came out of a swimming pool—or, as one conventioneer murmured after taking a sip, ‘That’s good artesian water. You can taste the minerals.”

After decades of decline, the park is now being restored. The reception celebrated a victory for preservation in a time when much of our industrial heritage is disappearing. Huge chunks of the old Philadelphia were torn down to make room for Interstate 95, and the process continues today. A prevalent local opinion is “Who wants to look at a bunch of old buildings?” But those old buildings are a unique window into a vital part of our history, and as long as the world keeps rushing headlong into the future, the SIA will do its best to make sure that the past is not discarded in the process.

MOUNT PLEASANT, MICH.: A Historical Dictionary of American Industrial Language (Greenwood Press) is, as its name implies, a treasury of the inventive, evocative, and sometimes poetic terms used in American mills, mines, and workshops through the years. They range from the whimsical ( niddy noddy ) to the prosaic ( knocker upper ). Some, such as guillotine shears , bring a picture immediately to mind, while others, like kish, bort , and frow , are more likely to make a person think of crossword puzzles.

‘There’s a certain directness, an aesthetic of economy,” says William H. Mulligan, Jr., the book’s editor. “These terms convey intricate meanings in just a syllable or two.” Mulligan spent four years supervising the project, melding his own work with that of a score of experts in such fields as lumbering, coopering, and upholstery. The result is not just a list of words but a verbal picture of American industry and the people who built it.

Take shoes, for example. Early American shoemakers, in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, lived by the sea and often doubled as fishermen. Many terms in the industry show this nautical origin: a workshop was known as a ten-footer , staffed by a crew of workers, each with his own berth . And in the lumber industry a term like steam nigger (a machine that loaded logs onto a carriage), while offensive to modern ears, conveys the reality of the era in which it was coined.

Mulligan is now working as a freelance historical consultant. Eventually he would like to see further dictionaries covering industries he couldn’t include in his book. But for now , A Historical Dictionary of American Industrial Language stands as a valuable source for scholars and browsers alike.

(By the way, here are what those words in the first paragraph mean: A niddy noddy is a device to wind yarn; a knocker upper is a bent piece of pipe used to maneuver the head of a barrel into place; guillotine shears use a dropping blade to cut sheet metal; kish is the impurities that float on molten lead; a bort is a low-quality diamond used for drilling; and a frow is a cooper’s tool used for splitting wood.)