"Their Eyes Were Watching God": Zora Neale Hurston, the "Forgotten Hurricane", and Everglades muck soil

Inspired by hearing Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, talk about reading poetry by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes to his son’s school class during this year’s Black History Month (February 2019), I finally completed this blogpost discussing some earth science aspects of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Hurston was a friend and collaborator of Langston Hughes.

As I usually embarrassingly do, on Tuesday, September 19, 2017, I finally finished our monthly book club selection, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by African-American author, Zora Neale Hurston, half an hour before the meeting. The book’s climatic events took place during the “Forgotten Hurricane” (AKA Great Okeechobee Hurricane or San Felipe Segundo Hurricane) that made landfall at West Palm Beach, Florida, on September 17, 1928. The subsequent breeching of the southeastern 5-foot-high muck dike of Lake Okeechobee resulted in catastrophic flooding from central Florida to Palm Beach on the east coast; more than 2500 people drowned, most of them African-American migrant farm workers. Tea Cake, third husband of Hurston’s main character, Janie Crawford, was a fictional victim. Coincidently with my finishing this book, Category 5 Hurricane Maria was devastating Puerto Rico, the most intense hurricane to hit that island since the Okeechobee Hurricane almost exactly 89 years before. Maria was initially on the same path as the 1928 “Forgotten Hurricane”, but after passing over Puerto Rico, it turned north, missing Florida.

FIGURE 1:
Path of the Forgotten Hurricane of 1928

FIGURE 2:
Path of Hurricane Maria, 2017

The muck dike gave way around 9 PM, September 17, 1928, near the town of Belle Glade, on the south-southeastern edge of Lake Okeechobee: “it only took an hour after the dike gave way for floodwaters to peak at a fatal 12 feet”, according to a 1988 Sun Sentinel article. In Hurston’s novel, Janie and Tea Cake lived in a migrant shack where “only the dyke separated them from great, sprawling Okechobee” [sic]. The storm became generally forgotten due to the early onset of the Depression in the affected area, poor documentation of the destruction, downplaying the tragedy to avoid loss of tourism, and the sad fact that most of the dead were African-American.


Is there any connection in the novel to the geologic-carbon theme of this blog? Answer= Yes, muck. “We goin’on de muck.”
“Whut’s de muck, and where is it at?”
“Oh down in de Everglades round Clewiston and Belle Glade where dey raise all dat cane and string-beans and tomatuhs…
 . . . Dirt road so rich and black that a half mile of it would have fertilized a Kansas wheat field. .
. . .Yuh can’t live on de muck ‘thout yuh take uh bath every day. Do dat muck’ll itch yuh lak ants.
. . .Work all day for money, fight all night for love. The rich black earth clinging to bodies and biting the skin like ants."

According to Wikipedia, “muck is a sapric soil that is naturally waterlogged or is artificially drained... a sapric is a subtype of a histosol where virtually all of the organic material has undergone sufficient decomposition to prevent the identification of plant parts. . . The World Reference Base for Soil Resources (WRB) defines ‘sapric’ as a histosol having less than one-sixth (by volume) of the organic material consisting of recognizable plant tissue within 100 cm of the soil surface. . . Muck soils are defined by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service as sapric organic soils that are saturated more than 30 cumulative days in normal years or are artificially drained. In other words, it is a soil made up primarily of humus from drained swampland.”

In Chapter 1, Section 2, of his 1947 University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) dissertation on “A History of the Everglades of Florida", Junius Elmore Dovell described the soils (mucks and peats) of the Everglades and Lake Okeechobee area and the various surveys and classifications done in the early half of the 20th century as interest in regional agricultural development grew. He writes that the best land, where Janie and Tea Cake picked beans, was custard apple muck; the names of Florida mucks derived from the primary vegetation initially growing at each location. Dovell reported the custard apple muck, in a 1915 survey, was found to be 40-75 inches thick over a peat that then extended down to limestone bedrock at 122-150 inches depth.

FIGURE 3: “Major landscape types in the Everglades before human action.” The area described by Tea Cake “round Clewiston and Belle Glade” is under the words “Custard Apple and” at the SW edge of Lake Okeechobee. By US Geological Survey through Wikipedia.

