From Coal to Coke

The soft, crumbly, low-sulfur coal extracted from this valley was ideal for processing into coke, a charcoal-like substance that was and remains an essential fuel for blast furnaces in the nation’s steel mills. To turn coal into coke, crews loaded freshly mined coal into heavy, brick-lined ovens and baked it for days as it passed through four stages of chemical transformation: sweating, gassing, and striking, then igniting into a blaze. During the burning process, smoke poured from the oven in changing colors—first pale blue, then white, then dark brownish-yellow, and finally deep black—until the smoke stopped and the coal’s impurities had been burned off, leaving red-hot coke. A team of men carried out each step: the charger lit the fire, the leveler leveled the coal inside the oven, the dauber bricked up the oven door while leaving a crack for air at the top, and after cooling, the quencher sprayed water on the fire while a drawer, or coke puller, scraped the coke out onto the ground. By 1892, Coketon already had more than 400 ovens in operation, built in double rows on each side of the railroad track, and the flames from more than 400 furnaces created a memorable nighttime scene.

West Virginia · United States