The Smelter
by Bryce Martin

An acrid, metallic aroma from Hell filled the air many a day in Galena, Kan. That would change some depending on exactly where I pedaled on a long bike-ride day. The odor flaring my nostrils came from the stacks of the Eagle-Picher lead smelter in billows powerful enough in bulk to reach several miles, depending on the wind stream and other conditions.

Another odor came from East Galena. You had to be fairly close, within a few blocks, to whiff the air bouquet from the Old Rock Distillery.

Route 66 went right by the Eagle-Picher plant, exposing it to America's traffic mainstream. Hell's Half-Acre was what the area was called immediate to the plant in a radius of a mile or so in any direction, but mostly next to and across Route 66 from the smelter. The earth was polluted from the pollutants sailing and settling from the plant's emission stacks, those huge pipes pointing upwards. It illustrated blight the way a patch of mange on a dog illustrated disease.

Smelting is what goes on inside a lead smelter. Since the ore known as galena is lead sulphide (think sulfur), the ore is literally roasted to remove the sulfur. The sulfurous fumes and particulates as excess are belched into the atmosphere from the plant's infernal belly.

I was struck at a young age by the phrase "Hell's Half-Acre" as a description for the area. How could any name be more apt and more colorful at the same time?

"How long has it been called that?" I asked. That was a question posed in the early 1950s and the reply was that it had been called that for decades past.

The plant was still operating in those early 1950s, though nothing near its output in peak or even moderate years in the past. Other Eagle-Picher lead smelters existed in the region. Big ones in Miami, Okla., and in Joplin, Mo. But the one with its picture in my grade school textbook, describing it as "the world's largest lead smelter" was this one, the one that had created Hell's Half-Acre. No picture or mention of Hell's Half Acre was in the textbook.

The EP picture was significant in that the textbook was not about Galena, not about its county, Cherokee, and not even about Kansas. It was a history book. To have that one mention about Galena in an entire book filled with chapters with text, pictures and illustrations on glossy paper about so many varied places and things, I swelled with pride. I was glad they left out the Hell's Half-Acre part.

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