Читать книгу Beyond Rust - Allen Dieterich-Ward - Страница 10

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 The railroad had superseded the river as a mode of transportation by the end of the century, but industrial infrastructure merged with the natural landscape and vestiges of a riverine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 of the western Appalachians, the southwestern edge of Pennsylvania was finally established in 1784. A year later, the passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785 defined how the lands across the Ohio would be surveyed and sold to settlers.⁵

As a result, while Pittsburgh remained part of the state of Pennsylvania, by the turn of the eighteenth century it was separated politically from its hinterlands to the south and west. By 1820, the city’s population had topped 7,200, making it second in size only to Cincinnati along the length of the Ohio. Wheeling scored an important coup in 1818 when it became the western terminus of a new National Road that connected the port of Baltimore with the Ohio River. Anglo-American settlers laid out the village of Steubenville, Ohio, in 1797 near a fort established to protect surveyors. Twenty years later the community boasted three thousand residents and a variety of manufacturers. Town lots for smaller communities also began appearing on local tax assessment records. The southwestern Pennsylvania community of Falls City, later renamed Ohiopyle, was founded adjacent to a series of rapids along the Youghiogheny River, a tributary of the Monongahela, shortly after the American Revolution by residents attracted by the availability of water power for mills. Ohiopyle’s population then slowly expanded after construction of the National Road in 1811 provided easier access to the markets of the east. Over the next century, residents were involved in the farming, mining and timber industries particularly after the arrival of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1871.⁶

This relationship between geography, market conditions and transportation technology drove metropolitan development within the region. While the Upper Ohio Valley had a temperate climate and relatively fertile soils replenished by seasonal flooding, the hilly landscape limited areas suitable for intensive agriculture and placed a premium on the level lands of the river and stream valleys. On reaching the flatter, fertile area just west of the Ohio River escarpment after weeks in the mountains, one early traveler on the National Road from Wheeling reportedly declared “This must be the land of Egypt,” a name that stuck to the small farming community of Egypt Valley in southeastern Ohio. The early market towns and river cities followed a development pattern of expansion outward on the relatively narrow flatlands between the riverbanks and the steep escarpment of the surrounding hills. These small towns served a number of important functions in frontier society, clustering together a variety of skills, professional services, and economic opportunities for the region’s residents. Even by 1790, Washington, Pennsylvania, located west of the Braddock Road between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, boasted sixteen retailers, thirty merchants and more than ninety-three other artisans and tradesmen, including such new trades as Windsor chair makers and coppersmiths.⁷

By the 1830s, the regional identity binding the trans-Appalachian West was overshadowed by an increasing identification along state lines. This transition was due in part to the decline in the importance of the rivers for inter-regional transportation and marketing in the face of road and canal construction. The arrival of the National Road in 1818 held out the possibility that Wheeling might challenge Pittsburgh’s supremacy, but the city struggled to attract investment when infrastructure development funds from Richmond were not forthcoming. President Andrew Jackson’s veto of the federal Maysville Road proposal in 1830 further heightened the role of individual states in determining the route of new transportation corridors, thus shifting the emphasis away from intra-regional improvements. “By 1835 the change wrought on Wheeling business [was] perceptible,” concluded historian F. F. Crall, and advertisements in Wheeling papers suggest the increasing penetration of the market by Pittsburgh merchants.⁸

Pittsburgh, which looked largely to Philadelphia as a partner in commerce, had an advantage compared to Wheeling, for whom out-of-state Baltimore was the key Atlantic port. The opening of a canal between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in 1834 reversed Wheeling’s advantages and caused the beginning of the city’s commercial subordination to its upriver rival. “We exceedingly regret that we cannot live at peace with our neighbors ‘at the head of navigation,’ ” one Pittsburgh editor mockingly declared. “We want to see our ‘little sister’ thrive and prosper. But she cannot let us alone. Like a half-starved, ill-natured mangy cur, she is constantly snarling and snapping at our heels.” Wheeling boosters struck back arguing that while Pittsburgh was above Wheeling, the seasonal lowness of the water and the five shoals between the two cities meant that only small boats could reach Pittsburgh—“little wet-tailed dinky boats that a cart load of rock would sink in their best days.”⁹

