Ironton and Huntington

My introduction to Ironton, Ohio, was to a city wedded to the industrial age. Factories hummed with workers, smoke poured into the sky and the downtown was alive with commerce.

At the time, people kept explaining that Lawrence County was really two different places. On the eastern end was a community that served mainly as a bedroom for Huntington. At the western end was Ironton and, to a lesser degree, South Point. Heavy industry defined this area. At South Point, there was the Allied fertilizer plant. I’ve heard stories that the plant created its own fog on some mornings. The fog could be so thick, drivers could hardly see the road in front of them.

At Coal Grove, there was Carlyle Tile. Crossing into Ironton, the tar processing plant, the cement plant and the coke plant dominated the sight from U.S. 52. Once in town, Dayton Malleable, known locally as simply “the Malleable” or “Malleable,” occupied most of a mile along South 3rd Street.

Past Ironton was the Dow Chemical plant at Hanging Rock.

Across from Coal Grove and Ironton were the Armco Steel works at Ashland. The bright orange triangular Armco sign was a nighttime landmark.

But that was nearly 30 years ago. The fertilizer, tile, cement, tar and coke plants are gone, along with Malleable. Several have been leveled.

There has been some activity just past Ironton, between Hanging Rock and Portsmouth, Ohio. In the past 10 years, a gas-fired power plant and a coke plant have been added to Dow and what is now the Sunoco chemical plant in that area. But western Lawrence County has lost its economic swagger. Not only have the factories been removed, but the county’s only hospital – the one that was once in Ironton – shut down several years ago.

I covered Ironton and the rest of Lawrence County for The Herald-Dispatch for nearly 10 years. That assignment ended in late June of 1989, but I still like to get down to Ironton as much as I can to see how things are changing.

A couple of things stick out. One is that in the 30 years since I was introduced to Ironton, the whole county has become more of a bedroom community for other places in West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio.

The second has to do with the Huntington attitude. Too many people in Huntington see everything through the lens of this city’s experience. They might not know that Ironton was planned and laid out as an industrial community before Huntington was. And they don’t see that Ironton has had many of the problems Huntington has had, only worse.

One former HD writer once said, “Take Marshall (University) out of Huntington and you have Ironton.” He said that before the Ironton hospital closed.