had fifty mills and was second only to U.S. Steel in production of tin plate.1
During its heyday between 1880 and 1920, the Steel Valley developed a set of social and environmental patterns that, while similar to other industrial areas, yielded unique challenges that require a nuanced analysis in order to understand subsequent attempts at regional economic restructuring. Just as with the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant in Detroit or the Googleplex in the San Francisco Bay Area, Weirton’s mills existed as nodes in a larger district where companies both competed over and shared a common labor force, natural resources, management expertise, and technical innovations. While cities with flatter topography like Chicago and St. Louis developed rings of manufacturing suburbs extending out from the central city, the dearth of flat land in the Upper Ohio Valley resulted in dense urban-industrial areas that snaked along the narrow riverbanks leaving large parts of the higher elevations relatively unpopulated. Further, Pittsburgh’s status as both a manufacturing center and an energy capital meant that metropolitan development included an industrialized countryside with pockets of urban-like densities occurring around company-controlled mine sites. Exploring the process of steel making from mine to mill provides a clearer understanding of the ways in which the values of the Gilded Age were embedded in this landscape of production.
As the formation of Weirton suggests, dispersed industrial development, a rugged landscape, and strong kinship networks, bolstered by employment policies designed to splinter class unity along ethnic lines, encouraged the formation of small tightly knit communities divided among hundreds of separate political jurisdictions. Weak civic administrations were expected to keep taxes low and serve the needs of industry, while corporate paternalism and the repression of organized labor undercut challenges to the existing economic and political system. As late as the 1960s, outsiders remarked on the continuance of a “strange ethnonationalism” among the various immigrant communities, which made it difficult to achieve any sort of political consensus. Despite annexation campaigns and attempts at government reform during the Progressive era, understanding this history of “perpetrated factionalism that approaches total chaos” is vital for interpreting attempts at public-private coalition building in later decades. Of the region’s older cities, only Pittsburgh was able to overcome this political splintering and embark on a meaningful program of urban planning and infrastructure development under the infamous political machine of Christopher Magee and William Flinn. Indeed, the creation of new public parks, and especially the expansion of the University of Pittsburgh in the hilltop civic center of Oakland, provided the first glimmer that Pittsburgh’s destiny might be more than that of the “Smoky City.”2
Coal, Steel, and Rail
The process of industrial production shaped the social and physical landscape of the Steel Valley, forming a common set of opportunities and challenges for the region’s residents. A ton of steel required approximately a ton and a half of iron ore, a half ton of coke, and a quarter of a ton of limestone, not to mention a few other elements, vast quantities of water, more coal to power the railroads and barges that ferried minerals from the mines, and electricity (also produced from either coal or natural gas) to run the mills. Similar to the region’s other major corporations, Carnegie Steel and its subsidiary, Frick Coke Company, owned a number of so-called captive mines that were transferred to U.S. Steel at its founding in 1901. The Leith Mine & Coke Works in the Connellsville region, for example, began operation in the 1880s to produce coke for the Joliet Steel Company near Chicago. Frick bought the mine in 1889 and upgraded operations, building the first steel tipple in the region to hoist cars loaded with coal up the shaft and lower workers into the mine. Despite some geological characteristics that made it “a hard one to manage” according to one mine inspector, the Leith mine was easily connected to Homestead and the rest of Carnegie’s steel empire by both the Pennsylvania and Baltimore & Ohio Railroads. By the turn of the century, more than three hundred people worked in the mine and the adjacent coking facilities, producing nearly 120,000 tons of coke annually.3
As with iron and steel manufacturing, consolidation and vertical integration produced dramatic changes in the way coal was mined, particularly in large companies. Mine owners worked to replace what had been essentially underground workshops controlled by skilled miners with new management practices aimed at lowering costs and controlling the production process. Mines became much more hierarchical spaces, with individual workers forming parts of interdependent, coordinated, and carefully supervised groups. Standard practice throughout the region was to divide the actual extraction of coal among specialized workers, including cutters (operated mechanical cutting machines along the coal seam), loaders (loaded coal by shovel into mine cars), and shooters (used dynamite to blast coal from the front of the seam) as well as myriad assistants, helpers, and other subcategories. Animal or mechanically powered coal cars then hauled the coal to the mine shaft and up to the coal tipple where it was sorted and weighed by supervisors.4
Upon reaching the surface, coking coal, such as that produced at the Leith Mine, was processed in one of the “beehive” ovens dotting the area. Over 40,000 such ovens produced 18 million tons annually; this amounted to 60 percent of the nation’s coke produced in a region only fifty miles long and five miles wide. Workers loaded the coal and processed coke onto train cars and shipped them to blast furnaces that created raw or “pig” iron. For the Homestead Works, this initial process occurred in the Carrie Furnaces, across the Monongahela River in the mill town of Rankin, “a small bleak place,” according to one observer. Each day three hundred railroad cars of coal and coke, limestone, iron ore from the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota, and other materials passed through the Carrie complex, which was dominated by the furnaces themselves—four steel behemoths more than two hundred feet high—each with the capacity to turn out sixty-five hundred tons of iron a day. Once there, the ore, coke, and limestone were hoisted to the top of the brick lined towers, while enormous stoves used coal to heat air to three thousand degrees and then blasted it into the bottom of the stacks. The downward movement of the ore, coke, and limestone, and the upward movement of hot gases refined the iron through a series of chemical reactions. Every three or four hours, workers extracted the molten iron from the furnace, as well as the heating process residue called slag.5
Even by the turn of the century, the dearth of flat land that forced both railroad lines and enormous mills to be located in the narrow river valleys required expensive and novel infrastructure to adapt the landscape to the needs of industry. From the Carrie Furnaces, for example, the molten iron was poured into huge cigar-shaped cars and went back across the river to the Homestead Works on a “hot metal bridge” that opened on New Year’s Eve, 1900. Once inside the mill, the iron was transferred to steel ladles and transported by enormous cranes to the open-hearth furnaces where it cooked in intense gas heat and hot air with a mixture of limestone and steel scrap. The men who worked at the tapping hole, where the steel flowed from the hearth into a giant ladle, wore thick protective coats, dark goggles, and heavy leather boots for protection from the intense heat. After the mixture had cooked for eight to ten hours depending on the type of steel needed, the skilled melter overseeing the process ordered a sample to be taken. If the molten metal was judged ready, workers used a long steel lance with a dynamite charge on the end to blow out the tapping hole and release the red hot metal. The slag floating on the surface was siphoned away leaving pure steel that was then poured into molds, where it solidified into ingots the size of a house.6
Once the raw steel cooled, workers reheated it until malleable and sent it to the primary mills where the ingots were rolled into semi-finished forms or to the forge division where they were crushed into shape by enormous presses on the way to becoming gun turrets, railroad axles, ship propeller shafts, and other finished products. From the primary mills, the steel shapes were taken to the finishing mills and rolled into plates, beams, pilings, or railroad wheels and sheared to the desired lengths. Workers then loaded finished products onto railroad cars or barges that traveled to consumers around the world. While it was only one of dozens of mills throughout the region, by the end of World War II the Homestead Works alone could churn out annually 2 million tons of pig iron; 4 million tons of steel ingots; 1 million tons of blooms; 2.7 million tons of slabs; 1 million tons of beams, pilings,
