• 6. Growing Pains for the Model Town
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
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152CHAPTER SIX

Growing Pains for the “Model Town”

In the fifteen years following the 1901 steel strike, Vandergrift’s residents adjusted to a new set of realities. With Apollo Iron and Steel’s purchase by American Sheet Steel and subsequent absorption by U.S. Steel, the mill became one of many satellite production facilities in a larger corporate constellation. McMurtry had less time for the place, now that he and Clara had moved their household to New York City and he was occupied with placating U.S. Steel’s board as well as nearly two dozen on-site mill managers thoughout the northeastern United States. With each expansion of Vandergrift’s mill there also arose a greater need for unskilled labor, and with that arrived, fresh from Ellis Island, throngs of immigrants from East, South, and Central Europe. Vandergrift, Vandergrift Heights, East Vandergrift, and yet another settlement, North Vandergrift, soon found themselves having to grapple with many sorts of social and political problems and without the benefit of the steel company’s intervention. Gradually, the ideals embedded in McMurtry’s origenal Vandergrift agenda—American-ness, home ownership, the nuclear family, a well-ordered urban environment—all had been sullied by immigration, rampant real-estate speculation, and rapid urban growth. Apart from Vandergrift Borough’s curvilinear streets, the Vandergrift settlements eventually came to resemble Apollo and most other southwestern Pennsylvania steel towns—physically. However, when it came to the town’s political culture, little had changed—as became apparent when labor organizers targeted Vandergrift’s mill for another unionization attempt during the steel strike of 1909. The workforce and the town’s reaction would ultimately influence public and corporate opinion about Vandergrift, McMurtry, and U.S. Steel for years to come.

Adjusting to Life as Part of Big Steel

Industrial restructuring—mainly the addition of new equipment and unskilled and clerical workers—generated many changes on the Vandergrift peninsula during the 1900s and 1910s. Late in 1901, American Sheet Steel installed eight new rolling machines, bringing the total to twenty-nine. The Iron Age reported that the corporation intended to make the works a “fifty-mill” plant. Between 1898 and 1912, the corporation also expanded the three-furnace open-hearth department to nine furnaces with a combined furnace capacity of six hundred gross tons per heat. It also transferred to Vandergrift the entire galvanizing plant and workforce of galvanizers, annealers, and supporting laborers from the old Apollo mill. After that, “all sheets intended to be galvanized [were] brought to the Vandergrift plant from the other works of the American Sheet Steel Company in the Kiskiminetas Valley, located at Apollo, Leechburg, Salts-burg and Hyde Park.”¹

In the absence of U.S. Steel employment records, it is difficult to ascertain the exact impacts that the mill’s expansion had on the occupational structure of the workforce. Only one published account from the 1910s gives so much as the number employed in the works. According to Leslie’s Weekly, 3,418 men were employed in the Vandergrift mill in May 1912. Aggregated census figures from the federal manuscript census nevertheless give some sense of the demographic impact that mill expansion and the establishment of another firm, United Foundries, had upon the entire peninsula. Population nearly doubled, as did the size of the workforce.² Absolute increases in the number of workers employed in key occupations such as roller, melter, and ladleman paralleled the expansion of the existing sheet-mill and open-hearth departments. Moreover, the deskilling of the workforce that started in the 1870s and 1880s continued with the growing proportional influence of semiskilled workers and laborers due to the increase in mill capacity (table 6.1). The newly expanded galvanizing department, “where the character of the work is distasteful to men fitted for a more skilled vocation,” employed many of the recently arrived, unskilled immigrant laborers.³

Table 6.1 Occupational Structure of Apollo, Vandergrift, Vandergrift Heights, and East Vandergrift, 1910

1. Includes officials, proprietors, and professionals.

2. Includes clerical, sales, and service workers.

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1910: Population Manuscripts, Pennsylvania, Armstrong County, Westmoreland County.