Peat is usually associated with muck. Muck by definition is more decomposed than peat, not having any visible plant parts remaining, although I assume by “visible” they mean with the naked eye since, even in coal, plant parts can be recognized under the microscope. Muck also has a higher sediment volume (sand, mud) than peat (Dovell). However, just because the muck is more decomposed than peat that does not mean that muck, in the Everglades and southern rim of Lake Okeechobee, is always found under, more deeply buried than the associated peat. Both Dovell and Marjory Stoneman Douglass (in The Everglades, River of Grass) describe the custard apple muck as sitting on top of peat, while in other locations, muck is stratigraphically under peat. A USDA report from 1929 does state “Peatlands pass more or less slowly from the natural state of well-preserved plant remains, through the muck stage, to the final transformation into humified organic matter.”

*********************
Zora Neale Hurston, novelist, anthropologist, anthologist, was a major author of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s. She was born in Alabama, but raised in Florida. Her work was, like the Great Okeechobee Hurricane, forgotten for about four decades due to politics (she was more conservative than some in her literary circle) and to her use of dialect being viewed not as preservation of culture and linguistics, but promoting pejorative stereotypes of African-American vernacular. Her career fortunately has had its own posthumous Renaissance since 1975 with the publication of Alice Walker’s article, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston”, in Ms. Magazine. Hurston’s works, including Their Eyes Were Watching God, have been rediscovered, reissued, and Hurston is now rightly recognized as a “pre-eminent writer” of the 20th century.

https://www.allisonbolah.com/site_resources/reading_list/Walker_In_Search_of_Zora.pdf Alice Walker’s 1975 Ms. Magazine article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston".
https://www.zoranealehurston.com/about/ Biography on Hurston official website
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/02/17/a-society-of-one New Yorker article on Hurston’s life and her writing
https://barnard.edu/news/archaeology-classic-celebrating-zora-neale-hurston-28 Description of Alice Walker’s search for Hurston

AGU, madeleines, and the 5 earth science books (and articles) I can’t live without!

Marcel Proust famously wrote in the first volume of his early 20^th-century novel À la recherche du temps perdu (title translated as Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time) about the involuntary memories triggered by eating a madeleine dipped in tea.  (This Proust memory passage even prompted my undergraduate college to rename its yearbook, The Madeleine!) A madeleine is a very small, cookie-size, sponge or génoise cake shaped like an elongated seashell; it can have an almond or lemon flavor. Although madeleines were a frequent purchase of mine at a Starbucks across from the Walter Washington Convention Center during the December 2018 meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington, DC, it was actually a talk about geodynamicist Donald Turcotte, in a session honoring the “Giants of Tectonophysics”, that got my mind rambling back to an infrequent but perennial thought of what are the five most important or essential earth science texts for me (including one by Turcotte), if I was limited to having just five. (The original thought long ago was the five books I would want if stuck on a desert isle, but really what would I need with academic reading with no office, lab, pencil… or food?!)

FIGURE 1: Madeleines and their baking pan. (From the Food Network, Canada.)

 

FIGURE 2: Four of my 5 most essential earth science texts (some with more than one edition), identified by the plethora of Post-Its.

  

Geodynamics: Applications of continuum physics to geologic problems by Donald Turcotte and Gerald Schubert, 1982, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 450 pages. (The volume that the AGU biographic talk on Turcotte brought to mind. It provides a calculus-based physics understanding of earth processes such as material flow, heat flow, fluid flow, flexure, brittle deformation. One could also say it is a mechanical engineering approach to geological processes, but on a huge scale in both length and duration. Doing the included problems cements understanding.)

Stach’s Textbook of Coal Petrology, 3rd. ed., by Stach, E., Mackowsky, M.-Th., Teichmüller, M., Taylor, G. H., Chandra, D.,Teichmüller, R., Murchison, D. G., and Zierke, F., 1982, Gebruder Borntraeger, Berlin, 535 pages, AND ITS SUCCESSOR, Taylor, G. H., Teichmüller, M., Davis, A., Diessel, C. F. K., Littke, R., Robert, P., 1998, Organic petrology: Gebrüder Borntraeger, Berlin, 704 pages. (These books are the bible(s) of coal, and later organic, petrology, the microscopic study of sedimentary organic matter, including formation of coal, macerals, utilization products. Stach’s 3^rd edition is what I originally learned on, but is a bit disordered since additions, over the 2^nd edition, were just tacked onto existing chapters or sections. Organic Petrology is an updated, cleaned-up revised version incorporating more on dispersed organic matter in sedimentary rocks, not just organic-matter-dominated coal.)

