Unloading an ore-steamer at Cleveland, O. -- lowering a 5-ton electric clam into the hold

"7963 (a) Unloading an ore-steamer at Cleveland, O. -- lowering a 5-ton electric clam into the hold. Copyright Underwood & Underwood U-85922"
"Underwood & Underwood, Publishers, New York, London, Toronto-Canada, Ottawa-Kansas"
"Works and Studios - Arlington, N. J. Westwood, N. J."
"S198"

Reverse "7963. We are standing on the deck of the freighter W. R. Linn alongside one of the great ore docks at Cleveland. This vessel has brought several thousand tons or iron ore down from the famous mining district at the head of Lake Superior, through Lake Huron and Lake Erie to this Ohio port. Here the cargo is being transferred to those stock-piles at the right, ready for railway shipment to the famous steel-mills in the Ohio valley 100 to 150 miles away -- Youngstown, Pittsburg, Wheeling, etc.

For many years the best unloading machinery took off the cargo in one-ton buckets. The apparatus in use here before us is run by electricity. That huge "clam" now in mid-air is just descending into the hold, where its shovel-shaped sections will together grasp a five-ton mass of loose ore, closing around their load with perfect security, then hoisting it and carrying it back over that that huge bin or "stack," where the ore is dumped.

In the distance great unloaders of still another design are at work on thecargo of a sister vessel. In a single year 13,000,000 tons of iron ore are shipped in vessels like this from the Lake Superior mines down here to the Lake Erie ports. The prospects are, however, that the Lake Superior region will before long be a strong rival of the Ohio Valley country in the manufacture of such raw material into pig iron and steel.

From Notes of Travel No. 37, copyright by Underwood & Underwood.

• Cleveland
  Ohio, United States
  

  Latitude: 41.509477 Longitude: -81.693649