The commercial tension between Pittsburgh and Wheeling during the early nineteenth century manifested as a battle over each city’s claim to be the “head of navigation” on the Ohio-Mississippi system. This rivalry became particularly bitter during the infamous Bridge War of the 1840s and 1850s. Bridges had special significance as a triumph over nature in both Europe and the United States. Described as “one of the proudest monuments of enterprise of our citizens,” the completion of the first bridge across the Ohio River in 1849 at Wheeling was hailed as one of the great marvels of its time, a triumph of human engineering over the forces of nature. For residents of Pittsburgh as well as Steubenville, however, the bridge was “an inconvenience and delay,” “an unreasonable obstruction to navigation” that impeded the passage of ships upstream. A series of cases that worked their way to the Supreme Court exposed the rivalry between state and local boosters in Virginia and Pennsylvania as well as the competing merits of land versus water transportation.¹⁰

Even as this rivalry intensified, the relative decline of the Ohio River as an inter-regional transportation artery marked the beginning of the end for Pittsburgh and Wheeling as chief cities of the trans-Appalachian West. The growth of Cincinnati especially, which developed a direct connection to the Great Lakes via the Miami and Erie Canal, cut off markets to the south and west. While Pittsburgh’s population trailed Cincinnati’s by only 2,400 in 1820, by 1850 the “Queen City” had twice as many residents as its upriver rival. On the other hand, new railroad links coupled with a common geography, culture, and perceived economic interests created a strong Unionist movement in northwestern Virginia. In a series of conventions between 1861 and 1863, the first held with Union troops gathered across the river within sight of the meeting place, Wheeling residents formally ratified ties to their regional neighbors in Pennsylvania and Ohio and the new state of West Virginia took its place in the Union on June 20, 1863.¹¹

Making Steel

As in the rest of the nation, railroads were key to the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century. The 1854 completion of the Pennsylvania Railroad to Pittsburgh spurred more rapid economic and population growth, pushing new manufacturing firms up the Allegheny and Monongahela floodplains and across the water. In Wheeling, over five hundred “excursionists,” including the governors of Maryland and Virginia, members of the two state legislatures, and municipal officials traveled all night from Baltimore to the opening celebration of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) in “handsomely decorated” railroad cars complete with “bands of music.” The ceremony itself included major banquets as well as speeches by railroad president Thomas Swann and other luminaries including the Latrobe brothers and Baltimore financier George Brown. By the early twentieth century, Pittsburgh alone had six major trunk lines, sixteen industrial and switching railroads, fifteen inclines, and dozens of streetcar and feeder lines that honeycombed throughout its area.¹²

In addition to providing a faster, more direct, and more reliable means of transporting goods, the development of railroads created a vast market for iron and steel products as well as for coal. Here again, the region’s location, coupled with easy access to natural resources, made Upper Ohio Valley communities ideal for supporting the industry. “The commercial advantages possessed by Steubenville are not confined simply to excellent transportation facilities by land and water,” proclaimed an 1888 report, “but underlying the city and surrounding country veins of coal are easily accessible to market.” In 1840 Pittsburgh produced more coal-fired steam horsepower than any other city in the United States; Wheeling was in second place. Between 1845 and 1855, coal mine production in Belmont County, Ohio, just across the river from Wheeling, exploded from less than 8,000 to 133,000 tons annually. Notably, production doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 tons in 1854, the year after the B&O crossed the river from Wheeling. Similarly, coal production around Steubenville doubled in 1854 with the arrival of the first railroad and then leaped to more than 200,000 tons in the late 1860s after the completion of the Steubenville Railroad Bridge.¹³