Petroleum formation and occurrence, 2nd. ed., by Bernard P. Tissot and Dietrich H. Welte, 1984, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 699 pages. (Served as the text for a petroleum geochemistry grad course I took; covers organic matter deposition, maturation and chemical evolution of kerogen and petroleum, migration, reservoirs, degradation.)

Sedimentary organic matter: organic facies and palynology by Richard V. Tyson, 1995, Chapman & Hall, London, 615 pages. (While the coal and organic petrology books focused on reflected-light microscopy, petrography in Tyson’s book is in transmitted light, as used in palynology. However, the value comes from the very encyclopedic coverage of particulate organic matter deposition, preservation, degradation, organic matter sources (land plant, algal), methods of study, and chemical analysis.)

Earth by Frank Press and Raymond Siever, 1986, W. H. Freeman & Co., New York, 656 pages. (Comprehensive text that is great prep for doctoral oral exams. A similar recommendation for exam prep (standard suggestion for grad students at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, New York) is How to Build a Habitable Planet, revised/updated 2012, Charles Langmuir and Wallace Broecker.)

What is the connection among these organic and geodynamics/tectonic tomes for me? Vitrinite reflectance, an organic diagenetic to very-low-grade-metamorphic indicator tool originally developed in coal petrology, can be used to model thermal history, determine paleotemperature and paleogeothermal gradient, causative heat flow processes (conductive vs. advective, transient vs. steady state), amount of any stratigraphic exhumation in the context of deformational and plate tectonic processes. All these aspects come under the umbrella of "sedimentary basin analysis".

Just by the way, scaling down from books, here are five articles that have been most influential or foundational for my research:

Tissot, B. P., Pelet, R., Ungerer, Ph., 1987, Thermal history of sedimentary basins, maturation indices, and kinetic of oil and gas generation*: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 71, p. 1445- 1466. (Although these authors had written previous articles on their earlier research, this well-illustrated presentation of organic maturation and petroleum generation as a series or distribution of first-order-rate reactions of increasing activation energy makes understanding this kinetic conceptual model very clear. IMHO, the publication of this article was the turning point in the popular acceptance of the distributed-activation-energy kinetic model over the earlier single-activation-energy-based Lopatin TTI model.)

Sweeney, J. J. and Burnham, A. K., 1990, Evaluation of a simple model of vitrinite reflectance based on chemical kinetics: American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin, v. 74, p. 1559-70. (Based on the same kinetic concept of organic maturation as Tissot and others, this application specifically on vitrinite reflectance evolution is the basis of the maturation modeling I do for basin thermal history. There are several similar models now by other institutes or companies; this one is also referred to as the LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Lab) model.)

Person, M. and G. Garven, 1994, A sensitivity study of the driving forces on fluid flow during continental- rift basin evolution: Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 106, p. 461-75. (At some point, I had put this volume of the GSA Bulletin aside on my home office floor, folded open to the start of this article for later reading. Subsequently forgot about it until working on some orals paper, or similar document, and literally tripped over the journal in a Eureka moment, re-discovering this paper on gravity-driven cross-basin fluid flow in rift basins and permeability control on resulting advective heat flow patterns. It explained the downhole vitrinite reflectance patterns I was seeing in my own rift-basin research. The authors applied large-scale basin fluid-flow modeling, previously used on foreland basins, to rift basins specifically.)

Dow, W.G., 1977, Kerogen studies and geological interpretations: Journal of Geochemical Exploration, v. 7, p. 79-99. (This article introduces using linear semi-log downhole vitrinite reflectance vs. depth profiles to determine amount of eroded section. A simple and elegant method, it has fewer assumptions, and, therefore, fewer possibilities for introduced error, than using thermal history modeling schemes to determine magnitude of exhumation.)

Pasley, M. A., Riley, G. W., Nummedal, D., 1993, Sequence stratigraphic significance of organic matter variations: example from the Upper Cretaceous Mancos shale of the San Juan Basin, New Mexico, in Katz, B. J. and Pratt, L. M., eds., Source Rocks in a Sequence Stratigraphic Framework, American Association of Petroleum Geologists Studies in Geology, no. 37, p. 221-242. (Not as well-known as the other articles listed here, this paper explaining the pattern of allochthonous vs. autochthonous particulate organic-matter deposition (land plant vs. marine algal) in marine transgressive-regressive sequences is an important contribution to understanding the sedimentary processes behind observed marine organic-facies patterns. It importantly contributed to my own understanding of related processes governing organic-facies patterns I saw in rift basin transgressive-regressive lake cycles.)

