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 ten mills. Within a few years the Weirton Steel Company 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