On the morning of September 3rd, 1891, a man named Joseph Barzak stood on a wooden platform one hundred and eighty-six feet above the concrete footing of a chimney under construction at the Carnegie Steel Company’s Homestead Works, on the South Bank of the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh. The platform was four feet wide. It had no railing. It was bolted to the inside of a brick cylinder that Barzak and three other men had been building for eleven weeks.

Below him, the hollow core of the chimney dropped straight down to the ground. Above him was open sky. A hod of bricks weighing forty pounds rested on his shoulder. He had carried that hod up a series of iron rungs set into the interior wall, climbing with one hand and balancing the load with the other.

When he reached the platform, he set the hod down, mixed a trowel of mortar, and began laying the next course of bricks on the top of the wall. When finished, the chimney would stand two hundred and twelve feet tall and serve the blast furnace of the Homestead Works. Every one of its one hundred and thirty-eight thousand bricks would be carried up and laid by hand. There was no crane.

No elevator. No scaffold on the outside. The entire structure was being built from the inside, one ring of bricks at a time, by men standing on a platform they raised themselves as the wall grew taller beneath them. This is a construction method that almost nobody alive today has ever seen or heard of.

For roughly seventy years, between 1860 and 1930, it was the way nearly every industrial smoke stack in America was built. The second half of the nineteenth century was the age of combustion. America was burning things at an unprecedented rate. Coal-fired boilers powered every textile mill, every iron works, every brewery, every slaughterhouse, every rail yard roundhouse from the Atlantic coast to the Missouri River.

Each of those boilers needed a chimney. The chimney created draft. Hot gases from the fire rose through the chimney, and as they rose, they pulled fresh air into the boiler from below. The taller the chimney, the stronger the draft.

The stronger the draft, the hotter the fire. The hotter the fire, the more efficient the boiler. By 1880, the standard industrial chimney in America stood between one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet. By 1900, the largest ones topped two hundred and fifty feet.

A chimney for a major steel works or smelting plant could be twenty feet in diameter at the base, tapering to ten feet at the top, with walls three feet thick at the bottom thinning to eighteen inches at the crown. These were not decorative. They were functional machines made of brick and mortar that had to withstand wind loads, thermal cycling, chemical attack from sulfur gases, and their own enormous dead weight. The men who built them were among the most specialized and least remembered workers in the history of American construction.

They were called chimney builders. Sometimes they were called steeple jacks, though that term more properly refers to the men who repaired chimneys after they were built. The builders were a separate trade. They had their own techniques, their own tools, and their own way of dying.

The method was called inside climbing construction. A foundation was poured first, concrete usually eight to twelve feet deep depending on the height of the chimney and the bearing capacity of the soil. On top of the foundation, the masons laid the first courses of brick. At ground level, the chimney was wide, fifteen to twenty feet across the interior, with walls thick enough to support the full weight of the structure above.

A man could stand inside and look up at the sky as though he was standing at the bottom of a well. When the wall reached about ten feet high, the crew installed the first working platform. This was a circular wooden deck built to fit snugly inside the chimney. It rested on iron brackets set into the mortar joints.

The masons stood on this platform and laid bricks on top of the wall around them. When they had built the wall up another five or six feet above the platform, they jacked the platform up to the new height, reseated the brackets, and continued. The men were standing inside a tube they were building around themselves. The tube had no openings.

The only light came from above. The only way in or out was to climb iron rungs set into the interior wall, straight up from the ground to whatever height the platform had reached. At fifty feet, the climb took two minutes. At one hundred and fifty feet, it took six or seven minutes carrying nothing.

Carrying a hod of bricks, it could take twelve. Every brick used in the chimney was carried up those rungs by hand. Every bucket of mortar was hauled up on a rope through a small opening in the platform. Every tool, every plumb line, every gallon of water came up the same way.

At the Homestead Works chimney in 1891, the crew carried an estimated one hundred and thirty-eight thousand bricks to heights ranging from ten feet to two hundred and twelve feet over the course of fourteen weeks. The bricks weighed approximately five pounds each. The total weight of material carried by hand exceeded three hundred tons. The men doing this work were almost exclusively immigrants.

In the Eastern industrial belt, the crews were Polish, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, and Italian. In the Midwest, the mix shifted toward Germans and Scandinavians. Company payroll records from the period show that chimney crews were typically four to six men: a head mason who directed the work and laid the most critical courses, one or two journeymen masons who laid brick beside him, and two or three laborers whose sole job was to carry bricks and mortar up the rungs to the platform. The laborers were the lowest paid.

They earned one dollar and twenty-five cents to one dollar and seventy-five cents a day in the 1890s. The journeymen earned two dollars and fifty cents to three dollars. The head mason earned four to five dollars. These wages were slightly above the average for construction labor, but not dramatically so.

The premium was not for skill. It was for willingness. Most construction workers refused chimney work after their first look up the interior of a half-built stack. The danger was constant, and it came from every direction.

The platform could fail. The iron brackets that held it were set into mortar joints. If a joint was weak, if the mortar had not cured, if the bracket was improperly seated, the platform could drop. A four-foot fall inside a chimney is not the same as a four-foot fall on open ground.

