She Watched the Mayville Blast Furnaces in the 1920's

It's hard to find anyone in Mayville who can still give first hand stories about the iron works.   Dolores Ihde, of Mayville, age 95, told me today that as a child  she and her grandmother would sit out on the front porch at night and look  west from their German Street porch to watch  the tops of the two Mayville blast furnaces lighting up the sky.

Credit:  http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2011/02/10/blast-furnace-spectacle-will-be-fire-and-steel-festival-highlight-84229-28144283/              No,  this is not Mayville in the 1920's, but I'm using my imagination.

Dolores was born in 1918, and the Mayville iron works shut down in 1928.   Dolores' fond memory reminds me of this story of Cleveland:

My father and I made other trips and best were the ones to the blast furnaces.  He explained how the iron ore from the boats was mixed with coal and carried in little cars to the top of the chimney above the furnace. It was dumped in, and as it fell down “a special kind of very hot air” was blown into it.  The coal and iron ore caught fire, and below they fell into great tubs as melting metal, a pinkish gold liquid, incandescent as the sun is when it is starting to set. The man and child were allowed to go rather near the vats, to feel the corching heat and to drown their gaze in the glowing boil. All the rest of the building was dark; the
silhouettes of the men who worked at the vats were black shadows. Wearing long leather aprons, they moved about the vats ladling off the slag. That was very skilled work, my father said; the men had to know
just how much of the worthless slag to remove. For years afterwards, when we could no longer spend Sunday afternoons on these expeditions, we used to go out of our house at night to see the pink reflections from the blast furnaces on the clouds over Cleveland. We could remember that we had watched the vatfuls
of heavily moving gold, and those events from the past were an unspoken bond between us.

“The Blast Furnace” from Home to the Wilderness by Sally Carrighar (1944  Houghton Mifflin Company).