The expansion of the region’s industrial capacity between 1850 and 1870 was largely an extension of previous patterns of production. The foundries and mills that made Wheeling “Nail City” in the 1860s, for example, had been established in 1832. The area’s iron, glass, pottery, and other industries also had their roots in the older riverine economy. However, government contracts during the Civil War brought “unprecedented activity and wealth” to local manufacturers. “Vast armies had been mustered out and adventurous young Americans were scattering themselves out over the face of their half-developed country, following the railroads West across the prairies, building new homes by the million,” explained one historian. “Nails were in demand and the black smoke rolled in clouds from the chimneys of Wheeling’s mills.” Around 1860, Wheeling manufacturers began developing the capacity to create their own pig iron, a raw material that they formerly had to have shipped from Pittsburgh. By 1885, the Wheeling district hosted over two hundred puddling furnaces, 1,400 nail machines, and an annual capacity of approximately 140,000 tons of nails.¹⁴

The most successful iron producer in the Upper Ohio Valley through the 1870s was Jones and Laughlin (J&L), a Pittsburgh firm founded in 1851 by two merchants and a skilled iron maker. Manufacturing facilities remained generally small affairs with the stages of production taking place in separate, often independently owned operations. Iron ore was first smelted into pig iron in an open-air furnace, generally near the source of the mine and the large amounts of wood needed to make the charcoal used as fuel. This was then shipped to forges and rolling mills, where it was converted into bars and slabs that formed the raw material for rails, nails, plates, and sheets. Still other factories produced the finished goods and tools that finally made their way to consumers. In order to address the inefficiencies in the iron production system, J&L founders B. F. Jones and James Laughlin began to introduce new labor saving technologies and to combine various parts of the production process within one firm. In 1860, J&L began work on blast furnaces on the north bank of the Monongahela that could use coking coal from nearby Connellsville to produce pig iron for existing rolling mills across the river.¹⁵

Jones and Laughlin’s construction of the Eliza Furnaces was part of a larger trend whereby industrialists in Pittsburgh and Wheeling slowly expanded and integrated their facilities. By 1870 innovations in management structure at the nation’s major railroads and radical advances in information technology began to be carried over into iron and steel production with dramatic repercussions. A new generation of managers and engineers spurred by an expansionist national policy and the political power to unite the two left an indelible mark on the social and physical landscape of the late nineteenth century. Railroads, especially the Pennsylvania Railroad, pioneered the use of new technologies, such as the telegraph, as well as a massively expanded corporate bureaucracy, because they had to. In terms of infrastructure, complexity of operation and technology, number of employees, and finances, the railroads quickly dwarfed their industrial predecessors, the New England textile mills. Unlike even the textile mills, the nature of long-distance transportation meant that railroad executives could not hope to personally observe all the workings of their company in a single day. Consequently, corporate managers had to develop systematic methods to run trains safely and on time, to ensure proper and timely maintenance, to track the thousands of shipments and millions of dollars that passed through the hands of countless employees.¹⁶

Perhaps no one was more responsible for transferring the management techniques of the railroads to manufacturing than Pittsburgh’s Andrew Carnegie. After rising to senior management at the Pennsylvania Railroad, Carnegie left in 1872 and formed his own company to manufacture steel using the new Bessemer process, facilitating the mass production of steel from molten pig iron. While Pittsburgh had solidified its position as the Iron City by 1850, this notoriously backward industry, with its primitive accounting and segmented production system, seemed an unlikely candidate for the type of managerial and technological innovation seen at the Pennsylvania Railroad. Indeed, of the thirty-eight iron and steel plants in and around Pittsburgh, not one used the more advanced Bessemer process. The largest of these, J&L’s American Iron Works, consisted of seventy-five smaller puddling furnaces and had an output of 50,000 tons of iron annually, an amount that would be dwarfed by a new generation of mills in less than a decade. Carnegie designed the firm that would form the nucleus of Carnegie Steel to take advantage of two opportunities for enormous profits he perceived while at the railroad—the vast market for steel rails and the ability to control costs by applying new financial accounting and management techniques.¹⁷