The men were surrounded by a brick cylinder. There was nowhere to jump. If the platform tilted, tools and bricks slid to the low side and fell through the gap into the interior shaft. A single brick falling one hundred and fifty feet down the inside of a chimney would kill any man it struck at the bottom.

Men fell from the rungs. The iron climbing rungs were set at sixteen-inch intervals, just wide enough for a boot. They were often slick with mortar dust and water. A man climbing with a hod on his shoulder had only one hand free.

If his grip failed, he fell straight down to the base of the chimney or onto the platform, depending on his height. Falls of forty, eighty, one hundred and twenty feet were recorded. None of them were survivable. There was the mortar gas.

Inside a partially built chimney, the air was still. Mortar gives off carbon dioxide as it cures. In a tall, enclosed, poorly ventilated cylinder, the carbon dioxide could accumulate at the bottom and work its way up. Men reported headaches, dizziness, and nausea.

On rare occasions, a laborer at the base of the chimney collapsed without warning. The crews learned to lower a candle on a string before sending a man down. If the candle went out, nobody went down until the air cleared. And there was wind.

A chimney at one hundred and fifty feet catches wind that the men on the ground cannot feel. The structure sways. The mortar in the upper courses is fresh and soft. A gust that hits the chimney while the top courses are still green can crack the mortar, shift the bricks, and compromise the entire ring.

The masons learned to stop work in high wind, but the definition of high wind was left to the head mason, and the head mason was paid by the job, not by the hour. The incentive to keep working was built into the pay structure. Joseph Barzak’s name appears in the Allegheny County death records for 1891, cross-referenced against a Carnegie Steel Company labor ledger that survives in the University of Pittsburgh archives. Barzak was twenty-eight years old.

He was born in Krakow, in what was then Austrian-ruled Poland. He arrived in the United States in 1887. He had worked as a general laborer for two years before joining a chimney crew as a hod carrier. By 1890, he had been promoted to journeyman mason.

His foreman’s log described him as steady, reliable, fast with a trowel. On the morning of September 3rd, 1891, Barzak was working on the Homestead Works chimney at a height of approximately one hundred and eighty-six feet. The crew had been building for eleven weeks. The chimney was nearing its final height.

Barzak was laying the interior course of a tapered section where the wall thickness was transitioning from twenty-four inches to eighteen inches. The platform had been raised that morning. What happened was recorded in the foreman’s accident report. The bracket on the north side of the platform had been set into a mortar joint that was less than eighteen hours old.

The mortar had not fully cured. Under the combined weight of two men, a hod of bricks, and a bucket of mortar, the bracket pulled free of the wall. The platform dropped approximately fourteen inches on the north side before the opposite bracket caught and held. Barzak, standing nearest the failed bracket, lost his footing.

He fell sideways through the gap between the tilted platform and the chimney wall. He fell one hundred and eighty-six feet to the concrete footing at the base of the chimney. The foreman’s report notes that work resumed the following morning. A new laborer was hired to replace Barzak.

The chimney was completed three weeks later. Carnegie Steel paid Barzak’s burial costs. There is no record of any payment to his family. The Allegheny County Coroner listed the cause of death as accidental fall.

No investigation was conducted. Barzak was not unusual. The fatality rate among chimney construction crews in the industrial period has never been precisely calculated. The work was done by small crews for private companies.

Reporting was inconsistent, but the best available estimates, drawn from county death records in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and New York, suggest that between 1870 and 1920, at least one worker was killed for every fifteen to twenty chimneys built above one hundred and fifty feet. In the peak years of industrial construction, the 1890s and 1900s, between forty and sixty industrial chimneys of that height were completed annually in the United States alone. The end of inside climbing chimney construction came gradually. In the early 1900s, external steel scaffolding systems became practical for tall structures.

Steam-powered hoists replaced the hand carrying of bricks. By 1915, most large chimneys were built using exterior scaffolding with mechanical lifts. The old method, the men inside the tube raising themselves as they built the wall around them, was abandoned within a generation. The last major chimney known to have been built entirely by the inside climbing method was completed in 1928 at a copper smelter in Anaconda, Montana.

It stood five hundred and eighty-five feet tall, the tallest masonry structure in the world at the time. But even that chimney used mechanical hoists for the upper sections. The pure hand carry method, the method Barzak and his crew used, was gone by 1920. The chimneys themselves lasted longer than the men who built them.

Many of the stacks raised in the 1880s and 1890s stood for sixty, seventy, eighty years. Some are still standing. You can see them in the old industrial districts of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. Brick cylinders tapering toward the sky, blackened with soot.

Most of them cold now, the furnaces they served long since demolished. They are the tallest structures in their neighborhoods. Most people who pass them have no idea how they were built. They were built by men who climbed into a brick tube every morning, carried forty-pound loads up iron rungs with one hand, laid bricks in a circle around their own feet, and raised themselves higher every day until the chimney was done.

The Joseph Barzaks of the industrial age. Men whose names appear once in a county ledger and never again.