Rick's Museum News

[Towntalk]

WFMJ coverage


http://www.wfmj.com/story/21440420/valleys-steel-history-forging-a-new-path-but-with-similarities-to-the-past

[Youngstownshrimp]

Rowlands for president!

[Rick Rowlands]

I love that pic of me preaching the gospel of steel!

[Towntalk]

Leaders with a local preservation group are looking for some help to one day open an interactive museum to showcase the Valley's industrial past, as well as the manufacturing that is now showing growth.

Members of the Youngstown Steel Heritage Foundation invited executives from a number of local firms to lunch Friday afternoon to pitch their ideas of creating a history museum along Hubbard Road on Youngstown's Northeast side.

While the organization already has collected a number of pieces, including a nearly 100-year-old Tod Engine from the old Youngstown Sheet and Tube Brier Hill Works, directors want their project to showcase the area's current manufacturing base as well. A spring open house is planned in the spring.

"We hear a lot about V & M Star and some of the other companies making products, but how many people have actually seen a piece of the pipe that V & M makes? Or how many people have seen some of these other items? We'd like to give these companies an opportunity to bring some of these products here," said Youngstown Steel Heritage Foundation Executive Director Rick Rowlands.

Although the group is still working on a design for their museum, as well as raising the money they would need to build and maintain it, they're hoping to have a grand opening in September of next year.
"We're at the very beginning stages of this. No plans have been created as of yet, so I'd like to bring people in on the ground floor to help us design the facility that will work best," said Rowlands.

For more than a decade, the Tod Engine has been the centerpiece of the Tod Engine Heritage Park on Hubbard Road.
"A lot of [the steel made with the machine] went to New York City, built the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center and that type of thing, Radio City Music Hall," said David Tod II, whose family built the old engine.
Foundation members would like to expand their collection and have their eyes on a hot metal railroad car that was originally built in the area and until last June had been in use at the now-closed RG Steel plant in Warren. They're hoping to buy it at auction in a couple weeks.
"We'd like to save one of them and bring it over to the museum, not only as an example of something made in Youngstown, but also kind of a memorial to the last steel plant in the Valley," Rowlands said.

Organizers said they'll need a couple hundred thousand dollars to open and maintain their museum and are hoping to attract some interested benefactors.
"It's very important when they can physically see the actual equipment versus looking at a picture on a wall or that kind of thing. It gives them a better feel of what things were really like," Rowlands said.

Directors say they want to have their museum open in September of next year.  In the meantime, they're working on holding an open house to show-off their current collect later this spring.
For more information on the Youngstown Steel Heritage Foundation, click here.