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COATESVILLE — Following renovations, The National Iron & Steel Heritage Museum — located along First Avenue in the historic district of Coatesville — has reopened to the public. The museum offers tours of several historic structures, including Terracina, a rare example of a “country Gothic” home.

Built in 1850, the furnished house now has a new roof made of cedar shake shingles along with other historically appropriate improvements such as copper downspouts. The months-long project was done by contractor Bill Dunleavy of Dunleavy Roofing in West Chester.

The new visitor center, which opened last summer, has been updated with more exhibits that help explain why the museum is named the “National Iron & Steel Heritage” museum. The displays tell the story of the former Lukens Steel Co. and its transition from being the oldest active ironworks in America to being the leader of the steel plate industry.

One of the more interesting new displays are photos of what is known as the 206” Mill still in use today by Cleveland-Cliffs, the steel producer that took over the site in 2020. The 206-inch Mill takes its name from the size of the steel plates it can produce. When this mill opened in 1919, Lukens earned the distinction of manufacturing the widest plates in the world.

The wider plates boosted Lukens’ reputation as a custom steel mill since the plates required fewer welder joints and made complex steel projects possible including the construction of steel bridges. Lukens steel was used in the Tappan Zee bridge over the Hudson River and The Walt Whitman Bridge over Delaware, to name two examples.

One of the core outdoor exhibits features an example of a steel “tree” or steel trident, used in the 1960s construction of the “Twin Towers” of the former World Trade Center. The return of ten of these tridents to the museum grounds in 2010 is one of the reasons why the Iron & Steel Museum now has a large collection of photos and artifacts documenting the 9/11 tragedy. Displays in the visitor center also tell of the construction process in creating the steel tridents, making Coatesville the site of the largest collection of 9/11 artifacts, outside of New York City, according to museum officials.

Jim Ziegler, the museum’s executive director, said the mandated shutdown during the COVID pandemic had one bright side: the museum’s popularity online has soared. The revamped website hosted 122,000 views last year, as compared to 50,000 views the previous year.

With an eye to telling the story of Lukens iron and steel in the context of national developments, Sam Radziviliuk, a former photographer at the Coatesville Record, who is now the museum’s digital manager, created two online timelines as well as online videos. One digital timeline gives important dates in North American history and the other timeline explains the fascinating “origin story” of Lukens. The Coatesville site (now Cleveland-Cliffs) is still manufacturing steel plates, making it the oldest active iron and steel mill in America.

The industry had its start in 1810 when the Brandywine Iron Works & Nail Factory opened in a converted sawmill along the Brandywine owned by Coatesville’s namesake, Moses Coates. In less than a decade, the Lukens timeline reveals, the early ironworks went from turning out iron nails and barrel rims to producing the first boilerplate in the nation.

That preceded the so-called “golden” age of steam, but the family-owned company continued to be innovative with several “firsts.” In less than 100 years, in fact, Lukens was a chartered stock company running the nation’s largest steam-driven reversing mill with hydraulic lifts used to move 120-inch-wide steel plates.

Today, visitors who come to the museum will see that the past is never far away. One old favorite on display outdoors, for instance, is the “spun head,” a 27-ton sonar sphere designed to detect submarines. A small diorama or model (one of several mechanical displays in the visitor center) reveals that the production of bowl-shaped steel plates was first made in 1885. It shows how the special belt-driven machine was capable of spinning steel into rounded shapes up to 7 feet in diameter and that without such inventions, steam boilers, tanks, and pressure vessels that ran 19th-century industrial America, would not have been possible.

“At first we added more and more to our online exhibits so people could see what they couldn’t see by coming in,” Jim Ziegler said, “but now we are happy to be open and people can once again see all what we have to offer.”

The Iron & Steel Heritage Museum is located at 50 S. 1st Ave. in Coatesville. Call 610-384-9282 for more information or go to www.steelmuseum.org. Tours are given at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. daily except Sunday and Wednesday, and no reservations are needed.

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