Steel Process Lantern Slide Collection
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The entire collection is scanned and online.
What's in the entire collection?
The Steel Process Lantern Slide Collection contains 82 lantern slides created by the Colonial Steel Company that document steel mills, the steelmaking process, railroad activities, and non-industrial topics circa 1907 to 1927. The Colonial Steel Company is specifically represented in 24 of the slides. A majority of the images depict the steel making process from various mills in Pennsylvania and New York. Three slides are topical and depict railroads and a gardening program at a Philadelphia school. An avid photographer and enthusiast of railroad and steel industry history, Ken Kobus collected these lantern slides, later donating them to the University of Pittsburgh Library System.
About the Colonial Steel Company.
Colonial Steel Company was founded in 1901. The president was James W. Brown. Its main offices were in the Keystone Building located at 324 Fourth Avenue in Downtown Pittsburgh. Colonial Steel manufactured crucible and high-grade open-hearth steel specifically producing multiple product types including brass, bronze and specialty metals, iron and steel products (castings; sheet steel; steel wire; wire rope; pig iron; and structural steel products), and hardware and hand tools. Manufacturing and main offices were in Colona, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, with warehouse branches in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
