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Iron and Steel Products
 With an abundance of iron ore in the Upper Peninsula and coal fields near
Michigan's southern border in Ohio, Michigan looked like a natural site for the
manufacture of iron and steel during the middle 19th century. One of the most important
milestones in steel manufacture took place in Wyandotte in 1865 when Eber Brock Ward's
Eureka Iron and Steel Company produced the first Bessemer-process steel in the United
States. But Michigan was not to become a major steel manufacturing state. Instead, Michigan factories made products from iron
and steel—cast iron stoves, wheels for railroad cars, ships, and marine engines. If you
worked in the "car industry" in Detroit during this era, you made railroad cars.
Detroit's largest employers in the 1890s were railroad car manufacturers. The Michigan Car
Company, Peninsular Car Company, the Russel Wheel and Foundry Company, the Detroit Car
Wheel Company and several other companies merged in 1892 to become the giant
Michigan-Peninsular Car Company.
Cast iron stoves were replacing fireplaces as the way to heat the Victorian-era home.
The Detroit Stove Works, Michigan Stove Company and Peninsula Stove Company were the
"big three" of Detroit's stove manufacturing industry. They—and other smaller
firms such as E. Bement and Sons in Lansing and the Kalamazoo Stove
Company—made Michigan a world leader in stove manufacturing. Michigan's most famous
stove, the Round Oak Stove, was made in Dowagiac.
Detroit, Bay City and Marine City-area shipyards manufactured larger and larger
steamboats to carry people and goods on the Great Lakes. Pleasure boats needed engines,
and the marine engine industry grew with manufacturers such as the Monitor Vapor Engine
Company of Grand Rapids and the Olds Motor Works of Detroit, later Lansing. Michigan's
work in iron, steel and marine engines would carry the state into the new century's
interest in automobile manufacturing.
 Can you identify some of these iron and steel
products on display in the gallery? (Click on the photo to see a larger
image.)
- Wrought iron garden seat
- Steam radiator
- Coffee grinder
- An ornately carved Gale plow with steel blade made for display at the 1893 Chicago
Columbian Exposition
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