I'm still VERY puzzled as to just exactly what this facility was. The fact that it's owned by a power company tempts us to think it's a power plant, but somehow that doesn't seem right either. Unless you were unable to get pictures of them, it doesn't seem to have the huge boilers, turbines, and generators that a power plant has. The building also seems to be a bit tall.

I wonder now if it might have been a gasworks. Until the 1950's most gas was "manufactured" from coal or oil, then piped to the customers. By the 1950's, the opening of large natural gas fields and long distance pipelines allowed gas companies to switch from manufactured to natural gas.

You got me. I'm just not sure. I'll dig up some history on the place and post it here.

It might be a power plant that was converted to natural gas furnaces. They used hot tube boilers in the furnaces, so you wouldn't see any huge boilers there. The turbines and generators would have been removed when it was mothballed as they could be used elsedwhere or sold.

The fact this location had/has rails running through it and a system of delievery and storage for coal suggests it once was used as a coal power plant

If you goto sinClair Community College's building 13 and look tot eh plant, you can see a good over view of the grounds and everything I mentioned.

It was definately a coal power plant a while back.
I have been to it, and there are still MASSIVE coal bunkers near it. I figure he just didnt take pictures of the boilers/turbines, or they might have been salvaged.

This was one of two central steam plants in Dayton. DP&L (the local utility) provided steam to many buildings in downtown Dayton from this plant and a smaller one located on Third street. Both closed in the mid-1990s when DP&L got out of the steam business. I worked downtown at the time and our building got perhaps a years' notice that we would have to install our own boilers because "city steam" was going away. The other plant still stands and is in the UE database on this site. To my knowledge Longworth was always coal fired and might have closed a year or so earlier than the Third Street plant. The building I worked in still had city steam in 1996 but I believe that was the last year for it.

Quite right. It was a steam generation plant, fueled by coal. As this activity produced no small amount of pollution, the concept was to have a central plant service a section of the city, rather then have many businesses burn coal to produce their own heat. As such, these plants were situated on the edge of town.

Posted by MothMan Quite right. It was a steam generation plant, fueled by coal. As this activity produced no small amount of pollution, the concept was to have a central plant service a section of the city, rather then have many businesses burn coal to produce their own heat. As such, these plants were situated on the edge of town.

Steam plants were in fact quite common in many places. There was one in my hometown of Portland, Oregon, which closed in the early 1980's. However, what made it different was that it used sawdust as fuel rather than coal or oil.