Weirton Steel is one of my favorite abandoned places and is absolutely massive. It is or was one of the most intact historic steel mills left in the US but unfortunately is now being completely torn down. I went back today probably for the last time ever. Most of these photos were from today but a few were from a couple of years ago. Most of the mill was abandoned in the early 2000's, although a few buildings were used until just a couple of years ago. Most of the mill was built in from 1909-1929.
• Video Link
Very cool educational video on Weirton Steel from 1969.
WSXMill
Historic image of the mill when it was still active.
Thanks for preserving this mill with your photos. The scale of everything in this place is hard to grasp. Lots of reminders of Carrie Furnace, only larger here. I can't believe that control room still has power!
This is a goddamn ruin, people! It looks like Roman ruins in Italy.
I don't know how people can let their own facilities and properties fall into ruins like this.
Shame! Laziness, I guess. And Lord knows how seriously lazy the rich can be.
I also know rust can be fascinating sometimes, but it's only to remind us of what Victor Hugo once wrote: Laziness is the worst kind of selfishness. You just sit there and wait for people around to serve you, as if they were your slaves.
This is exactly what the rich people who once owned this facility did. They sat there, stuffed their butts until everything fell into ruins, then just left by ordering everyone to shut their mouths. For example, they never thought of turning their so called blue collars into your white ones. They were too busy with satisfying their shameful laziness.
Then you see what happens.
You'd be wrong to think a blue collar hasn't got the same brain as yours, technically. It's the very same as yours. The rest is only a matter of culture, mindset and all.
As always, photoLith shows an incredible talent for lighting you can actually FEEL. Doesn't matter, what the subject, photoLith puts his viewers there in real time.
I live about one mile away from the very similar Bethlehem Steel plant at its world headquarters. Those many acres are being transformed into some really wonderful attractions. Included is a new elevated walkway throughout those massive rusting blast furnaces. Your journey puts you up there just inches away from apple-sized rivets and intricate piping systems that boggle the mind. Well worth a visit to Bethlehem, PA.
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Thank you for the compliments. That's what Weirton should have done is turn the mill into a national historic park and preserved it. Would have brought in much needed tourist money into the dead town and it would have been the largest intact historic steel mill left in the country, other than the active Gary Works. But Weirton is full of not forward thinking people so they squandered it's potential and now a great piece of American industrial history will be lost forever.
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Really cool (and just across the river from little Toronto ). And of course, excellent photographs. Why's it being demolished - safety concerns? Redevelopment? Not that it can easily just be repurposed, but seems a waste to just knock it down.
How fares the fate some of the other big, old steel mills in Pittsburgh & area? (I'm thinking of some like the mighty US Steelworks in Braddock)
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The Braddock Mill is still going strong, but every other mill in the region pretty much has been torn down, except for a small part of Carrie Furnace which is preserved as an historic site. Theres also Clairton Coke works, which is massive and still in production.
And a scrapping company bought the mill from Weirton Steel to sell the steel, which they will just break even on and then they plan on selling all the land for industrial uses.
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Thank you. It breaks my heart that such an important and beautifully intricate piece of history will be lost. When I was just there this Sunday, a good 30 percent of it was gone from the past time I was there. These steel mills in my opinion are works of art of engineering and ingenuity. To think, they had the wherewithal to build such complex structures to create the back bone of the worlds skyscrapers, rail networks, cars, etc in the early 1900's without the aid of computers to figure out this complex patchwork of pipes and processes is simply astounding, and all of it will be gone. There are only a few historic steel mills left in the US. There used to be many dozens of them in the Ohio and Monongahela river valleys that made most of the steel for the world in the late 1800's to mid 1900s. There is only one left now that is still active in this region. Steubenville, OH recently tore down their steel mill, which was of an even older vintage. These places should be treasured in American history, just as much as the Gettysburg battlefield or the Empire State Building. Yet, a foreign scrapping company bought the property and all of its immense history will be lost and the country will be poorer for it. But such is American society, a throw away culture which doesn't value its history in the least.
Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what the power is for, but there's still active natural gas and liquid nitrogen pipelines running through the mill and a rolling mill is still active across the railroad tracks. There was still power on in 2 buildings. And the rooms with the power and voltage meters were the last thing still clearly being used and were nominally maintained. But these small maintained rooms were only about .1 percent of the space of the former active mill. Was sort of nervous being in the power control room but it was Sunday afternoon, so I doubted any demo or power company workers would show up. However, even these last working rooms will be torn down by 2021. It's strange that they didn't have these rooms locked up at all and some of the tags and warning signs said 6900 volts, which if you touched a live wire by accident in these rooms, you'd be toast. I've explored thousands of abandoned places and am scared of four things, falling through a floor, getting arrested, getting shot by an irate redneck or accidentally touching a live wire. Luckily so far, I've only fallen through a couple floors and steps and gotten shot at two times and almost arrested twice. Luckily haven't had a run in with electricity yet.
Last edited by photoLith; Aug 22, 2017 at 3:09 AM.
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Thank you. It breaks my heart that such an important and beautifully intricate piece of history will be lost. When I was just there this Sunday, a good 30 percent of it was gone from the past time I was there. These steel mills in my opinion are works of art of engineering and ingenuity. To think, they had the wherewithal to build such complex structures to create the back bone of the worlds skyscrapers, rail networks, cars, etc in the early 1900's without the aid of computers to figure out this complex patchwork of pipes and processes is simply astounding, and all of it will be gone. There are only a few historic steel mills left in the US. There used to be many dozens of them in the Ohio and Monongahela river valleys that made most of the steel for the world in the late 1800's to mid 1900s. There is only one left now that is still active in this region. Steubenville, OH recently tore down their steel mill, which was of an even older vintage. These places should be treasured in American history, just as much as the Gettysburg battlefield or the Empire State Building. Yet, a foreign scrapping company bought the property and all of its immense history will be lost and the country will be poorer for it. But such is American society, a throw away culture which doesn't value its history in the least.
Well said, and I agree. Thanks for capturing it before it disappears forever.
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). And of course, excellent photographs. Why's it being demolished - safety concerns? Redevelopment? Not that it can easily just be repurposed, but seems a waste to just knock it down. 
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