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UER Forum > UE Photography > Much Abuzz About Coke: Beehive Ovens In the American Southwest (Viewed 376 times)
Aran 


Location: Kansas City
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Huh. I guess covid made me a trendsetter.

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Much Abuzz About Coke: Beehive Ovens In the American Southwest
< on 12/21/2022 7:04 AM >
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The mountains and deserts of the Four Corners region are mining country, and many of the abandoned places out here are related to that industry. One of the many products mined in Colorado and Utah is coal, used in vast quantities for the smelting of steel. Since raw coal doesn’t burn hot enough to reach the melting point of steel, it must first be refined into a product known as coke. Burning coal in a low oxygen environment removes impurities such as resin and moisture, and what is left behind is known as coke. This coke is almost entirely purified carbon and can easily burn hot enough to melt steel when used in a blast furnace.

Coking was first invented in England during the early 1700s for iron smelting. This technology made its way across the Atlantic to the East Coast in 1817 and quickly became a common fuel for high temperature metallurgy. One of the earliest methods for manufacturing coke was through beehive ovens. Beehive ovens, named for their shape, originated in Europe during the middle ages and were initially popular for baking and firing pottery before later being adapted for large scale coking operations.



Figure 1: A row of coke ovens with larry cars atop them for fueling. Image provided by the Library of Congress.


By the end of the 19th century the Industrial Revolution was well under way in America and the steel industry had moved on from singular, small scale beehive ovens. Instead, frontier coking operations embraced an industrialized variant in which ovens were built in rows up to a quarter mile long each, with railroad tracks running both on top of the rows and between them. Special narrow gauge “larry cars” with hoppers on them ran along the top set of tracks, and coal was loaded into the ovens through a hole in the roof of each oven. Once loaded, the coal was ignited and allowed to burn for about two to three days. After all the impurities had burned off, the remaining coke was doused in water to cool it enough for workers to scoop it out the door in the wall of each oven and into freight trains that ran along the lower tracks. The process would repeat around the clock, and the oven walls often remained hot enough from the previous batch to ignite the next one.



Figure 2: The Sunnyside Coke Ovens site when it was in operation, date unknown. Image provided by the J. Willard Marriot Library.


Though larger scale and heavily industrialized ovens such as the ones used in this coke plant were more common east of the Mississippi River, western coking operations favored beehive ovens for a few reasons. The first is that they were comparatively easier to build, as the beehive design is a fairly simple one. The second is that they were relatively low tech- industrialized though they were, the whole setup was really just a large number of simple beehive ovens with a few sets of rails. The urban centers in the eastern half of the country had the population and industrial base to support complicated factories with lots of moving parts that could break, but in the frontier simple was better.

Due to the vast distances separating industrial centers and the coal mines that fueled them in the American West, it became more economical to convert coal into coke near the mines and ship the refined coke to its final destination by rail rather than haul raw coal all the way to the steel mills. Beehive oven coking operations could be found across the Southwest, but this write up will focus on two in particular.



Figure 3: A sign placed by the Redstone Historical Society next to the ruins of the ovens.


Figure 4: Some of the Redstone ovens with the resurfaced cinderblock façade, which was done by the Mid Continent Coal and Coke Company in 1959.


The first is an operation known as the Redstone Coke Ovens. Built in 1899, the ovens were constructed to turn the output of the nearby Coalbasin mine into coke for the Colorado Fuel and Iron steel mill in Pueblo, CO- which was at the time the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi. The entire project was the vision of a man named John Cleveland Osgood, known as “The Fuel King of the West.” He built the entire settlement of Redstone as a company town for his coking operation, which at the time was the largest in Colorado. Running 249 ovens around the clock, the Redstone Coke Ovens were said to produce over 100,000 tons of coke per year.

The fortune of Redstone was not destined to last. Colorado Fuel and Iron Company’s steel mill in Pueblo was often hobbled by frequent worker strikes, which when combined with rising production costs in the Coalbasin mine led to it being decided that shipping coke all the way from Redstone was not economical when there were closer options available. The mines above Redstone closed and the coke ovens went cold in 1909, resulting in the town’s swift decline. Redstone very nearly became a ghost town with a population of only 14 people during WWII and the metal oven doors were scrapped for the war effort.



Figure 5: Some of the stabilized Redstone ovens. The missing façade allows the dome itself to be seen.


Figure 6: The interior of one of the Redstone ovens that was stabilized but not restored.


The ovens languished until 1959, when they were bought by the Mid Continent Coal and Coke Company, which resurface some of the ovens with concrete and resumed partial operations. They gave up in 1961 and the ovens fell back into abandonment. These stone igloos soon caught the attention of the first generation of hippies who had fled to the mountains of Colorado to be one with nature, and the ovens became squats for hippies throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

By the end of the hippie era the ovens were once again mostly forgotten and decay began to set in as nearby residents looted them for construction material. The neglected ovens began to collapse, and though they were listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1990 nothing was done to halt their decline until the early 21st century. In 2010 the Redstone Historical Society received a grant from the state of Colorado to preserve the ovens, and work began to stabilize the ones that remain.



Figure 7: Two of the four fully restored Redstone ovens, with a façade rebuilt with historically accurate materials and techniques.


Figure 8: A stabilized Redstone oven with the dome visible next to two of the fully restored ovens for comparison.


