Utah's Iron and Steel Industries

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Iron Mines and Steel Mills
Mark Hemphill
"Union Pacific Salt Lake Route" (1995)
Pages 169-171

(used with permission)

In 1850 Mormon colonists moving south discovered "a hill of richest iron ore" at Iron Springs-the outcroppings of a 400 million ton iron ore deposit. In its quest to achieve economic self-sufficiency, the church established an iron works at Cedar City the next year. On September 30, 1852, they tapped their furnace and the first pig iron produced west of the Mississippi ran out. The Iron Mission persevered in the face of isolation, drought, and floods, but could not surmount technical problems and a lack of capital, and gave up in 1858 after producing 25 tons of pig iron. Another iron works, established in 1869 at Iron City (25 miles southwest of Cedar City) produced about 30 tons a month. It failed by the late 1870s, because of lack of money and distance from markets. The Mormon Church gave up. The iron ore had to wait for a better day.

In 1921 Columbia Steel Corp., a small West Coast steel maker, decided to produce its own pig iron. To minimize transportation costs on its raw materials, Columbia built a 350-ton (daily capacity) blast furnace and 33 by-product coke ovens (later increased to 56) at Ironton, a site just south of Provo served by both the LA&SL and the Rio Grande. The blast furnace was blown-in on April 30, 1924, and poured its first iron the next day, making Columbia the first integrated steel maker in the Far West. Columbia shipped its iron pigs to its open-hearth furnaces at Portland, Oregon, and Pittsburg and Torrance, California, where they were converted to steel and rolled into shapes. Some of the pigs went to Pacific States Cast Iron Pipe Co., which built a plant at Ironton in 1926 to make about 10,000 tons of pipe a year. Ironton's coal came from the company's Columbia Mine near Sunnyside, its limestone from the Keigley Quarry west of Provo, via the Rio Grande, and its iron ore, approximately 231,000 tons per year, from its open-pit mine at Iron Springs, via the LA&SL. U.S. Steel Corp, acquired Columbia Steel in 1930.

In early 1941, as war appeared imminent, the U.S. government observed that the West was lacking in steel-making capacity, particularly the steel plate needed to build the cargo ships necessary to support a trans-Pacific war. If the Panama Canal was blocked with sunken ships, steel would have to be shipped overland by rail, which would be very expensive. Much of the steel then used on the West Coast came from Bethlehem Steel's mammoth Sparrows Point mill near Baltimore, and was hauled to Los Angeles in company-owned ships for about $6 per ton. The comparable rail rate from Gary, Indiana was about $20 per ton. Thus in May 1941 the U.S. Government's Defense Plant Corp, decided to build a new steel plant at Geneva, just north of Provo, to supply steel plate and structural shapes to West Coast shipyards. The DPC chose this site for its proximity to Utah's large iron ore, coking coal, and limestone reserves, because it had plenty of water (over 200 million gallons a day were needed) and a skilled local labor force, and because main line railroads fanned out from Provo to all of the West Coast's principal cities. Often it is claimed that the Geneva site was chosen for its safety from enemy attack, but this was a trivial concern of Geneva's planners. This claim imagines a military capacity Japan never had.

Geneva, when completed, had 252 by-product coke ovens, three 1,110-ton daily capacity blast furnaces with an annual capacity of 1,150,000 tons of pig iron, nine 225-ton open-hearth furnaces, a 45-inch slabbing and blooming mill, a 132-inch (wide) plate mill with an annual capacity of 700,000 tons, and a 26-inch structural mill with an annual capacity of 250,000 tons. To supply additional pig iron, the government brought an idle 600-ton blast furnace from Joliet, Illinois, to Ironton, where it was blown-in on July 1, 1943, and built 300 beehive coke ovens at Sunnyside. Because of wartime material and labor shortages, and due to Geneva's sheer size (it was then the 11th largest steel plant in the U.S.), blast furnace No. 1 was not blown-in until January 3, 1944. The first steel was tapped from the open hearth furnaces on February 3, 1944, and the first plate rolled on March 22. With Germany's surrender on May 7, 1945 and Japan's on August 14, the need for Geneva diminished, and by November 12 the government reduced Geneva to hot stand-by basis. Geneva had produced 676,447 tons of plate and 144,280 tons of shapes, nearly all shipped to the West Coast.

U.S. Steel purchased the $200 million plant from the government for $47.5 million on June 19, 1946. The government sold the "Old Joliet" blast furnace at Ironton and its 300 beehive coke ovens at Sunnyside to Kaiser-Frazer Parts Corp, in May 1949. Kaiser operated its Ironton furnace until May 1950, shipping its pigs to the Midwest. In May 1951 U.S. Steel leased Kaiser's furnace. It operated the Ironton furnaces during periods of peak production to supply molten iron via hot-metal trains to Geneva's open-hearth furnaces. In April 1962 U.S. Steel blew out Ironton's blast furnaces for the last time.

