Oglebay Norton Marine Services Company LLC history

By the time the founder died in 1878, he owned a growing fleet of vessels dedicated to iron ore shipping, as well as a 3,000-acre iron ore mine in the Menominee range.

Henry's son, Horace, developed a 3,000-acre tract on the Menominee range, and a new partnership was organized in 1884 when Wheeling, WV, industrialist EARL W. OGLEBAY joined Horace A. Tuttle in Tuttle, Oglebay & Co.

When Horace Tuttle died in a railroad accident in 1889, Earl Oglebay bought out the surviving Tuttles and dropped their name from the corporate moniker.

In 1890 Oglebay Norton & Co. secured a contract to organize all of JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER's iron-ore properties in the Mesabi Range and to act as manager and sales agent.

They would continue to manage sales and shipping for Rockefeller’s mining interests until 1901, when the oil magnate sold Lake Superior Consolidated Mines to the United States Steel Corporation.

Although Oglebay, Norton and its predecessors had operated their own shipping vessels since the mid-19th century, the company did not create a true fleet until 1920.

After its incorporation in 1924, the company branched into mining and selling coal, marketing fluorspar and ferro-alloys, and manufacturing insulation products for steel ingot pouring.

As early as 1939, the firm, aware of the depletion of high-grade iron ores, initiated a study of low-grade minerals and established the Reserve Mining Co. to develop taconite.

In 1949, the company installed Ohio’s first continuous coal mining machine.

Taylor, Harrie S. Oglebay Norton: 100 Years on the Great Lakes (1954).

In 1957 Oglebay Norton & Co. and its subsidiaries merged into a single unit, the Oglebay Norton Co., allowing for further growth and diversification into the areas of glass and foundry sand production and mining fracture sand for the petroleum industry.

In November 1975 Oglebay Norton’s fleet lost its flagship in what has been called “the most famous shipwreck in Great Lakes history.” During a terrible storm that year, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald split in two and sunk in Lake Superior.

In 1986, LTV Steel Co.’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy erased $50 million in iron ore contracts from Oglebay Norton’s books.

In 1987, Hong Kong’s Industrial Equity (Pacific) Ltd. acquired a 24 percent stake in the company.

Having diffused the previous year’s investors, Oglebay Norton executives faced a new challenge in 1988, this time from Brent D. Baird’s First Carolina Investors Inc.

Beginning in 1992, the company shed its coal mining and foundry interests and halved its dividend to generate funds for four key businesses: marine transportation, iron ore, refractories and minerals, and industrial sands.