Figure 9: The interior of one of the restored Redstone ovens. This oven was so well restored that it would be fully functional, if not for the mortar used being unable to survive the heat of the coking process.


Today, 56 of the original 249 ovens still stand as “stabilized ruins” in a state of “arrested decay.” This essentially means that they will be preserved but not restored. 4 additional ovens were fully restored, and the remainder will be allowed to crumble to demonstrate the passage of time. The Redstone Coke Ovens now live on as a roadside tourist attraction for Redstone, which has rebounded somewhat as a small but pleasant vacation town.

This brings us to our second set of coke ovens. Built in 1902, these coke ovens in the desert of East Carbon, Utah were constructed to turn the output of several nearby coal mines into coke for the Kaiser Steel Company in California. This operation was at one time the largest beehive coking operation in America, with nearly a thousand ovens producing well over 300,000 tons of coke per year in two separate locations, Sunnyside and Dragerton, which eventually merged into the township now known as East Carbon. In the 1920s the Carbon County Railway Company was formed to ferry workers and coal to the ovens, and a railyard and train depot were constructed at the Sunnyside oven site



Figure 10: One of the several rows of ovens at the Sunnyside oven site.


Figure 11: The space between two of the Sunnyside oven rows where train tracks would run. Workers would scoop coke out of the ovens into freight trains that would run along these tracks for transport to steel mills.


Figure 12: A close up of some of the Sunnyside ovens.


Operations continued until the mid-1930s, partially resuming operations during WWII before shutting down for good on Christmas Day in 1958 for several reasons. The first was that the beehive oven style of coking fell out use in favor of more modern, industrialized operations like this one. Beehive ovens produce less coke and are more inefficient than their modernized counterparts. They are also far worse from an environmental and worker health standpoint, as the toxic gases released by the coking process are vented unfiltered through the hole in the top of the oven. Additionally, technological advancements in metallurgy allowed Kaiser Steel Company to directly use coal in its steel mills without first needing to convert it to coke. Lastly, the coke produced by the Sunnyside ovens was simply low quality product, as the coal in the region often contained too much resin and moisture- so when better quality coke from geographically closer coking operations became available, the Sunnyside ovens just couldn't compete.



Figure 13: The train station and depot built at the Sunnyside oven site.


Figure 14: The inside of the Sunnyside train depot. It's pretty much an empty shell of a building nowadays.


Figure 15: Another shot of the Sunnyside ovens.


The 800 ovens in what was Dragerton were completely buried at some point following their shutdown. The roughly 300 Sunnyside ovens remain and are featured in these photos, but their metal doors were removed for scrap and the front of the ovens were smashed to render them inoperable for tax purposes. The shell of the train depot also remains at the Sunnyside site, and it currently is public land. Unlike the Redstone Coke Ovens, the Sunnyside Coke Ovens have been allowed to crumble.



Figure 16: Me, standing in the partially smashed section of one of the Sunnyside ovens.


Figure 17: A piece of one of the smashed Sunnyside ovens. The heat of the coking process was so intense that it fused the brick of the ovens to the dirt surrounding them.


Figure 18: Cryptocartography crouching in one of the half smashed Sunnyside ovens.


Both these sites are impressive examples of beehive coke ovens, and though this style of oven is no longer used in coking it remains an intriguing blend of pre and post industrial revolution design. Beehive ovens fell out of favor in coking operations across the country for the same reasons the Sunnyside ovens shut down, and there aren’t many ruins of similar size left in America.

__________________________________________________________

Sources:

Library of Congress: View of Coke Ovens Looking East, Showing Larry Cars and Water Pipes.
J. Willard Marriot Library: Coke Ovens, Sunnyside, Utah.
Wikipedia: Abraham Darby I
"Redstone Coke Ovens" plaque, Redstone Historical Society. 2010.
Wikipedia: Redstone Coke Ovens Historic District
New York Times: Giving New Life To Ovens Where Hippies Once Roamed
CoalZoom: Utah Historical Society Visits Coke Ovens
AZBackcountryAdventures: The Coke Ovens of East Carbon (Sunnyside) Utah
Jacob Barlow: Sunnyside Coke Ovens
Utah Rails: Sunnyside Coal Mines



[last edit 12/21/2022 3:34 PM by Aran - edited 3 times]

"Sorry, I didn't know I'm not supposed to be here," he said, knowing full well he wasn't supposed to be there.

Pearson 


Location: Chicagoland/Sometimes Austin
Total Likes: 470 likes


You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

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Re: Much Abuzz About Coke: Beehive Ovens In the American Southwest
< Reply # 1 on 12/21/2022 10:44 AM >
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Posted on Forum: UER Forum
Really cool. Great writeup as always




EsseXploreR 


Location: New Jersey
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Re: Much Abuzz About Coke: Beehive Ovens In the American Southwest
< Reply # 2 on 12/21/2022 11:25 AM >
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Posted on Forum: UER Forum
This is really fascinating! Cool to see these relics have lasted so long. It seems like a lot of the more modern Coke works up in the northeast and great lakes have been getting ripped down pretty aggressively over the last few years. Thanks so much for sharing.



[last edit 12/21/2022 11:25 AM by EsseXploreR - edited 1 times]

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UER Forum > UE Photography > Much Abuzz About Coke: Beehive Ovens In the American Southwest (Viewed 376 times)


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