This weekend a summer festival will be held at the site that gave Joliet its name as the city of “iron and steel.”

The “Joliet Iron Works Summer Fest,” a free program sponsored by the Forest Preserve District of Will County, will be held Saturday, June 19, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., at the Joliet Iron Works historic site, in downtown Joliet.

“What is key about this site is that Joliet is still known as the city of steel that refers back to this site,” said Bruce Hodgdon, a spokesman for the Will County Forest Preserve District. “There is nothing else like it that is a part of Joliet’s past.”

Visitors to the iron works site can walk through the preserve for a self-guided tour.

What is left of the previous steel companies are the foundation of each building, and at each of the previous structures there are 17 exhibits that provides information about each structure and how the work done at each building contributed to the iron and steel-making process.

For decades the site was forgotten. The foundational ruins were hidden under a thick growth of vegetation. In the early 1990s, an open space organization, CorLands, negotiated with U.S. Steel who still owed the space to make it a public-use property.

“For all of those years it was forgotten, it lay beneath weeds,” Hodgdon added.

U.S. Steel agreed to donate the 60-acre parcel to the forest preserve if the district agreed to develop it for public use. Then the district received a grant that provided a large amount of the $2 million needed to renovate the space.

Local businessmen built the original foundry, called the Union Coal, Iron and Transportation Company, around 1870. At the time Joliet was a good location for a new factory. The location had coal supplies, and it was near the I & M Canal. During this time Joliet was becoming a major rail hub, a staging area for western expansion. The factory included two blast furnaces, and a 95-foot-high structure that produced about 700 tons of pig iron a day.

In 1873 the company reorganized and became the Joliet Iron and Steel Company. The new company added two 5-ton Bessemer Converters, a technology that originated in England that enabled iron ore to be converted into steel. Before this process, steel was rare and costly. The Bessemer Converters produced large amounts of steel and for cheaper.

By 1887 the Joliet Iron and Steel Company became the largest producer of steel rails in the world. By the turn of the 20th century, the factory reached its peak. It employed 2,000 men and produced steel 24-hours a day, with an annual payroll of about $2 million. The plant became part of the United States Steel Corporation in 1901.

The festival to commemorate this site will provide entertainment, food, and children’s activities including a climbing wall, petting zoo, pony rides, face painting and an inflatable obstacle, as well as a self-guided tour of the site ruins.

The Joliet Iron Works historic site is located on Columbia Street, just east of Scott Street and the Ruby Street Bridge, in downtown Joliet.