Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward

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СКАЧАТЬ numerous, they quickly outstripped the local labor capacity, necessitating the increased importation of immigrants to meet greater industrial demand. Unlike the situation in the region’s more urbanized areas with pre-existing housing, these new residents often settled in shoddily constructed company towns where they were subject to the will of their employers. “At each tipple is a miner’s hamlet,” observed Thwaites of the hastily constructed communities, “a row of cottages or huts, cast in a common mold, either unpainted, or bedaubed with that cheap, ugly red with which one is familiar in railway bridges and rural barns.” This settlement pattern also had a spatial element, with the older agricultural communities occupying the flatter uplands and newer mining camps in the river and creek valleys. These “patch” towns were often ruled with an iron fist and, when coupled with the demands of a dirty, dangerous and debilitating workplace, were the site of some of the most violent labor wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³³

      If Andrew Carnegie’s transformation of the moribund iron industry through the creation of the vertically integrated corporation symbolized the rise of Pittsburgh as the world’s greatest steel producing region, his partnership with coal baron Henry Clay Frick symbolized the new relationship between city and countryside. Born on a farm near Connellsville fifty miles up the Youghiogheny River from Pittsburgh, Frick represented the generation of Upper Ohio Valley natives who transitioned away from the region’s riverine roots toward its industrial future. His grandfather, Abraham Overholt, made a fortune distilling Old Overholt whiskey, a staple of the trans-Appalachian trade. The Connellsville region was particularly appealing to mine and mill operators because of the high-quality coal, Connellsville Coke, used in the steel-making process, and because of the ease of transporting large amounts of coal by river to mills in and around Pittsburgh. Frick obtained a loan for $10,000 from Pittsburgh financier Thomas Mellon to begin mining local coal, and by 1873 he was selling all he could produce. A decade later, Frick was a millionaire with a thousand coking ovens and three thousand acres of land under his control.³⁴

      At the same time, Carnegie was rapidly expanding his vertically integrated steel operations even as his takeover of the Homestead Works represented his first horizontal acquisition. However, the increased production capacity of the new mill created a need for greater access to coking coal, a problem he solved with the purchase of a controlling interest in the Frick Coke Company in 1883. The industrialization of the countryside had a profound effect on the physical landscape of the Steel Valley. At its peak in 1910, over 40,000 “beehive” coking ovens in the Connellsville region produced 18 million tons of coke annually, 60 percent of the nation’s total. Most of this tonnage went directly to feed the blast furnaces of J&L Steel, Carnegie Steel, and smaller competitors. In addition to the creation of dozens of mining camps throughout the area, the small cities of Connellsville, Uniontown, and Greensburg also grew dramatically during the period as local foundries and machine shops sprang up to produce and repair mining equipment and service and equip the railroad spur lines built in the late 1870s.³⁵

      The rural hinterland became an integral part of the heavy industrial economy as the Steel Valley’s rugged hillsides were thus transformed into “mountains of fire.” Nearly thirty miles separated the closest portion of the Connellsville district from the Pittsburgh iron market at the time of its initial exploitation by Frick in 1871. By World War I, a dense network of railroads, capital and labor links, and heavy industrial plants along the Monongahela River knit the two areas tightly together, both spatially and functionally. Even at the end of the twentieth century, abandoned structures relating to the oil and coal booms remained scattered throughout the region. As mining progressed, huge heaps of wastes accumulated near the mine entrances, looming over nearby housing. Silt from the piles clogged nearby streams as acid mine drainage turned the water orange and coated the hillsides in rivulets. Subsidence from underground mining was a frequent occurrence and the increased use of surface mining during World War I left enormous scars on the landscape itself, eventually prompting outcries by some local residents that their “country would be better fit for farming.” In her 1947 book, Cloud by Day, Muriel Earley Sheppard described the landscape of the Connellsville district as “a country of extremes, ugly by day with banks of coke ovens, tipples, sidings, and fields gnawed to the rock with strip-coal operations; luridly beautiful by night when the glare of the ovens paints the sky … a place of wealth and great poverty, with too much smoke, too much violence, and far too many people.”³⁶

      “I do not intend to beg for the city, nor to advise you how to dispose of your money,” opened an 1899 letter from Wheeling attorney Nelson Hubbard to Andrew Carnegie, “and if the mere suggestion I am making is unwelcome to you I hope you will take no further thought of it.” Hubbard went on to urge the Pittsburgh industrialist to consider locating one of his new libraries in the smaller city. “Had the prosperity continued which Wheeling had in the iron business three and two decades ago,” the writer explained, “we might have had a considerable class of people with money … who could supply our need themselves. But Pittsburg overshadowed Wheeling and took the profit out of the iron and steel business here.” Hubbard continued, “Pittsburg concerns had capital, transportation, business facilities and successful management, which could not be equaled here; and when Pittsburg’s real growth began, Wheeling died.” He concluded, “Should you ever care to interest yourself in the city, the appreciation and gratitude of a minority will be correspondingly strong.”³⁷

      Even as German immigrant Val Reuther began work in Wheeling as a skilled iron heater, the changing dynamics of industrial manufacturing meant that employers were increasingly substituting capital in the form of new labor saving technologies that made artisanal iron production obsolete. As Hubbard’s letter suggests, when the communities of Wheeling, Pittsburgh, and Steubenville shifted from a riverine to an industrial economy during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the boundaries of the region’s economic and cultural influence contracted even as Pittsburgh rose to dominate its smaller neighbors. By the early twentieth century, enormous firms with names such as U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal, and Weirton Steel had remade the Upper Ohio Valley into the center of the nation’s heavy industrial production—the Steel Valley.

      This regional makeover owed as much to the evolution of new forms of management by Pittsburgh industrialists as it did to either a fortuitous location or available natural resources. During the 1870s, captains of industry such as Thomas Scott, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Frick pioneered the development of a new way of managing railroads, rolling steel, and mining coal—the large, vertically integrated, industrial corporation. A high degree of specialization in basic manufacturing and the domination of a few very large, multi-divisional industrial corporations set the stage for the Steel Valley’s meteoric rise and subsequently hampered efforts at economic diversification. Between 1880 and 1920, the full ramifications of this transformation would become clear as new immigrants, new social relationships, and a remanufactured landscape created a distinct regional culture intimately tied to the success, sites, and process of steel production.

      CHAPTER 2

      Mines and Mills

      In 1909, Pittsburgh industrialist Ernest T. Weir purchased 105 acres of West Virginia farmland overlooking the Ohio River across from Steubenville, thirty-five miles west of Pittsburgh and thirty miles north of Wheeling. Weir was the son of immigrants from Northern Ireland and, before striking out on his own, had worked his way up to general manager of U.S. Steel’s tin plate mill in Monessen. The new mill site was at the intersection of river and rail transportation with good connections to Pittsburgh and national markets. It also featured a ready supply of cheap land and cheap fuel from nearby coal mines and oil wells. Proximity to Steubenville via a new bridge provided Weir with a pool of workers, while the older city also allowed access to goods and services, functioning as a downtown marketplace for the new factory town. “As we were walking over the vacant fields and looking over the land,” Weir declared of his first visit to the site, “it was already a settled matter that we would build a completely integrated steel plant.” The company’s first facility was in operation before the end of 1909 and consisted of СКАЧАТЬ