Pittsburgh Plate Glass Factory - Clearly Abandoned - Bartlett, California
Each time driving by, I’ve wanted to take a picture of this old factory. This time through, I did.
Located on the west shore of Owens (Dry) Lake, the factory is approximately ten miles south of Lone Pine, Cal. It was used as a salt extraction facility, a soda ash manufacturing joint and a chemical recovery and reprocessing facility until it closed operations in 1968.
The Southern Pacific Railroad had a siding here, at a location known as Bartlett. I’m not sure when runs there were discontinued, but the last of the track in the area was removed in the late 1990s.
Not sure when this photo was taken, but it looks like maybe the 1930s?
“The railroad siding of Bartlett was long the home of a soda ash plant. The first plant located here was the Kuhnert Syndicate’s pilot-scale plant built in 1926. The plant perfected their sodium carbonate recovery process from the Owens Lake brine, and built the full-scale Pacific Alkali Co. soda ash plant here in 1928. In 1944, Columbia-Southern Chemical, a subsidiary of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, purchased the plant. The plant continued to use the old sodium carbonate recovery methods here until the plant was upgraded late in 1958 to incorporate the sesquicarbonate process, and it had three times the capacity of the old plant. Operations ended in 1968. It is the ruins of the 1958 plant upgrade that are seen today.”
Glad I finally stopped to snap this one up. It’s just such a cool looking building.
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