One of the most important industrial plants operating in Rybnik and its surrounding area was the Steel Mill “Silesia”. It was built as early as the middle of the 18th century in Paruszowiec, now a district of Rybnik, and was closed at the end of the twentieth century. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, during the heyday of the plant, a housing estate for workers was established nearby, of which a few three-storey multi-family brick houses known as familoks have been preserved to the present-day.