Coal was mined in this region and transformed into cokein beehive ovens. Almost pure carbon, coke burns hotterthan coal and was crucial to the success of Pittsburgh'ssteel making.

One of the largest coking complexes was Adelaide,founded by Henry Clay Frick in 1888 and named for hiswife. By 1910 it consisted of a coal mine, 375 coke ovensand housing for employees. It stretched from this area tonearly one mile downstream where a few partial ovensremain. In 1916, at peak production, 223,908 tons of coalwere mined here and reduced to 149,270 tons of coke.

CONNELLSVILLE COKE

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Fueling the steel mills

SPONSORED BY:Southwestern PA Heritage Preservation CommissionAllegheny Trail AllianceRegional Trail Corporation

For more information:www.gaptrail.orgwww.coalandcokepsu.org From the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, the Connellsville region

was the world's coke producing center. This map shows the manycoke works near Adelaide in 1899. Notice how many are owned bythe H.C. Frick Coke Company.

In this 1899 photograph, you can see the wooden coal tipple behind the coke workers. Men used the fourteen-tine coke forks to transfer thesteaming coke into wheelbarrows which were then dumped into waiting railroad cars for the trip to the blast furnaces.

From atop, lorry wagons emptied coal into the hot ovens. The front openings werebricked up to control the burn. Two or three days later, the finished coke waspulled out. By 1910, 44,252 of the 55,166 coke ovens in Pennsylvania were locatedin the Connellsville Coke Region.

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“…Pittsburgh built some of the new hot-blast furnaces and fueled them

with Connellsville coke, easily available over the new railroad.* After that,

if Pittsburgh made the Coke Region, the Coke Region made Pittsburgh

because it was her coal fields that gave Pittsburgh a running start.”

Cloud By Day, 1947.

*The new railroad was the:”P.McK&Y.RR” (see map at right), now the trail.

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