Forgotten brownfields: Rural industrial districts in Pennsylvania, 1870--1930

Environmental historians of American industrialization tend to focus on the polluting effects of industry in urban areas and the coincident disruption of rural landscapes by extraction of natural resources. In this scenario, rural landscapes are indirectly affected by industrialization, but do not become industrialized.; This dissertation offers a different perspective on environmental change by focusing on the environmental effects of three rural industries in Pennsylvania: the wood chemical and leather industries of the upper Allegheny Valley and the merchant pig iron industry in the Juniata region. When these industries declined after World War I, they left abandoned production facilities and residual wastes with environmental problems for succeeding property owners or the state to clean up. In late-twentieth century parlance, they created Brownfields.; I argue that rural Brownfields created during the early twentieth century are an important, but overlooked, area for environmental historians to investigate. The environmental history of industrialization included the impact of a diverse and widespread pattern of manufacturing in rural settings throughout the United States, which can be reconstructed by working at the intersection of business history and the history of technology. Analysis centers on three case studies applying archival evidence to the methodology of the Life Cycle Inventory adopted by environmental engineers. It reveals the existence of blighted and polluted rural industrial sites that were redeveloped or left to be covered by encroaching second-growth forests before the advent of late twentieth-century environmental regulations. Today, many of those locations contain ruins and piles of solid wastes and/or harbor residual chemical contaminants that could preclude or retard their economic redevelopment in the future.; Using the interdisciplinary approach to environmental history demonstrated in this dissertation offers environmental historians an opportunity to both expand their focus and take a proactive approach in informing public policy toward rural environments.