WARREN — The lone remaining trace of steelmaking on Pine Avenue SE was purchased for $750,000 by a northern California-based company that manufactures equipment and material for the flexible packaging industry.

The office building for the former Republic Steel was bought by New 999 Pine LLC, a company formed in August that, according to records with the Trumbull County Auditor’s office, shares a mailing address of Converting Technology in Milwaukee.

Converting Technology is an affiliate of San Rafael, Calif.-based PAC Machinery, which operates in the packaging industry. The Milwaukee location specializes in its own brand of pre-opened bags on a roll.

PAC Machinery also has a satellite location, Clamco, in Berea that makes bagging and shrink packaging systems.

Its ties to the packaging industry date to the 1950s. The privately held company’s products include heat- sealing equipment, vacuum sealers, automatic baggers, pre-opened bags on a roll and shrink packaging systems, according to the company’s website.

An email seeking comment was sent to PAC Machinery’s vice president of sales and marketing. Chuck Joseph, a Realtor with Platz Realty Group who helped broker the deal, said he did not know what may become of the building.

The sale of the 56,000-square-foot, two-story office building at 999 Pine Ave. SE and the 6.41 acres it sits on was final Sept. 18. The land is valued for taxes at $97,200 and building, $402,800, the auditor’s office shows.

Its previous owner, 999 Pine Avenue LLC of Lisbon, operated by Andrew Blocksom, purchased the building and land for $215,000 in July 2019 from the Community Improvement Corporation of Warren and Trumbull County, according to auditor’s records.

The former Tech Belt Energy Innovation Center in Warren, known now as BRITE Energy Innovators, acquired the property in December 2014 from BDM Warren Steel Holdings and held onto it until unloading it to the CIC in January 2018.

The building is immediately adjacent to the site where for more than 100 years steel was made by several companies, starting with Trumbull Steel Co.

Republic Steel assumed the name of the mill in 1930 and merged with LTV in 1984, but two years later, the company filed bankruptcy. The Renco Group Inc. bought the mill and renamed it Warren Consolidated Industries Inc., or WCI.

Over the coming years, WCI filed bankruptcy, from which it emerged in 2003, and sold the mill to OAO Severstal in 2008.

RG Steel LLC, a new entity of the Renco Group, bought the mill in 2011. In September 2012, RG Steel declared bankruptcy, leaving 1,200 employees out of work. BDM Warren Steel Holdings bought the mill later that year and started looking for a new buyer, but with no buyers in sight, it auctioned parts of the mill in spring 2013 and began tearing down buildings and started to market the land. The blast furnace, the last remaining blast furnace in Trumbull and Mahoning counties, was torn down in 2017.

The site is now a vacant brownfield that officials are hoping to redevelop.