Vertical integration, the combination of various stages of the production process in one facility, grew out the desire to lower unit costs by producing more goods per investment dollar and cutting labor expenses. While J&L, Wheeling’s LaBelle Company, and other manufacturers had begun this process in a piecemeal fashion, Carnegie used systematic analysis to lower expenditures both within manufacturing components and in the intervals between parts of the overall process. Carnegie’s first fully integrated steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Works (ET), was a key example of this process in action. Located twelve miles south of Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River and designed by Andrew Holley, one of the foremost experts on the Bessemer process, ET was the most modern steel mill in the world at the time. As opposed to the traditional separation of processes in the existing iron industry, the plans for ET combined the making of steel using the Bessemer process with the fabrication of steel rails in an integrated method based on cost-data analysis. When it opened in 1875, ET featured a plant with two 5-ton Bessemer converters and a mill capable of producing 225 tons of steel rails daily, an amount that increased to three thousand tons later in the century. The mill was initially supplied with pig iron from Carnegie’s nearby Lucy and Isabella Furnaces, but a blast furnace was added in 1880 that made it possible to transform raw iron ore and coke (processed coal) into finished steel rails all at one facility.¹⁸

Between 1872 and 1901, when he sold the company to financier J.P. Morgan, Carnegie created a vast steel empire, centered in Pittsburgh, with an enormous array of iron and coal mines, railroad links, furnaces and rolling mills that allowed for the transformation of raw materials into finished products by all Carnegie-controlled companies. The secret to his success was high volume/low cost manufacturing—the application of the Pennsy’s formula of “big trains, loaded full, and run fast” to the mass production of steel. The purchase of the Homestead Works (1883) and Duquesne Works (1891), following capital shortages and labor strife among the previous owners, allowed Carnegie the capacity to dominate the manufacture of steel rails and he also began moving into rolled steel and other goods. Through precise accounting and careful analysis of costs, Carnegie was able to drive down dramatically the price per ton of steel produced forcing his rivals to consolidate, move into niche markets, or fold altogether. Shrewd deal making, political intrigue and his increasing economies of scale also allowed Carnegie to negotiate shipping costs and access to natural resources at advantageous rates. By the end of the century, Carnegie Steel controlled the largest and richest deposits of coking coal and iron ore then known. Its Pittsburgh area plants were the most modern in the world, with an annual output 700,000 tons more than that of Great Britain and a profit in 1900 of $40 million.¹⁹

In addition to the purely economic explanation for Carnegie’s success in transforming American manufacturing in the late nineteenth century, it is essential to consider the epistemological shifts in the relationship between humans and nature underpinning this transition. By 1870, as manufacturing—once perceived as an art, controlled, at least in part, by its practitioners on the foundry floor—evolved into an applied science, manipulated and overseen by professional managers, engineers, and scientists, business leaders increasingly saw the economic potential of applying chemistry and metallurgy to the production process. Carnegie looked for profits at every stage of steel-making and inculcated in his managers the need for constantly updating equipment that might be out-of-date though not outworn. Soon after the opening of ET, for example, its Bessemer converters became outdated when Sidney Gilchrist-Thomas discovered a new way to use iron ore with a higher phosphorous content. Carnegie immediately recognized the value of this discovery and obtained the rights to the process, which proved to be more effective in open-hearth furnaces. With substantial gains to be made at high volumes, he was prepared to scrap all his Bessemer converters despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in them. Responding to objections from British iron workers that his methods created waste and recklessly destroyed equipment, Carnegie famously declared, “Most British equipment is in use twenty years after it should have been scrapped. It is because you keep this used-up machinery that the United States is making you a back number.”²⁰

The repercussions of Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire spread throughout the Upper Ohio Valley, pulling in new residents, reshaping community bonds, and transforming the physical landscape—in effect creating a new “Steel Valley” region that superseded even if it did not fully displace earlier regional connections. The period witnessed the creation of many works of art celebrating the triumph of mass production, while the negative environmental effects of smoke, slag, and other forms of industrial pollution were often ignored or interpreted as positive signs of economic growth. Existing industrial employers modernized their works, and new innovators, such as George Westinghouse who arrived in 1873, also contributed to the region’s rapid economic growth. Between 1860 and 1890, Pittsburgh’s population again surpassed that of Cincinnati, more than tripling from fewer than 180,000 to nearly 552,000 residents. This population increase corresponded to a growth in manufacturing employment from 20,500 in 1860 to 97,600 in 1890, compared to a growth from 30,208 to 103,010 in Cincinnati. The importance of the vertically integrated industrial firm in driving this growth is clearly visible as Pittsburgh dramatically outpaced its downriver rival in the size of manufacturers, with an average plant of forty employees in 1890, compared to only eleven per factory in Cincinnati.²¹