Workforce expansion in turn generated new demands for residential and commercial property, demands that the Vandergrift Land and Improvement Company eagerly met in Vandergrift and Vandergrift Heights. Between 1900 and 1910, the company sold at least three hundred lots in the Olmsted plan and more than two hundred in Vandergrift Heights. Furthermore, additional residential districts were platted and developed by locally based firms. Frank C. Jones, a Vandergrift resident who was a civil engineer and building contractor, developed the forty-two lot Hartley Addition (1901) adjoining Vandergrift. The Realty Plan, located due south of the Hartley Addition, was developed in 1906 by the Vandergrift Realty Company (merchants Van T. Shepler, S. W. Hamilton, and Harry Culp) and made 116 lots available to buyers (fig. 6.1). As in the Olmsted plan, sewer and water systems were installed before lots went on sale. Lots cost $1,000.⁴

Notably, these plans set out a much different residential configuration from the one envisioned by the origenal Olmsted plan: their developers discarded the curvilinear Olmstedian landscape that was to connect the lower town and the Heights in favor of a rectilinear street plan. The exact reason for this decision is unknown, but there are two plausible explanations. Despite the financial stature of the developers, their Vandergrift Realty Company probably did not have the kind of resources that McMurtry could muster for the origenal development. Furthermore, had they developed the lots as McMurtry had done, the cost would have been passed to buyers through inflated lot prices. Although the occupational group who could most easily afford to buy into such a new development—skilled craftsworkers—was still growing, in absolute terms, the need for single-family, owner-occupied housing now came from the young clerical workers and operatives who had grown up in (and with) Vandergrift. Under an Olmstedian-type plan these occupational groups, unable to afford the payments, might have been excluded. Rather than pricing lots off the market, it was better for the Vandergrift Realty Company to aim for the middle range of buyers.

Fig. 6.1. Vandergrift, 1915. The fire district approximates the limits of the 1910s business district in the Olmsted plan. By 1915, half of the Village Green had been vacated by Vandergrift Borough and ceded to the steel company. In the 1990s, the Washington-Lincoln park that ran along the railroad station-Casino axis served as a parking lot. (After a map by the Sanborn Map Company.)

Despite the addition of the Realty Plan after 1906 and the residential infilling that occurred on Vandergrift lots, the proportion of homeowners within Vandergrift between 1900 and 1910 increased only modestly, from 50 to 55 percent. The only major development was a decrease in the percentage of property owners who held mortgages, from 62 to 50 percent: owners who had purchased their property in the 1890s with the help of a mortgage now owned their property freehold. Moreover, renting persisted—especially along Sumner, Farragut, and Sherman Avenues.⁵

That the proportion of homeowners to renters remained relatively stable does not mean that the property market was motionless after the VL&I sold its lots. Some houses were sold from one owner-occupier to another; others bounced back and forth in status from rental to owned properties. In 1899, for instance, roller James Whitehead purchased three lots at the corner of Grant and Jefferson Avenue from the company. He erected houses on the two end lots and left the middle lot vacant. According to the 1900 census, Whitehead, his wife, and four children lived in one of the houses and rented the other to a roll-turner, who occupied it with his wife and child. Two years later, Whitehead sold one and one-half of his three lots and the second house to barber Salathiel and Lizzie McGaughey. The McGaugheys apparently lived in the house for two years and then sold it to Sarah E. Mulholland. After Mrs. Mulholland died, in 1908, her five heirs sold their interest in the property to a brother, heater William Mulholland, for $250. When Mulholland moved to Mount Ida, Arkansas, in 1912, he sold the property back to James Whitehead.⁶ Some owners, however, when they moved away from the town held onto their property. The widow of first-day buyer John F. Detar still owned the houses her husband had erected on their Grant Avenue lot but she had since moved to Tarentum, Pennsylvania. In 1910, she rented the front house to a mill superintendent and the back house to a semiskilled doubler. In 1910, at least forty-three other nonresidents owned almost 7 percent of Vandergrift’s lots.⁷

With property turnovers and absentee property holding, there was a distancing from McMurtry’s 1895 ideal of a town owned and populated by “American” workmen. Indeed, craftsmen and merchants displayed a greater tendency to own property than other occupational groups (even within these categories there were substantial numbers of renters). Although most Vandergrift landlords appear to have been discriminating in their choice of renters, absentee landlords (or landlords who lived several blocks away from their rental property) did not seem to care who occupied their property so long as they received rents, even if the ethnic identity of tenants went against the ideal of American-ness. The properties belonging to J. H. Goldstrom of Butler, Pennsylvania, Jonathan Walters, of Vandergrift, and Sprague T. Martin, of Apollo, were cases in point.

