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The town of Dunbar,
Pennsylvania was settled in the late 1700s and incorporated as
a boro in 1883. This valley was a root of the iron and
steel revolution that catapulted southwestern Pennsylvania
into world prominence as the production center for the new
heavy industrial
economy. The Dunbar Valley was a near utopia for
producing iron steel and glass. Nearly all the required
resources for commercial production existed literally within
eyesight of this small town. These included iron ore,
charcoal (from the forest), coal for coke, limestone &
building stone, water
and refractory clay.
When you visit now, it is hard to
imagine that the Dunbar Valley was once a thriving industrial center, complete with homes,
churches, cemeteries, Iron, Coke, Charcoal and Glass Furnaces,
Hydro-Power Dams, Deep and Strip Mines, Tunnel and Surface
Quarries, Railroad Yards, Refractory Clay Pits and Brick and
Coal-Byproduct Ovens.
But, the unbelievably rich resources present in the ridges to
the south of town (The Dunbar Creek Watershed) were the fuel
that fired a
frenzied industrial boom that rapidly built Dunbar into a
thriving commercial center that thrived as long as the
resources lasted then faded in disrepair and decay as the
resources ran out. The shortages of two world wars
assisted in the deconstruction of Dunbar's industrial
facilities. The acute need for scrap steel resulted in
the demolition of the outdated facilities. The
structures were dismantled and cut into pieces to provide raw
material for the war efforts. The scrapped pieces of
Dunbar's old mills were fed to the newer furnaces that had
been built down river toward Pittsburgh to create new metal
using new technologies
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