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PITTSBURGH – For decades, Youngstown Sheet & Tube’s Campbell and Brier Hill factories have made the steel and parts that built America.
R. Gene Koch, a Mineral Ridge native who lived in Lake Milton, believed for decades that the wooden patterns used to make these steel pieces were worth preserving.
“Look at the crafts. Why does nobody care? It’s a dying art, part of the industrial age ”, Koch said in an interview in 1991.
Koch passed away in 2008 at the age of 81 and didn’t live to see this become a reality, but two men from Pennsylvania are now trying to give Koch’s collection the showcase he always believed it was. deserved.
Chip Barletto of New Castle and Cory Bonnet of Pittsburgh earlier this year acquired more than 6,000 wood models, blueprints and other artifacts from Brier Hill Works from Koch’s wife, Evelyn, a retired city school teacher. Warren.
“The only reason she left it with me was because I told her I was going to keep them all and take the whole collection.” said Barletto. “I wasn’t going to reuse them, make a clock or a table. I want to preserve them. As a child, I considered these things to be a work of art.
Read A LOT MORE in Sunday’s TRIBUNE CHRONICLE.
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