SO, what are the most important or essential earth science texts or articles for YOUR career??

Bethlehem Steel 2: Jack Crelling, Bethlehem Steel Homer Labs, and effects on my own research direction and insight

In my previous post on Bethlehem Steel, I mentioned that I had worked for and taken Coal Petrology courses at Southern Illinois University from a professor who had worked in Bethlehem Steel research labs. That was Dr. John C. Crelling, who recently died at the too-young age of 77. Jack was not just a teacher to me, but a family friend.

Jack Crelling, after getting his PhD at Penn State and service in the Army during Vietnam (of which he was very proud), worked at the Homer Research Laboratory of Bethlehem Steel on South Mountain in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, ~ 1 ½ miles up from the blast furnaces. He was Geologist-in-Charge of the Coal Petrography Laboratory, Coal and Coke Section, from 1972-1977. From 1978-2006, Jack taught at Southern Illinois University (SIU), Carbondale, IL, continuing his research after retirement as Research Faculty. A summary of his expansive and innovative research interests are at https://geology.siu.edu/faculty-staff/research-faculty/crelling.php https://geology.siu.edu/faculty-staff/research-faculty/crelling.php ; his curriculum vitae with extensive publication list and professional society awards can be found at https://geology.siu.edu/_common/documents/faculty-cv/crelling-cv.pdf ; and a memorial is in the December 2018 issue of the newsletter of The Society for Organic Petrology (https://www.tsop.org/newsletters/35_4.pdf , page 9).

I worked for Jack in his SIU Coal Characterization Lab starting in December 1982, a few months after my arrival in Carbondale as a faculty wife. My initial job was programming, in BASIC, the code for collecting spectral epifluorescence data from liptinite macerals under a microscope through an analog-digital converter. The computer was a state-of-the-art Apple II, and I had 512K of space for the program!! Eventually over the next 2 ½ years, I also did petrographic work, learning first macerals and point-counting through Jack’s Coal Petrology courses, and then vitrinite reflectance directly in the lab.

When I arrived at SIU, I had just completed a Master’s in Geology at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA (birthplace of BASIC), doing a mapping thesis in nearby sillimanite-grade thrice-deformed granite-intruded Silurian-Devonian rocks that were mostly turbiditic flysch of the Early Devonian Acadian orogeny. I enjoy putting together a regional story of deposition, deformation and temperature history. However, the trajectory of my career interest changed after taking Jack’s coal classes and working in his lab, focusing no longer on thermal evolution of high-grade metamorphic rocks, but instead on “metamorphism” or diagenesis of sedimentary and very-low-grade metamorphic rocks.

Below are three significant contributions Jack had on either the direction of my research interests or petrologic knowledge. The latter derived from Jack’s Bethlehem Steel experience: 

1) Change in research interest: Besides being useful for my new job in his lab, I took Jack’s Coal Petrology (microscopic study of coal) course, spring semester 1983, because this was an earth science topic not available at my previous educational institutions and would fill a gap in my geologic knowledge. We used Stach’s Textbook of Coal Petrology (3^rd edition) which covered origin of coal and macerals, changes in coal rank with burial and temperature (peat to lignite to bituminous to anthracite), coal utilization, and applications of the microscopic study of coal. Towards the end of the course, Jack displayed a chart (Figure 1) that showed the relationship of coal rank to various chemical and physical parameters and, importantly, to the zones of oil and gas generation. I remember the words that popped into my head, “So that’s how it works!” That chart, somehow more than anything discussed in my earlier petroleum geology course, graduate clay mineralogy course, or graduate metamorphic petrology class, tied together for me what is going on, invisible to the naked eye, during diagenesis in sedimentary rocks, particularly the windows of oil and gas generation, in relation to coal ranks, and vitrinite reflectance. That the chart indicates the eventual graphitization of anthracite, the realms of sedimentary and metamorphic rocks became transitional, no longer compartmentalized, as many of us unconsciously make them. I decided then to focus my interest in “metamorphism” and thermal history on the diagenetic to very-low-grade-metamorphic temperature range where the coal-petrographic maturation technique, vitrinite reflectance, would be applicable.

 

FIGURE 1: The probable figure from Stach’s Textbook of Coal Petrology Jack Crelling showed in his Coal Petrology course that changed the trajectory of my research career.