Steel making at Geneva resumed in July 1946. On January 1, 1953 the Geneva Steel Co. and the Columbia Steel Co. became U.S. Steel's Columbia-Geneva Steel Division, which operated the Ironton, Geneva, Torrance, and Pittsburg plants, and the Utah coal, iron ore, and limestone mines. As built Geneva was unsuitable for peacetime, having an emphasis on heavy steel plate, so U.S. Steel invested $75 million to convert, upgrade, and enlarge Geneva, adding a hot-rolled coil mill in 1950, a tenth open-hearth furnace in 1952, a hot-rolled sheet mill in 1953, and an $8-million welded steel pipe mill in 1955. By 1957 Geneva was producing over two million tons of steel ingots per year. Pacific States Cast Iron Pipe at Provo also expanded and modernized, producing about 100,000 tons of cast iron pressure pipe a year by 1950, most of this shipped by rail throughout the West and to export at Los Angeles.

The southern Utah iron ore mines dramatically expanded their output during the war, to nearly two million tons in 1945. CF&I began working its southern Utah reserves in 1943, shipping up to 50,000 tons a month from the Duncan Mine to its blast furnaces at Minnequa, Colorado (just south of Pueblo) via the UP and Rio Grande. After the war CF&I opened the Blowout and Comstock Mines, which provided about half of its iron ore needs. The Blowout closed in 1969; Comstock shipped to Pueblo until 1982 on unit train MNQA. The southern Utah mines shipped large quantities of iron ore to Kaiser Steel at Fontana, California, from 1943 into the late 1950s, and to the Port of Long Beach in the 1950s to be loaded on ships to eastern steel mills and to Japan. U.S. Steel opened the Desert Mound Mine in 1950 to supplement its mine at Iron Mountain and closed Iron Springs in the mid-1950s after exhausting its reserves.

During the 1950s these mines shipped up to 4.8 million tons a year over the LA&SL, some 200 to 300 cars daily-a huge tonnage for a railroad that 30 years before did not haul that many total cars in a day! The UP dieselized the Iron Mountain Branch in 1943, using a single NW2 stationed at Iron Mountain working three shifts. The road trains on the Cedar City Branch were dieselized with three-unit sets of FA/FB's and F3's in 1947-48. As of 1949, one or two daily trains made a turn from Milford to Iron Mountain, exchanging 90 empty unassigned UP hoppers for a similar number of loads. More power was added at Milford for the run to Provo, where the ore trains were either broken up and switched to Geneva, Ironton, or the Rio Grande, or kept intact for Geneva. UP's 3500-class 2-8-8-0's worked in turnaround service out of Salt Lake City. Westbound they delivered steel empties to Geneva, and pulled coal, coke, and ore empties for delivery to Provo. Eastbound they hauled coal, coke, and ore loads from Provo to Geneva and set them out for Geneva to run through its rotary dumpers, and pulled carloads of finished steel and forwarded them to Salt Lake City. The UP enlarged the Provo, Iron Mountain, and Lynndyl yards in 1942, Lund and Iron Mountain yards in 1947, Lund again in 1950, and relocated two miles of track at Iron Mountain in 1951 to handle this heavy traffic.

Almost all of Geneva's hot-rolled coil and sheet went to the finishing mills at Pittsburg via the SP and WP, for conversion to high-quality cold-reduced sheet steel and tin plate. Geneva depended upon Pittsburg to absorb most of its steel, there being little direct market for Geneva's products in the West. Geneva met about one-fourth of the West's steel needs during the 1950s.

In 1940 Henry J. Kaiser decided to build freighters and small warships on the West Coast. However, no mill would guarantee him sufficient tonnages of steel plate. No problem: he would build his own, wangling a $100 million loan from the Defense Plant Corp, in February 1942. Kaiser wanted to build his mill at Los Angeles Harbor, but the DPC was fearful of Japanese naval gun bombardment and insisted he build it 60 miles inland at Fontana on a site served by Santa Fe and SP. Construction began in March 1942 and the mill's 1,200-ton blast furnace was blown-in on December 30, 1942. Steel plate began flowing to Kaiser's shipyards in August 1943, enabling them to build 1,490 vessels by 1945. Kaiser paid off the government loan, with interest, in 1950.

After the war Kaiser converted his mill to peacetime products and by 1959 quadrupled its size to meet the demand for steel. A second 1,200-ton blast furnace was blown in during 1949, a third in 1953, and a fourth in 1959, making Fontana the largest mill west of Chicago. Three basic oxygen furnaces began replacing its nine open-hearth furnaces in 1959.

At full output after 1959, Kaiser used about 10,000 tons of iron ore, 7,000 tons of coal, and 2,100 tons of limestone daily. During the war most of Fontana's iron ore, about 2,500 tons daily, came from Kaiser's Vulcan Mine nine miles southeast of Kelso. It was trucked to Kelso, loaded into UP hoppers, and interchanged to the Santa Fe at Barstow. In 1944 Kaiser purchased an iron ore reserve at Eagle Mountain, California from the SP. Mining began at Eagle Mountain in August 1948; the Vulcan Mine closed in 1949. The UP also carried up to 400,000 tons of Utah iron ore and 300,000 tons of Nevada limestone a year to Fontana during the 1950s.

