Follansbee Steel is the only manufacturer of a pre-painted or natural Terne roof and is a leading supplier of metal roofs for new and retrofit commercial, institutional, residential and historic preservation projects.

Follansbee Steel traces its history back to the early 1800s when James Park produced a number of products, including block tin, ingot copper, antimony, sheet zinc, sheet iron, and tin-plated carbon steel, a widely used sheet metal roofing product. The tin plated sheet manufactured by Park came to be known as the “old tin roof.”

Ownership of the company switched hands to James Scott, and eventually was purchased by John and Robert Follansbee. The outstanding performance and popularity of the "old tin roof" coupled with the brothers' entrepreneurial expertise resulted in a rapid expansion of the newly named company of Follansbee Steel. In 1902, the opening of the Follansbee Steel plant gave rise to the establishment of the City of Follansbee, West Virginia.

In 1954, the Louis Berkman Company purchased Follansbee and sold all the basic steel production operations to Wheeling Steel. Follansbee retained and continued to improve its best-selling products of coating lines and sheet metals.

Follansbee employed seven years of laboratory and field testing to develop an alloy that would provide unsurpassed corrosion resistance. This unprecedented research and development effort resulted in Follansbee's patented ZT® (zinc/tin) alloy, which is oxygen reactive and surpassed 20,000 hours of salt spray testing with no red rust. Follansbee's innovations have taken the old classic tin roof to new heights of performance and longevity.

Follansbee Terne: A favorite of Frank Lloyd Wright

Legendary American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, wrote the following about Follansbee:

“Imaginative new conceptions in architecture can frequently trace their origin to a basically simple idea. One of the oldest types of roofing, terne metal, thus lends itself to many dramatic new applications in the contemporary idiom. Because of its inherent adaptability in both form and color, Follansbee Terne permits the visible roof area to become a significant part of the structural design. Thus be rediscovering and reinterpreting a time-tested material, we make out of the very old the very new. I have furthermore found terne superior to other roofing metals in economy, color-adherence, heat-reflection, permanence, workability, and coefficient of expansion.”

 - Frank Lloyd Wright

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