 2) Pseudovitrinite and awareness of oxidation and variable preservation of vitrinite: The macerals within the vitrinite maceral group represent various degrees of chemical and physical change during burial, not including pre-depositional combustion, of woody plant material. Telinite is identified clearly by preservation of woody cellular structure; it is the maceral used in vitrinite reflectance measurement. In collotelinite, texture is more homogeneous with cell walls possibly only barely visible. The loss of cell structure in collotelinite and collodetrinite (gelified vitrinite detritus in which other particles like spores, charcoal can be embedded) indicate an increased physical breakdown of woody material during early stages after deposition (peatification) and then subsequent early coalification. In addition to these vitrinite group macerals, there are unofficial maceral designations for woody material subjected to more oxidizing (less reducing) conditions which may also preserve wood cellular structure and, additionally, increase reflectance. A higher-reflecting telinite with distinctive slits was identified by Benedict and others (1968*) of Bethlehem Steel and called “pseudovitrinite” (Figure 2). In the coking process, it acts as a semi-inert, not totally softening and going through the liquid-crystal mesophase that vitrinite does. Benedict and colleagues found the amount of pseudovitrinite in a coal affected various performance characteristics both in the coke ovens and of the resulting coke in the blast furnace.

           Due his Bethlehem Steel background, pseudovitrinite was a maceral we counted during in Jack’s courses* and during coal characterization in the lab (Figure 3). The intellectual seed planted by working with “pseudovitrinite” was that there are pre-to syn-depositional oxidative processes that can affect the reflectance of vitrinite. These processes may be autochthonous, occurring in the coal swamp if mires dry out and are not continuously buried in a wet reducing environment, or allochthonous during punctuated transport of trees and dead wood downstream before deposition in fluvial, lacustrine or marine sediments. Kaegi (1985*) used the term “oxyvitrinite” to refer to higher-reflecting non-slitted vitrinite. However, more than a few geologists assume that any higher-reflectance vitrinite must have been eroded from an older exhumed rock, calling that population “recycled vitrinite”. I have only rarely identified vitrinite or coaly particles (twice?) that definitely had been previously buried. To assume all higher-reflectance vitrinite is eroded coaly material with a previous maturation history ignores the taphonomy of organic matter and oxidizing processes either in swamps or water-born transport. (Certainly, any vitrinite found in marine rocks had to travel from land to get there!)

FIGURE 2: Pseudovitrinite showing remnant woody plant structure and the trademark slits that differentiate pseudovitrinite from telinite. From Crelling’s Petrographic Atlas of Coals and Carbons.

FIGURE 3: Standard maceral point count sheet from Jack’s lab, this one used in an Advanced Coal Petrology Coal-of-the-Week assignment, 1983. Note the pseudovitrinite among white-light maceral categories.

3) Coke petrology- applications to and understanding of fly ash petrology: Although introduced in undergraduate Coal Petrology class, Jack’s Advanced Coal Petrology class included a larger focus on the petrography of industrial coke, definitely a consequence of his Bethlehem Steel experience, although his Master’s research at Penn State was on natural cokes near igneous intrusions. One might wonder, why should I care about coke petrography if I am never going to work for a steel company? This knowledge, I have found, can be a valuable tool in the study of fly ash, a component in modern sediments deposited since 1800. Counting volume of fly ash particles in Central Park (NYC) sediments, I made notes on the “coke” texture of particles in order to identify rank range of contributing coals (currently collecting vitrinite reflectance data on the samples to compare that with the broader rank categories from coke-texture). I find familiarization with coke petrography and the physical processes of carbonization and combustion that produce structures in coke and fly ash particulates invaluable for understanding what one is seeing microscopically. In the last few years, the International Committee on Coal and Organic Petrology (ICCP), the international organization responsible for standardizing coal and organic petrology nomenclature and petrographic accreditation, has been working on a petrographic fly ash classification scheme *. Ideally, the classification should be able to be used by petrographers based solely on particle morphological and textural characteristics, but to apply classification categories like “fused” and “unfused” successfully, when one is not familiar with physical and chemical changes during combustion, is challenging.  (Fused carbons are primarily bituminous coal vitrinites that have softened and lost any gases producing new mosaic or ribbony textures in a solid carbon char before final combustion consumption; unfused carbons are inert macerals, anthracites, rogue unburnt vitrinite.) Not all coal and organic petrographers get coke or combustion education as part of their coursework or training, but due to Jack’s steel industry employment, I luckily received more thorough instruction than many! Photomicrographs here are from Crelling’s Petrographic Atlas of Coals and Carbons on the Southern Illinois University, Dept. of Geology, website, a useful reference tool Jack created.

