deep the original beauty of the once green slope, is in turn being veiled with climbing weeds—such is Nature’s haste, when untrammeled, to heal the scars wrought by man.”
As Afloat on the Ohio suggests, the transformation of the Upper Ohio Valley into the Steel Valley resulted in an economy based on a nexus of coal, steel and rail that linked Pittsburgh, Steubenville, Wheeling and their hinterlands in a process of natural resource extraction. Industrial entrepreneurs pioneered the development of the vertically integrated corporation, creating an interconnected system of mammoth steel mills, coking plants, and mines extending from the heavily industrialized river valleys to the mining camps of the region’s mountainous interior. Residents had a common culture shaped by the topography and grounded in a celebration of industrial triumph over nature. The logic of industrial capital reshaped the natural landscape, but so too did the region’s rivers, mineral deposits, and rugged topography structure growth patterns in ways that were unique among the nation’s great manufacturing areas. As a result, each stage in the social evolution of metropolitan Pittsburgh required a cultural reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world.
By 1900 competition for control of the Ohio headwaters had given way to a regional community, with Steubenville and Wheeling on the periphery of the metropolitan core in southwestern Pennsylvania. At the heart of this framework were the mines and mills themselves, which bound together distant areas in a sophisticated production process that resulted both in finished goods and the social inequalities observed by Thwaites. Expanding communities and industrial sites placed heavy demands on the environment, which decreased standards of living even as social reformers faced a fractious administrative and political system often dominated by large industrial corporations. By World War II, a social crisis rooted in increasing economic and environmental problems eventually resulted in a new public-private partnership in Pittsburgh that sought to remake the region both physically and symbolically. Taking the full measure of Pittsburgh’s “Renaissance” first requires exploring the complicated ways in which the economic and political realignments that created the Steel Valley set in place patterns of land use, social interactions, and cultural assumptions that proved difficult to change.
FIGURE 2. Metropolitan Pittsburgh: the Steel Valley.
CHAPTER 1
Building the Region
A cacophony of strange lights, sounds, and smells confronted wide-eyed Valentine “Val” Reuther in 1899 when he stepped off the train in Wheeling, West Virginia. Greeted by his brother Jake at the station, the eighteen-year-old German émigré had just made the trip from his family’s farm in Illinois to seek his fortune in the city. Turn-of-the-century Wheeling, like the rest of the Pittsburgh metropolitan region, was bursting with vitality and Val quickly found quarters in a “very proletarian” boarding house in South Wheeling, an area full of “Germans, Poles, Scandinavians, Yugoslavs, and Irishmen.” He soon started as a laborer at the Riverside Ironworks, located in a nearby industrial suburb, where he worked seventy-two hours a week for $1.50 a day. Through hard work and a personal relationship with the foreman, Reuther climbed his way up the labor ladder, eventually landing a job as a “heater” in the rolling mill and earning ten to twelve dollars for the same twelve-hour shift.1
In 1899, it had been more than 125 years since the Zane family first settled the east bank of the Ohio River as an outpost of the British Empire. Merchants in Pittsburgh, Wheeling, and Steubenville prospered as western markets expanded, using the river and its tributaries to gather produce and distribute manufactured goods from Europe and the Atlantic seaboard. The railroad had superseded the river as a mode of transportation by the end of the century, but industrial infrastructure merged with the natural landscape and vestiges of a riverine society to foster a common culture shared by residents throughout the region. “The mine, the mills, and the river made a fascinating setting for exploring boys,” recalled Valentine’s son Victor of his youth on the banks of the Ohio. “Calliope organs resounding from the river drew us to the banks to watch the steamers go by, creating great waves with their side or rear paddle wheels. We fished and swam; it was a rite of adolescence for each boy to make it all the way to the other side of the water.”2
Reuther’s story provides an important reminder that the fraught conversion to a post-industrial society that would take place a century later was not the region’s first challenging transition. From the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the Upper Ohio Valley’s strategic position at the headwaters of the vast Ohio-Mississippi river system made it politically significant and provided access to the economic markets of the western frontier. On the one hand, we can see the beginning of a regional community defined by its rough topography, distance from other metropolitan regions, and orientation to its rivers. On the other hand, Steubenville, Wheeling, and Pittsburgh each vied for control of the headwaters with local boosters touting the advantages of their respective cities in terms of location and access to mineral resources, especially coal. In a pattern that would reemerge, especially after World War II, the success of local communities during this earlier era depended to a large extent on the ability to harness resources on the state level: a factor that further underscores the ways tensions between intra-regional bonds and barriers will matter to the subsequent story.
The expansion of the railroads lessened the area’s importance as a transportation node, but trains also sparked a new industrial phase and eventually attracted investment in manufacturing, especially iron and steel making. By the end of the nineteenth century, the region had evolved into the Steel Valley, which formed the center of heavy industrial manufacturing in the United States. An extensive web of railroads connected the densely settled mill towns of the narrow river valleys with mining camps and villages in the surrounding mountainous countryside. In addition to these economic bonds, residents shared a regional culture shaped by the topography and grounded in a celebration of industrial triumph over nature. This shift had cultural, social and material ramifications as heavy industry replaced a riverine society and Pittsburgh increasingly served as the hub of a complex metropolitan landscape. While Steubenville and Wheeling were drawn into Pittsburgh’s orbit as economic satellites, however, the creation of the Ohio River as a state boundary ensured that political rivalries would also play a key role in circumscribing regional development.3
Controlling the Headwaters
The difficulty in crossing the rugged Appalachians was a key factor in establishing the regional connections between communities in the Upper Ohio Valley, a theme that would remain centrally important throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. The area lies in the northwestern part of Appalachia, the mountainous region stretching from southern Quebec to central Alabama. The landscape ranges from the steep hillsides of the Allegheny Mountains in southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia to the gently rolling hills of the Appalachian Plateau in southeastern Ohio. Numerous rivers and streams punctuate the terrain with the two largest, the Monongahela and Allegheny, merging in what is now Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. Unlike the Chesapeake colonies, where the major east-west river system passed through deep gorges, the Susquehanna River from Baltimore through Harrisburg was easily traversed. From there British soldiers and settlers followed a Native American trail, the Allegheny Path, along the ridge tops farther and farther westward.4
On the other hand, even after the defeat of the French in the Seven Years’ War, competition continued between Virginia and Pennsylvania for control of the headwaters and by 1776 rival trans-Appalachia routes ran to the Ohio River at Pittsburgh (Forbes Road) and northwestern Virginia near Wheeling (Braddock Road). The victory over the British Army by American colonists in the 1780s hastened a massive influx of white residents and land speculators that continued as the new federal government opened the Northwest Territory for settlement. Continuing a colonial rivalry that had been simmering for decades, Pennsylvania authorities frequently clashed with Virginian settlers and land speculators over the exact location of the state boundary line. Though one contingent to the Continental Congress proposed resolving the territorial dispute by creating a new state of “Westsylvania,” an acknowledgement of the diverging regional interests of both Richmond and Philadelphia elites from residents