Main Office; Top Floor

I’ve lost track of how many consecutive weeks I have risen early on a Saturday to make it down to the plant for more research. I was out the door by around 9am and was at the plant about 90 minutes later. It was a wet night and morning and roads were foul so I just took the quick three mile ride and entered through the fence near the quench station. I stashed my bike in the pump house and got to work.

First on the itinerary was again looking to get into the coal bunker basement through the access panels in the ground floor. Last time I started throwing debris down there to build a way to get back out again. But it took me only seconds this time to see it had at least 6″ of water down there. Damn – that’s out.

I wandered around down there and pretty quickly started to feel like it was going to be a pretty uneventful morning. I started scooping up some random paperwork I found around (nothing mind boggling) and tried to figure out what to do next. I made a half hearted attempt to get up the ramp to the next floor but it was covered with snow and very slippery. So I gave up on the ovens department in general and headed over to the by products plant.

I was in the old powerhouse just behind the main office. There is a giant heap of binders in there that I have looked through before but most is water damaged far beyond being salvageable. But what did I find, sitting out by itself away from the pile?

This is the kind of thing that is so important to save and share with the world. The top disqualifying tenants that cause me to leave documents behind are when they do not mention the name of the company or date, or when they describe processes or other information that is vague or non specific to the plant or the industry in general. This does not meet any of those issues and quite honestly, I am VERY interested in the content. I saw immediately it did have some water damage and the pages had caked together. But my ‘training’ the previous weekend taught me a lot so I declined the urge to start peeling the pages then and there and stuffed it in my bag. Strangely, like that binder from last weekend, this one was also left out in a place of prominence begging to be found. Not quite divine intervention probably, but it pays dividends to return early and often, there is always something great waiting to be found.

I was getting bored when I heard voices. I took a look around the corner and saw someone in the window of the main office. I gave a wave and it was returned and saw it was FALS’ buddy from two weeks ago. We had a quick chat and I told him he had the best seat in the house considering the view. He laughed and agreed. Suddenly I realized he was on the top floor! I have laid in bed many a night trying to calculate how to get up there and clearly he found a way. I asked how the hell he managed that and he said to come up to the 2nd floor and he would show me.

There are a couple doors (torn from their hinges) leaning up against the wall which could be used as a ladder. I guess these have always been there but I never really paid attention. While I get around pretty well for someone of my size I saw pretty quickly this was going to be out of the question. Besides the difficulty to get up there, the stakes were high. One false move and you would fall off the door/ladder and potentially down past the ramp to the ground floor. So I found solace in the SE office which I had previously avoided and saw was stuffed with paperwork. I silently questioned why I had been checking out the NE office so rabidly in weeks past, and got to work. I told my guy upstairs to snap a few pics for me and let me know if he saw any paperwork. He quickly sent me a flurry of photos and the dispatches from above were impressive!

It wasn’t long before he started to drop down some serious stacks of paperwork. He told me that there was a legitimate ‘file room’ stuffed with racks of paperwork.

I could barely keep up with what I was finding in the SE office and what was being dropped down. Soon came some mysterious bundles which were wrapped in brown paper and secured with tape or twine. I cut the twine and could not believe what I saw!

I was excited recently when I found documents dating back to the mid 1970s. In just a few seconds we had rewound the clock about 25 years! The three bundles tied with string all dated from the late 40s to early 50s.

In the meantime I was finding some serious scores in the SE office. I found a couple things I had to leave behind for lack of space in my bag so I stashed them a secure space away from potential rain or wind and I will go back to get them next weekend:

