Steel Country

We are continuing our journey with Paddle-to-the-Sea.  This week, we visited the coal country around Lake Erie.  This was a particularly fun chapter for me since I am very familiar with this area of the country and had special memories to share with Froggy.

The text is very short but paints a vivid picture of the fire from the Steel mills.  The text focus on the freight ships and the Niagra Falls.  However, we took a deeper look at the steel mills, coal mining and its impact on the environment.  We visited a  virtual coal museum.

   

We looked at some old photos of Pittsburgh during the Steel times.  I shared Saba's story of what Pittsburgh was like when he went to Carnegie Mellon.  And then both Abba and I shared stories and pictures of what Pittsburgh was like when we lived there and how beautiful it is now.

 

This is the same church now.

And then I continued sharing explaining how Pittsburgh is a success story but that many of the smaller towns that Paddle visited are now ghost towns because the mills have closed.

It is really late in the book but I just found this amazing website that is designed to accompany Paddle's journey using Google Earth.