FIGURE 4: Combustion char with mosaic texture. From Crelling’s Petrographic Atlas of Coals and Carbons.

FIGURE 5: Metallurgic coke from high volatile bituminous coal showing mosaic texture. From Crelling’s Petrographic Atlas of Coals and Carbons.

  

 *Benedict, L.G., R.R. Thompson, J.J. Shigo III and R.P. Aikman, 1968, Pseudovitrinite in Appalachian coking coals: Fuel, v. 47, p. 125-143.

Crelling, J.C., 1986, The occurrence and properties of pseudovitrinite (abs): Abstracts and Program, The Society for Organic Petrology (TSOP), 3^rd annual meeting, Calgary, p. 28-29. http://archives.datapages.com/data/tsop/TSOPv3_1986/crelling.htm (page 28 only; accessed February 2019)

Kaegi, D.D., 1985, On the identification and origin of pseudovitrinite: International Journal of Coal Geology, v. 4, p. 309-319.

Suárez-Ruiz, I., Valentim, B., Borrego, A.G., Bouzinos, A., Flores, D., Kalaitzidis, S., Malinconico, M. L., Marques, M., Misz-Kennan, M., Predeanu, G., Montes J.R., Rodrigues, S., Siavalas, G., Wagner, N., 2017, Development of a petrographic classification of fly-ash components from coal combustion and co-combustion. (An ICCP Classification System, Fly-Ash Working Group–Commission III): International Journal of Coal Geology, v. 183, p. 188-203. doi.org/10.1016/j.coal.2017.06.004

Bethlehem Steel 1: Virtual tour of the blast furnaces along Hoover-Mason trestle walkway

This summer (2018), arriving early for a movie at the ArtsQuest Center at SteelStacks https://www.steelstacks.org/ in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I was surprised to see the elevated walkway over the old trestle right in front of the majestic row of closed Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces across from the arts venue. (Steel making in Bethlehem ceased in 1995, and the expansive industrial property along the Lehigh River has been repurposed as an arts/entertainment/retail center.) The walkway with educational signs about the blast furnaces and related steelmaking process has been there since about 2013, but somehow, big events or bad weather kept me from noticing it before. 

Not sure when in my life I first heard of Bethlehem Steel: definitely by the time my youngest sister attended Lehigh University, an engineering and liberal arts school, just up the hill from the steel works in Bethlehem. She would mention the huge completed I-beams that would tie up traffic as they tried to make their way out of town.

Eleven years after her graduation, we moved to Easton, immediately east of Bethlehem and the smallest of the Lehigh Valley’s three cities: Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton. Although non-local media outlets sometimes call the area “Philadelphia suburbs”, and many do commute daily 50-60 miles to Philadelphia, we are also 65 miles straight due west of New York City with a significant population commuting to the “Big Apple”. Scranton/Wilkes Barre in the northern anthracite belt is ~75 miles north. The Lehigh Valley during colonial and growing industrialization of the 19^th century became an industrial hub due to river and canal access along the Lehigh and Delaware rivers connecting the anthracite fields, markets of Philadelphia/NYC, and its own mills and factories. Steelmaking began in Bethlehem in the mid-1800’s.

Prior to moving to the Lehigh Valley, we lived in Carbondale, Illinois, where I worked part-time in the coal petrology lab, Geology Department, Southern Illinois University. The lab director, from whom I also took courses in Coal Petrology and Advanced Coal Petrology, had worked several years in the Bethlehem Steel research labs characterizing coals for coke-making and specific parameters that would well-predict the behavior of a coal in both coke ovens and the resultant coke in the blast furnaces.

I was fortunate to get a tour of Bethlehem Steel works in 1990 while it was still operating. We visited the Basic Oxygen Furnace and a rolling mill, escorted by a retired employee. And a few years later, on a grad school field trip to various outcrops of the Late Triassic Lockatong lacustrine black shales of the Newark basin, we ended up in New Jersey right under the George Washington Bridge (crossing the Hudson River between New York City and New Jersey) with Bethlehem Steel boldly stamped on the lower girders of the west suspension tower.