• Binder of business cards. Most are for vendors that the plant used (some are international) but the last page is the most interesting. It includes cards from local restaurants in Hegewisch, South Deering, East Side or NW Indiana. I am kicking myself for not at least taking that page. Best of all it is in a beautiful black Acme binder in very good shape. I have a nice red Acme binder I have been filling with my archives but it is getting full. Tempted to go get this right now!
• Weeks ago, I found some really large folded blueprints in mint condition in the coal bunker. I found a binder here with pocket pages containing at least two more. I didn’t open them but I can tell from the paper and writing they were drawn by the same company. I assume they are diagrams of the BP department and I need these! Worse yet I don’t even remember where I left them (on the floor or window sill).
• I got an overwhelming pile of purchase orders which I was disinterested in initially. Looking back, these would be a great addition to the ‘accounting’ section of the Document Archive. I need to spent 5-10 minutes looking for interesting vendors from the literally thousands of POs available.
• I also found another stash of 3.5″ floppys, and these are in near perfect condition. However, they appear to only contain software or drivers, not data. As such, I left them behind but I may grab them next time to experiment with cleaning the inside the disk and/or removing the platter (and finding a use for the USB drive I wasted money on!)

My guy upstairs told me he was going to check out the roof. I urged him to be safe and send more photos! These photos offer a point of view previously reserved for fancy drones but these are far more well earned. I take no credit for them as I didn’t have the nerve to try to get up to the 3rd floor myself.

FALS and another friend popped back up around then, having returned from an expedition around the facility. He told me he had found some paperwork for me. This is so cool because he had scooped it before he even knew I was there. I thanked him profusely and told him to stash it down below on the ground floor so I could scoop it when I came down. My guy upstairs got finished and headed out with FALS and I continued digging for a while in the SE office.

When I came down the paperwork wasn’t there so I figured they were busy and I walked around some. As I climbed down the ramp something colorful caught my eye near the wall. I had to fight my way through the sharp branches of some trees but I pulled out some interesting artifacts.

I figured they were back toward the ovens department and followed footprints for a while but lost the trail and assumed they were gone. So I decided to explore the western edge of the property. I saw a few things on the sattelite view I wanted to check out. I figure no one has ever bothered to walk this deep into the cattails and see what was back there. So I headed west from the coal bunker and then started north along the edge of the cattails. The railroad on the other side was busy with trains and their horns and noise soothed me. I came upon some small ponds and navigated around them. I came across three or four concrete structures back there. They weren’t quite buildings and I am not sure of their use.

I grabbed the shovel seen laying at the foot of this monolith, figured I could stash it as it might come in handy sometime. I headed back toward the gate house and texted to ask if FALS and his crew were still around. They had departed but they said they did leave the paperwork along with a mystery tool they had found. They asked if I knew what it was. Now I was really intrigued. So I made a beeline back to the main office to see what they had left me.

At a distance as I approached I thought “these guys give me way too much credit, I have no idea what that thing is”. But when I got close, I identified it immediately. I only know what it is because I have used one hundreds of times – it is a tensioner for steel banding which can be used (among other purposes) to strap freight to a skid for shipping.

That in itself is pretty cool – any old tools found at the plant are exciting for me. But one look told me that there was a lot more going on with this specimen. I know primarily from searching eBay for Acme related items. After finding the same items again and again, I did additional research to better understand what I was seeing. Let me explain: this is a current screenshot on eBay with a query for ‘ACME STEEL’:

Interlake owned the coke plant for years before Acme and Interlake merged in the mid 60s. Prior to that, Acme was a Chicago based company that made steel strapping (and the related tools, as you can see here). In 1986, Interlake spun off portions of the business (including the coke plant and blast furnace) and the name for those facilities became Acme. Why do I share all this background? Because a closer look at this tool showed two very interesting things.

So besides the Acme stamp on the side, the ball end of the lever shows the Interlake ‘I’ used in their logo. Bottom line: while this may have been just another everyday tool used at the plant (interesting in itself), it was manufactured by another division of the same company! Best of all, it shows the earmarks of both of the brands on the tool. So this rusty specimen got strapped to the back of my bike so it can be taken home and cleaned and restored. Along with the two wrenches I have also rescued, I will share a new post soon with the current state of the restorations on all three.

On my way back to the pump house to grab my bike I took a closer look at some new graf on the quench station. My man FALS has been busy – and so have I. Big up to all my friends and a big thanks for grabbing artifacts for me.