Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ wires surcharged with a ruthless voltage or delicately sensitive to speech and codes,” Kellogg declared, “bind here a district of vast natural resources into one organic whole.”²⁵

      Despite this recognition of the importance of understanding the Steel Valley as an interconnected “locality,” the survey itself reveals some of the thornier issues in conceptualizing the region as a “definite geographical area.” Part of the problem was that growth in metropolitan Pittsburgh was quite decentralized compared to other areas in the nation, a factor further complicated by the state boundaries dividing Pittsburgh from its hinterland in the south and west. Development in the older cities, such as Steubenville and Wheeling, was largely limited to the narrow floodplains between the rivers and the steep surrounding mountains. Employers looking for flat space on which to locate their enormous integrated mills and factories had little choice but to expand beyond city limits. The accompanying need for access to river and rail transportation networks resulted in a dense, ribbon-like pattern of industrialized urban development extending upstream along the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers from Pittsburgh and downstream to Wheeling. The relationship between market town and agricultural hinterland was also remade during the period with rural mining camps forming an integral part of the region’s new industrial paradigm.²⁶

      Everything in the Steel Valley’s older communities began at the water. Prior to the arrival of the railroad in the 1850s, the region’s rivers were the primary means of getting goods and people in and out of urban areas. Consequently, urban development spread away from the banks with wharfs and merchant warehouses giving way to retail establishments and central business districts and finally residential neighborhoods, which often spread to the lower slopes of the surrounding hills. Despite the region’s rough topography, city founders in Steubenville, Wheeling, and Pittsburgh each adopted a grid pattern of development, making for a haphazard patchwork of steep, often impassable streets climbing up hills and down into ravines as builders attempted to master the landscape. The broken topography of mountains and river valleys tended to concentrate the population in the narrow flatlands as well as foster the growth of numerous, politically independent communities divided by breaks in the terrain. Despite enormous population growth after 1860, for example, Pittsburgh did not begin to consolidate its political power in the region and spread across its rivers until it annexed the small towns of the South Side in 1872 and its commercial rival Allegheny City in 1907.²⁷

      The examples of Wheeling and Steubenville suggest that the development of metropolitan regions, a process that historians have often viewed simply as industrial decentralization, also involved the incorporation and enhancement of existing local production systems. The rise of the railroads and expansion of manufacturing strengthened the connections between areas within the Steel Valley region that had previously been largely autonomous. Beginning in the 1870s, the transformation from small craft-based industries to enormous integrated mills requiring river and rail access increasingly pushed companies to search for outlying sites for new facilities. This trend was accelerated by land speculation and a desire for more control over workers as well as the region’s rugged topography and the spatial distribution of its mineral wealth. As new mills and mines sprang up throughout the rapidly urbanizing river valleys and the rural countryside, manufacturers, political leaders, and engineers developed an extensive railroad system spreading throughout the region. Trunk lines and regional carriers connected the major cities, while inter-urban lines and streetcars enabled speedy movement within communities and out to their growing hinterlands. By the late nineteenth century, a trip from Pittsburgh to Wheeling that had once been counted in days by steamboat or wagon road (if the season permitted the journey at all) could now be accomplished in a matter of hours, no matter what the weather.²⁸

      In addition to expansion within existing municipalities, corporate managers laid out entirely new mill-oriented communities, such as Homestead (1881), Monessen (1896), Follansbee (1905), and Weirton (1909). Industrialists built dozens of enormous mills and factories that hugged the narrow flatlands up the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers from Pittsburgh and down the Ohio Valley through Steubenville and Wheeling. The concentrated growth of mill towns in the river valleys exacerbated the issue of air pollution, leaving a legacy of environmental degradation and spawning some of the region’s earliest anti-pollution legislation. By the early twentieth century, a thick smoky haze that deepened with winter’s cold air blanketed many Steel Valley communities. According to local lore, smoke from the city’s stoves and furnaces so fouled the air that business executives would often have to change shirts at lunch due to the grime. “I remember,” recalled Wheeling resident John Hunter II, when “you drove downtown in the mornings, you’d have to turn on your headlights at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning because of the smoke.”²⁹

      As with the region’s cities, the growth of smaller Steel Valley communities during the mid-nineteenth century depended in large part on their location in relation to existing transportation systems, the vagaries of the local landscape, and the productivity of the soil. Kittanning, Pennsylvania, founded in the late eighteenth century, developed in a pattern similar to that of Pittsburgh, its neighbor down the Allegheny River. Washington, Pennsylvania, the site of the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion, was located along the Braddock Road, a major east-west route across the Appalachian Mountains. Smaller communities such as Ohiopyle on the falls of the Youghiogheny River and Barnesville, Ohio, west of Wheeling were both founded in the early nineteenth century as agricultural market towns in close proximity to the National Road. Unlike settlements in the steeper and rockier terrain of southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the gently rolling hills and fertile soils of eastern Ohio made family farming a more profitable proposition through the late nineteenth century. These small towns were hubs of regional activity, drawing local farmers weekly to downtown markets, hosting small craft-based manufacturing and artisans’ shops, and serving as centers for county government.³⁰

      The rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth century built on this preexisting system of hinterland seats and crossroads villages that served as collection points for agricultural goods and trading centers for the region’s farmers. Beginning in the 1850s, as the superiority of the Midwest for field crops and livestock became increasingly apparent, ambitious farmers in metropolitan Pittsburgh began to specialize and modernize. Agricultural entrepreneurs made the transition to truck gardens, commercial orchards, and dairy farms to supply the region’s growing cities as well as rural mining and lumbering operations. Southwestern Pennsylvanians began to specialize in sheep and wool production and influenced their neighbors in West Virginia and Ohio to do the same. By 1860, Ohio had the nation’s highest density of sheep; Harrison County just west of Steubenville boasted more than 150 sheep per square mile, a feat directly attributable to the construction of the first woolen mill west of the Alleghenies in the city in 1812. By the 1860s, transporting wool to the markets of Pittsburgh and the Atlantic seaboard was not difficult because railroad expansion had left few parts of the region more than ten miles from a rail line.³¹

      Rather than a clear break between farming and manufacturing economies, urban capitalists and industrialists in the Steel Valley soon joined forces with local farmers and entrepreneurs to produce the large quantities of minerals, coal, oil, and natural gas necessary to feed the ravenous appetites of the region’s industrial revolution. This industrialized countryside existed side-by-side with earlier agricultural modes of production. Indeed, the relationship between the two was often complementary, with local farmers tending their livestock and lands during the summer and producing a supplemental winter income by working coal seams on their own property or traveling to nearby mines. The arrival of the railroads between 1840 and 1870 fostered the growth of larger factories, provided a better outlet for locally grown produce, and allowed quicker connections with the region’s cities for both work and leisure. During the 1880s and 1890s, John D. Rockefeller brought much of the chaotic landscape of individual “wildcatters” and small-time speculators under the control of his mammoth Standard Oil conglomerate. Similarly, by the end of the century, most of the hundreds of small mines dotted throughout the region producing coal for home heating, steel production, and the railroads were gradually consolidated into a handful of conglomerations generally controlled by railroad or steel interests.³²

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