PRESERVING AMERICA’S INDUSTRIAL AGE

Other evocative Industrial Age places to visit in America include: Nearby Beckley, W-Va., on I-77.

takes you 1,500 feet into hillside via a onceworking coal mine. Above ground, a coal camp shows what life was like working there in the early 20th century. Former miners lead guided tours.

Pullman National Monument

in Chicago. The first planned industrial community in the nation, added to the national Parks system in 2015, was built in the 1880s as a company town to house workers who manufactured Pullman railroad sleeping cars. In Massachusetts,

Lowell National Historical Park

preserves part of the textile industry that helped pave the way to American industrial preeminence; working conditions there and elsewhere led to the rise of the labor movement. What was it like to work in Pittsburgh’s steel-making heyday? Rivers of Steel offers five self-guided regional tours that take you into historic mining towns and even guided tours of a onetime blast furnace — the Carrie Furnaces National Historic Landmark in Swissvale (closed Nov.April).