From the mid-1960s to about 1974 the UP hauled up to 500,000 tons of iron ore a year from Cima to Berth 49 at the Port of Los Angeles for export to Japan. Most of this ore came from Standard Slag Co. at Beck Springs, California, and was trucked 49 miles to Cima, where a front-end loader filled 50-car unit trains. Four assigned SD45's (later four or five SD24's) hauled this train, symboled CUW/CUE (Cima Unit West/East), on a 72-hour turnaround.

In the late 1950s iron mining companies began building pellet plants for magnetic taconite ores in northern Minnesota's Mesabi Range. Steel mills discovered they could make better steel at lower cost with pellets, because pellets are uniform in size and composition, and are higher in iron content. Southern Utah's highly variable natural ores presented a particular problem for Geneva, because Geneva's product line was focused on sheet products, where uniformity is crucial. The southern Utah iron ore deposits are comparable to Mesabi Range natural ores in iron content, about 54 percent by weight, but are uneconomical to pelletize. Instead, in 1960 U.S. Steel began building a 1.5-million ton annual capacity pellet plant near Atlantic City, Wyoming to pelletize a 30-percent iron content ore body, and a 76.7-mile railroad to connect the plant with the UP at Winton Junction, Wyoming. Geneva received its first 40 cars from Atlantic City on August 17, 1962. UP's 94-car Atlantic City trains initially left Winton Junction every other day. By 1971 this had become 120-car unit train ACU (Atlantic City Unit). In total the UP had four unit iron ore moves on the South-Central District in the early 1970s: the ACU, 1.5 million tons-per-year; the SUE/SUW, 500,000 tons-per-year; the MNQA, 500,000 tons-per-year; and the CUW/CUE, 500,000 tons-per-year

By the 1970s American steel makers, though the most productive in the world, were in deep trouble, beset by high costs for labor, pollution controls, and modernization programs on one side, and competition from imported steel and world-wide overcapacity on the other. CF&I shut down its basic steel making facilities in 1982, and Kaiser followed in 1983. California Steel Industries, Inc. used Kaiser's rolling mills until summer 1994 to make plate and sheet steel from Brazilian slabs; Fontana's blast furnaces, basic oxygen furnaces, and coke ovens have been razed. U.S. Steel's expensive-to-operate Atlantic City pellet plant shut down on October 1, 1983. After emptying the stockpiles in late October, its railroad shut down, after which Geneva's pellets came from U.S. Steel's Minntac plant at Mountain Iron, Minnesota, in 105-car unit trains via C&NW and UP. Symboled MIGW/MIGE (Minntac to Geneva West/East), they started up in November 1983. The pellets made up about 85 percent of the iron ore needs at Geneva, the remainder supplied by the Comstock Mine in one to two 80- to 150-car trains weekly. Geneva also received some imported ore via Los Angeles.

For many good reasons, U.S. Steel ceased investing in Geneva after the late 1950s, and by 1986 it was a museum of World War II technology. Looking at what it believed to be a $1 billion modernization bill for Geneva, USX (U.S. Steel's successor) decided in January 1986 to enter into a joint venture with Pohang Iron & Steel of South Korea, under which Pohang would contribute $300 million to modernize the Pittsburg finishing mill, share in its ownership, and supply its hot-rolled coil steel. This would leave Geneva without a customer for 70 percent of its output. When Geneva's employees went on strike in summer 1986, Geneva looked to be dead. Instead, two Utah lawyers, believing the mill viable, purchased Geneva in July 1987 for $44.1 million, which included USX's and CF&I's southern Utah iron ore deposits. Geneva Steel, the new company, began producing steel a month later. Since 1987 Geneva has spent over $300 million to modernize its mill, installing two QBOP basic oxygen furnaces to replace the 10 open-hearth furnaces, a continuous caster, the world's largest coil box to roll coils, and extensive pollution controls. Geneva Steel is now the only basic steel plant in the West. Currently about 90 percent of its 1.5 million tons of steel a year becomes hot-rolled coils of up to 60,000 pounds each and steel plate. The rest of its output is steel pipe, plus coal chemicals. These products are distributed principally in the Midwestern U.S. The structural mill is closed.

Initially the UP hauled all of Geneva's iron ore and most of its finished steel. In 1994 Geneva rebid these contracts. The UP was shocked to find that SP and Wisconsin Central won the Minntac pellet contract, and won about 70 percent of Geneva's finished steel output, the UP retaining only the Pacific Northwest and portions of the Midwest. SP took over the Minntac trains in August 1994. SP also delivers all of Geneva's coal, along with occasional unit trains of imported coke from Richmond, California. In 1994, Geneva halved its use of southern Utah iron ore to about 215,000 tons-per-year, or two 78-car trains monthly. Since 1983 the UP has considered abandoning the Cedar City and Iron Mountain Branches. This possibility now looms large.

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