Martin and Chris LaFrenz drove 250 miles from Knoxville, Tenn., to Birmingham, Ala., to see one of the South's hottest new cultural attractions: a 124-year-old pig-iron blast furnace.

Attendance at the Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark has grown 25 percent since 2000 to 125,000 visitors a year, and city leaders plan to build a visitor's center big enough to hold school groups. The site has become a magnet for weddings, picnics and rock concerts.

Sloss, where Blacks and Whites worked together but lived apart, is one example of how the shrinking manufacturing industry is adjusting, playing up to the tourists in cities in the Rust Belt and beyond. Other industrial museums that pay homage to mining, steelworking and carmaking are cropping up in Pittsburgh and Detroit and in Bethlehem, Pa., as well as in Germany and England.

The emergence of museums dedicated to the relatively recent industrial past shows that history's window is growing shorter. Pioneer villages are passé, while steel mills that closed a decade ago are considered historic. Since 1996, cultural tourism is growing at twice the rate of the regular travel industry, with 118 million tourists a year, according to studies by the Washington, D.C.-based Travel Industry Association of America and Smithsonian magazine.

"People are reaching back and touching their beginnings," says Stephen Donches, president of the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem. "Where do their parents and grandparents come from? Where did they settle? What did they do for work? It becomes more of a story about people, not just objects."

The Rust Belt isn't the only place memorializing heavy industry.

In Richmond, Calif., there is the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park, a 150-acre park built at the shipyard on San Francisco Bay where 28 percent of the 120,000 workers during World War II were women.

In Massachusetts, the Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site has rebuilt a blast furnace, rolling mill and other buildings from North America's first integrated ironmaking facility, which dates to 1646.

Bethlehem's National Museum of Industrial History is expected to open next year - the original opening was envisioned for 1999, but financial problems prevented that - in the 37,000-square-foot former electrical shop at the abandoned Bethlehem Steel plant that nestles in the heart of the city. Local leaders want more than a museum. Some city leaders want the developer of a separate 120-acre slice of the vacated Bethlehem Steel land to add theaters, stores and a baseball stadium, and turn the five former blast furnaces on the property into a Universal Studios-style attraction.

The Homestead Works, outside of Pittsburgh and once one of the world's largest steel plants, has been mostly razed and turned into a shopping area called the Waterfront, complete with movie theaters and nightclubs. A preserved building was turned into a Rivers of Steel Museum that shows vintage U.S. Steel Corp. promotional videos and displays old comic books featuring Joe Magarac, a mythical steelworker of Paul Bunyan proportions.

Preservation of industrial sites economically or logistically isn't easy. With the price of scrap metal at historic highs, developers are tempted to sell outmoded industrial equipment as scrap, which goes for as much as $350 a ton. And the projects often come with hefty cleanup costs, to undo decades of industrial pollution.