Other communities also reoriented their economies away from agriculture and small-scale craft industries toward heavy industrial manufacturing and the extraction of natural resources. Wheeling and Steubenville emerged as important subsidiary centers of heavy industry with their own steel and iron producers, railroad links, and burgeoning workforce. Wheeling carved a niche for itself as a supplier of nails and by 1880 had thirteen iron and steel works, the most prominent of which were the LaBelle Iron Works and the Riverside Iron Works where Valentine Reuther began his career. As with Carnegie Steel, after reorganizing in 1875 the LaBelle Works controlled costs through vertical integration by acquiring a stake in iron ore mines in Minnesota, coal mines and coke ovens in Pennsylvania, furnaces and mills in Steubenville, and a host of other operations connected by railroad to its sprawling facility in Wheeling. However, Carnegie’s ability to access credit during the critical period surrounding the Panic of 1873 provided an opening for ET and Pittsburgh more generally that entrepreneurs in Steubenville and Wheeling could not match.²²

As a result, despite Wheeling’s success it was soon clear that it had been thoroughly outclassed by its upriver rival. The eight iron works in the city itself had a combined capitalization in 1880 of $2,274,425 with more than 2,600 employees and an output valued at $4,416,567. This compared to the 8,000 employed in 1885 at the Homestead Works alone. The 1900 census reported just over 11,000 manufacturing employees in Ohio and Marshall Counties (Wheeling), while Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) had risen to a whopping 128,000 workers. Relatively speaking, the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing was about the same, 15 percent for Wheeling and 16.5 percent for Pittsburgh, but the dramatic overall growth in the latter was directly attributable to the “capital, transportation, business facilities and successful management which could not be equaled” in the smaller city. Even the most successful of Wheeling’s iron producers, LaBelle, maintained a management structure that was more akin to the network of merchant families and artisanal ironman than the professional managers and scientists of Carnegie Steel. The company was founded by a small group of ex-Pittsburgh ironworkers who saw the potential of the community’s access to coal deposits and river transportation as well as the rail connection of the B&O. There were no capitalists in the partnership and through the 1920s, when it was reincorporated as the Wheeling Steel Corporation with more than four thousand employees, was striking in its continued reliance on management still “in the hands of descendants of the founders, many of the officials and directors being connected by blood or marriage.”²³

By the end of the nineteenth century, the region that had once been a colonial frontier and later a gateway to western settlement and markets had become the Steel Valley—the world’s greatest steel-producing region with a new economic system based on the large vertically integrated corporation. Between 1870 and 1890, metropolitan Pittsburgh emerged as the nation’s most powerful industrial area due in large part to the successful application of new scientific and management strategies in the process of steel making. While Wheeling and Steubenville also steadily added to their industrial capacity, the overwhelming growth of their larger neighbor drew them into the metropolitan region as satellite communities. A 1902 history of the Upper Ohio Valley made clear this transition, when it stated that Wheeling’s modest success as a manufacturing center was due not only to “the cheapness of fuel” but also to the city’s very “proximity [to] the Pittsburg (Pennsylvania) district.”²⁴

Mountains of Fire

By 1907 capitalists and corporate managers as well as entrepreneurs and local residents looking to participate in the heavy industrial economy had dramatically reshaped the social and physical landscape of the Upper Ohio Valley in ways that would have long-lasting repercussions. In that year the newly organized Russell Sage Foundation financed an extensive analysis of the nation’s most important industrial area, resulting in a landmark six-volume study, entitled The Pittsburgh Survey. The project’s scope was regional by design, an attempt to methodically examine workers and communities in the new system of urban factories, mill towns, and mining camps built on top of a pre-existing framework of agricultural settlements, market towns, and river-oriented cities. Survey director Paul Kellogg explained this vision of the area as an integrated unit, a complex totality that inextricably linked society and culture, humans and the natural world. “Pipe lines that carry oil and gas, waterways that float an acreage of coal barges, four track rails worn bright with weighty ore cars, 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

As mines in the Steel Valley grew larger and more 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.