Coke ovens were plentiful in the late 19th century. The coalfields of western Pennsylvania provided a rich source of raw material for coking. In 1885, a coal and iron company constructed the world's longest string of coke ovens in Walston, Pennsylvania, with 475 ovens over a length of 1.25 miles. Their output reached 22,000 tons per month.
For fifty years, Pennsylvania's steel industry depended to an amazing extent on a skinny strip of land, scarcely two or three miles wide, running some fifty miles through Westmoreland and Fayette counties in southwestern Pennsylvania. Here, a seven-foot-thick seam of high-quality coal poked up its head, ready to be carted away and baked into coke, a valuable industrial fuel.
At its peak in 1913, the Connellsville district's 38,000 ovens provided fully half the entire nation's supply of metallurgical coke. It took 2,000 railcars each day to haul it away. Most of the coke was used in blast furnaces to smelt iron ore into molten pig iron, the raw material for steel.
The classic beehive oven, often built in single "banks" along a hill or in double "blocks," was around twelve feet in diameter and five to seven feet tall. Workers dumped coal in the top through a "trunnel" to form a layer two feet thick, and sealed the openings with brick, loam, or clay. Heat from the previous charge ignited the coking process, which continued for two or three days.
A chemical cocktail of ammonia, tar, phenols, and choking clouds of smoke went straight into the air. When complete, coke workers opened the oven's door, sprayed the red-hot mass with water, then raked the smoking, steaming coke into railroad cars.
Although they made a top-quality fuel, beehive ovens poisoned the surrounding landscape. After 1900, the serious environmental damage of beehive coking attracted national notice.
IN WHAT TOWN WAS THE WORLD'S LONGEST STRING OF COKE OVENS CONSTRUCTED AND WHAT TOWN PRODUCED THE MOST COKE FOR FIFTY YEARS ?????
HOLLYWOOD, PA....CLEARFIELD, PA = N 40 47.675 W 078 56.365
WALSTON, PA....CONNELLSVILLE, PA = N 40 46.914 W 078 55.898
CONGRATULATIONS TO beans&franks FOR THE FTF