Forge and Furnace

How the Midwest Built America -- and What It Cost

From the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire to the cold blast furnaces of Pittsburgh, this tour traces the rise, crisis, and reinvention of American industry. Nine stops across three cities tell the story of a region that fed the world, armed the world, and moved the world -- then paid the bill.

Itinerary

1. The Night the City Burned — On October 8, 1871, a fire that may or may not have started in the O'Leary barn destroyed 17,500 buildings and left a third of Chicago homeless -- then gave the city permission to reinvent itself from scratch.
2. Hog Butcher for the World — For a century, the Union Stock Yards processed more animal flesh than any place on Earth -- an industrial cathedral of blood and profit that made Chicago the nation's refrigerator and inspired Upton Sinclair to write 'The Jungle.'
3. The White City — In 1893, Chicago answered its critics by building a temporary city of white plaster and electric light on the lakefront -- 27 million visitors came, and the modern American city was born in their imagination.
4. The Line That Changed Everything — In 1913, inside this concrete-and-glass factory in Highland Park, Henry Ford's engineers perfected the moving assembly line -- reducing the Model T's build time from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes and rewriting the rules of human work.
5. The Machine That Ate the World — At its peak, the Rouge Complex employed 100,000 workers, consumed raw iron ore at one end, and rolled finished automobiles out the other -- the largest integrated factory on Earth, a city within a city.
6. Blood on the Overpass — On May 26, 1937, Ford's private security force beat UAW organizers Walter Reuther and Richard Frankensteen on an overpass outside the Rouge Complex -- and a newspaper photographer captured every blow.
7. The Battle of Homestead — In 1892, Andrew Carnegie's lieutenant Henry Clay Frick sent 300 armed Pinkerton agents up the Monongahela River to break a strike at the Homestead Steel Works. The workers fought back with rifles and dynamite. The Pinkertons surrendered. The union lost anyway.
8. When the Dam Broke — On May 31, 1889, a dam maintained by Pittsburgh's wealthiest industrialists -- including Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick -- collapsed and sent 20 million tons of water through Johnstown, killing 2,209 people in ten minutes.
9. Cathedral of Rust — The Carrie Furnaces once produced 1,250 tons of iron per day for U.S. Steel. They went cold in 1982. Now they stand as a 35-acre monument to an industry that built a nation and then left town.