The Slate Belt

A Landscape of Extraction

The Lehigh Valley’s extractive industries of coal, iron, cement and slate created a much altered landscape with vast and deep quarries, enormous kilns, and mill buildings in a complex landscape that allows for the exploration of architectural, ecological, and socio-cultural considerations. As proven elsewhere, this industrial legacy holds the key to revitalization of the region by “regeneration through heritage,” not only in the preservation and possible re-use of these sites, but as catalysts for reviving and maintaining the social and cultural fabric of their surrounding communities and natural environment. Cultural and environmental conservation have become powerful partners in the reclamation of this complex place through ecological and social as well as architectural concerns.

In conjunction with the efforts of the students and faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, a team of students from Muhlenberg College, under Professor Joseph Elliott, Professor of Fine Arts, who documented both the few active quarries, as well as the residents of the communities that make up the Slate Belt district. The final result of that effort produced a web page called Slate Stories that showcased the photography and documentation carried out by the students.

Much of the information for this website has been collected and quoted from primary documents that were created in response to, and as a result of, this massive industry which existed for more than a century from the early 1830's until its ultimate demise during the decades after World War II. The Pennsylvania Slate quarries produced the largest output in the world but during World War I, many of the slate firms closed to release men for other essential war work, especially in the Bethlehem Steel plant nearby. Most of the quarries that closed, never reopened after World War I as modern synthetic materials such as asphalt composites and plastics proved less expensive and easier to use and required less skilled labor to fabricate and install. The long history of the slate industry is complex, involving a wide range of forces from the local to the global. No industry of this scale ceases to exist overnight and it was not a single event that undid this once important resource. This site attempts to shed light on the elements that drove the slate belt to such significance as well as the forces that lead to its demise.

Industrial Heritage

Why invest in preserving these former industrial landscapes?

First, their continued physical existence is critical to understanding how the region took shape physically, socially, economically, and culturally, more than any text or photograph can convey: real structures in real landscapes. Second, these early twentieth century sites extend the region and country’s industrial narrative from the classic eighteenth and nineteenth century notion of industrial heritage to those complexes that were responsible for America’s emergence as the world power by the latter twentieth century. Third, although the twentieth century is better documented than any other century in word and image, analog and digital, the industrial artifact and place, where they survive together, still remain the primary locus for analysis and interpretation.

"By taking a cultural landscape approach to the analysis and redevelopment of these overlapping industries, we acknowledge their original premise of natural resource extraction and exploitation in the deconstruction and construction of the land."

Cultural and environmental conservation become powerful partners in the reclamation of this complex place through ecological and social as well as architectural technological concerns.

In order to bring a more critical approach to the preservation of the most important and iconic of American industrial sites as recommended by the 2010 Symposium Industrial Heritage Retooled, this project proposed to address an important and understudied class of 20th-century industrial heritage: the extractive industries.

"The intent is to produce a well-documented and methodologically driven website that clearly identifies the critical components of this neglected large-scale industrial landscape."

The geo-survey, mapping, and architectural documentation, all supported on a digital platform make this information accessible in a new and innovative way. Hopefully, this data will be used to advocate support for preservation at the site and community levels through exhibition, publication, and public meetings. Web site access will help establish dissemination and influence of the findings of the project. Since the intent is to provide an accurate depiction of what the slate industry was, much of the content of this website has been extracted directly from sources that were written by those who had direct involvement with the industry. An advisory committee including former PHMC director Brenda Barrett, Robert Melnick, Professor and former Dean of Landscape, University of Oregon, Fred Quivik, Professor of History at Michigan Technological University, and Shaun Eyring, Landscape Architect. NPS will assist the project as needed. Partners in this project include: the National Park Service-Historic American Landscape Survey (HALS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) as well as the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor, and local community partners, including the Slate Belt Heritage Center in Bangor, PA.