So here is a virtual tour of the blast furnaces along the Hoover-Mason Trestle walkway at the eponymous site of Bethlehem Steel. (All photos without citation are by me.):

Figure 1A: Map- Bethworks master plan (~2013) for transforming the Bethlehem Steel site to arts/entertainment area from http://stream-hugger.blogspot.com/2013/01/going-brown-when-going-green-is-bad.html http://stream-hugger.blogspot.com/2013/01/going-brown-when-going-green-is-bad.html . The blast furnaces are in light brown at the central north of the map, bordering the Lehigh River (click to enlarge).

Figure 1B: Map- Bethlehem Steel works from 1979. Note location of brown-colored ore yard (now Sands Casino), red basic oxygen furnace on right (now industrial park), red blast furnaces (center).

Figure 2: General diagram of a blast furnace operation (Dong, 2008*).

Figure 3:  Bethlehem Steel blast furnaces looking east. There are 5 blast furnaces, A-E (see Figure 1B). The A furnace is the three-stack one on the left. Brick building on the left is the Visitors Center; in the center of the photo are the steps up to the Hoover-Mason Trestle walkway.

Figure 4: Blast furnace row looking west. One can see the silver-gray tourist walkway over the remnants of the Hoover-Mason railroad trestle used to transport materials to furnaces. Canopy structures at the lower left edge of the photo are part of the Leavitt Pavilion outdoor concert venue.

Figure 5: Staircase up to trestle walkway, right in front of blast furnace A. According to AbandonedAmerica, “the oldest furnace is blast furnace A, which was built in 1914. It was rebuilt in 1950 and last ran in 1960. Because of its location directly beside another blast furnace (B, which ran into the 1980s), active mill buildings, and a busy mainline railroad, it was never demolished. ‘A’ furnace is notable because it is the only surviving blast furnace in the United States that still has triple pass stoves”.

Figure 6: Looking east from west end of elevated walkway.

Figure 7: Educational diagram on walkway showing relationship of blast furnace to trestle and explaining the transportation and charging of furnace with the three “ingredients”: coke, limestone, and iron ore. Coke is a vesiculated elemental carbon solid produced by cooking bituminous coal in ovens at high temperature.

Figure 8: Close-up of walkway, trestle, and old trestle car, looking west toward blast furnace A.

Figure 9: Trestle route map. The coke works were about 2 1/2 miles ESE of the blast furnaces; the Sands Casino was built over the old ore pits, half mile east of furnaces (see Figure 1B map).

Figure 10: Blast furnace with skip track used for hauling materials to load at top of furnace.

Figure 11: Sign explaining materials layering in blast furnace and transformation of iron-oxide ore to metallic reduced pig iron (which has about 4% carbon).

Figure 12: Working at a blast furnace, Bethlehem Steel, Sparrows Point, Maryland, 1951 (Baltimore Sun)

Figure 13: The basic oxygen furnace (BOF) at Bethlehem. In a BOF, recycled steel or other additives can be added to pig iron from the blast furnace. The BOF at Bethlehem was just west of the current casino (old ore pit location), but has been demolished, replaced by an industrial park (see also map of Figure 1B). (Photo: Hagley Museum collection)

Figure 14: Panoramic shot, looking west, with Hoover-Mason Trestle walkway and blast furnaces on the right (north) and the ArtsQuest concert/movie venue, on the left, that includes studios and offices of the local Public Broadcasting station.

Figure 15: Relict stone walls of iron foundry (background) and possibly old plate shop (foreground), just west of blast furnaces. (Based on map 1B and truck dock legend at http://www.brokenbushandroundtop.com/bethlehemsteel/bethmap_page.html .)

Figure 16: From 2014, leaving Christkindlmarkt, an annual German-tradition Christmas craft market in Bethlehem, the “Christmas City”.  For the last several years, the market has been located at the west end of the “SteelStacks” behind and next to the Visitors Center.

Figure 17: Blast furnace A illuminated at night.

To finish your virtual visit, there is a great DRONE FLYOVER of the SteelStacks from 2016 on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HPwX4pB_Qo .

* Citation for Figure 2 diagram: Dong, Shan Ning, 2008, Development of Analytical Methods for Characterizing Metallurgical Coke and the Injectant Coal Chars, Tars and Soots Formed during Blast Furnace Operation (dissertation), Department of Chemical Engineering
, Imperial College London of Science, Technology and Medicine, 204 pages (Figure 2-1) (https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/1329/1/Dong-SN-2008-PhD-Thesis.pdf )