Ojibway Blast Furnace – 1935

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• Thanks everyone!

• The "Canadian Pittsburgh"? How bout "Windsor, At Least It's Not Hamilton". Stephen's observation was the first thing that came into my head, there being no rail access to the site.

• Amazing information - Andrew, this website is truly remarkable, thank you!

• douglasm, the Essex Terminal ran right along the slip...actually I just noticed you can see a boxcar along the slip. I know what you ment, direct access, but I was looking at a 1949 aerial and there at that point anyways, seems to be the faint outline of a ROW.

• According to what the Border Cities Star published at that time, there were 2 more blast furnaces to be built, for a total of 4 -- hence the duplicated unfinished concrete structures. I think the concrete structures would have been used to enclose the process of feeding and emptying the furnaces.

• Just as a note to the absence of rail service to the site. I just found a photo from the WPL of the furnace and it indeed had acsess to rail. Infact, the line went right in between these mystery structures. Granted, there appears to be anchors in the concrete suggesting there was more to build....but....it was there.

  http://heritage.windsorpubliclibrary.com/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=%2Fheritage&CISOPTR=913&DMSCALE=100&DMWIDTH=600&DMHEIGHT=600&DMMODE=viewer&DMFULL=0&DMX=24&DMY=0&DMTEXT=&DMTHUMB=1&REC=17&DMROTATE=0&x=270&y=191

• Regarding the concrete structures at the ends of the two furnaces, each would have supported a "cast house" around the base of the furnace, where molten pig iron would be drawn off the furnace and hauled by rail to a nearby steel plant for processing. Slag would have been removed there, too. Also missing are two "skip cars"—inclined trolleys to carry ore, coke, limestone and other ingredients (delivered by freighter) to dump into the top of the furnaces. None of that was ever built, of course. Canada's thirst for steel had begun to wane with the end of WWI and the postwar recession all but killed rail's need for steel, too. With only sewers, curbs and sidewalks to show for itself, construction on the huge Ojibway townsite ground to a halt first but the furnaces continued to be built. It was the Great Depression that caused US Steel to quit the Canadian project completely, the furnaces never having seen fire. Begun in 1913, the furnace site was finally abandoned in about 1930. When this aerial photo was taken in 1935, the site was already looking lonely and overgrown. Two years later, it was sold to DOSCO. The furnaces were pulled down in 1958. (My grandfather and uncle were building engineers for the project.)

• Fantastic information on this site, thanks guys & gals. A sad story on 'what might have/could have been'

• Until I saw these photos I never knew of this furnace plant's existence in Windsor. These blast furnaces were identical to most of the "second generation" blast furnaces constructed at the Gary Indiana Works, from 1916 to the late 1920s. So this is no coincidence that these uncompleted Ojibway site furnaces were duplicates of the Gary furnaces, since U.S.Steel had constructed both plants. At the Gary Works, the furnaces of this same design, specifically units 1,2,3,5,8,9,10,11 and 12 survived into the 1980s, and furnaces 8-12 had been rebuilt during the mid and late 1950s with taller uptakes and single downcomers. As of 2013, number 8 is the oldest furnace left at Gary, accompanying three other, larger blast furnaces at that plant.