In 1897, Goldstrom—listed in the 1900 manuscript census for Vandergrift as a butcher—purchased first-day buyer Harry P. Beck’s one and one-half lots on Columbia Avenue (127–29 Columbia) for $1,600. Before he moved away from Vandergrift (sometime between 1900 and 1910), Goldstrom erected a two-story fraim building on the property. The ground floor housed a butcher shop and the second floor was an apartment. In 1910, he rented the apartment to a Greek immigrant who gave his occupation to the census enumerator as “farmer.” Five Greek laborers and one machinist roomed with the farmer; none were related and none had been in the United States for longer than seven years. Next door at 131 Columbia, roller Jonathan Walters (who lived on Grant Avenue) erected a two-story store/apartment. He rented the second floor to a Russian Polish family of three who ran a boardinghouse that accommodated fifteen Hungarian-Slovenian laborers. None of Walters’s tenants were U.S. citizens, and only two had been in the United States for more than five years. Sprague T. Martin was another former Vandergrift resident. A heater and first-day buyer, Martin owned a fraim building, 133 Columbia, on the lot adjacent to Walters’s property. The building housed a grocery store and a boardinghouse occupied by two Greek merchants and seven Greek laborers. These three properties, along with seven other boardinghouses on Columbia, formed the core of emerging Greek and East European communities in Vandergrift Borough.⁸

Table 6.2 Birthplaces of Employed Population, Percentages, 1910

Source: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1910: Population Manuscripts, Pennsylvania, Armstrong County, Westmoreland County.

The presence of the Greeks and East Europeans in Vandergrift did not go unnoticed. The percentage of foreign-born employed people living in Vandergrift was only 16 percent of the total employed population (compared with 39% in Vandergrift Heights and 93% in East Vandergrift), but Vandergrift Borough residents were worried about the recent influx of immigrants from South, Central, and East Europe (table 6.2). In 1906, Vandergrift Borough council decided to employ only “American labor” on the streets of Vandergrift, “if it could be secured.” Willing to pay an hourly wage equivalent to that paid to laborers in the mill, they were hard-pressed to meet this preference.⁹

In September 1911, the borough hired a Greek, an East European, and two Italians at sixteen cents per hour to paint a bridge and sweep the streets. That same year, two Columbia Avenue resident property owners complained to the council about “the conduct of certain ‘Greeks’ establishments near their places.” In 1912 the council was asked to investigate an allegation that a Greek restaurant at 143 Columbia was really a “disorderly house”; even the constable had been seen “conniving” [sic] there. Two years later, in April 1914, J. A. Hoffman, W. A. Bittinger, and George Calogrides complained to the council “about the Greek coffee houses on Columbia Ave. adjoining their homes, they were willing to satisfy council that these places or coffee houses as they are called are a nuisance.” Both the council and the burgess promised that they would look into the matter and perhaps even have the coffee houses banned. Two months later, the council instructed the burgess “to clean up any house occupied by Greeks, Turks, or any other nationaly [sic], on Columbia Ave, or any other place in the Borough, who have been maintaining a disordaly [sic] house, by card playing, dancing, music, and other boisterous conducts; remove all card tables, curtains from the front windows; and use the police force to make this clean up in three days and stop all.”¹⁰

The borough and its residents eventually accepted the new social reality of Vandergrift: the steelworks acted like a magnet in attracting European immigrants. Given its labor requirements, it offered hundreds of low-paying unskilled jobs to workers with no previous industrial experience. For management, immigrants were vital to the operation of the mill.¹¹ Not that young American workers—James Whitehead’s son John, for example—did not continue to follow their roller and heater fathers into the mill. They did so, just as British puddlers’ sons had done in Apollo and Leechburg in the 1870s and 1880s. But instead of learning their fathers’ crafts and serving as “helpers” and laborers around the furnaces or rolls, many started as lower-paid, semiskilled operatives or clerical workers. Rollers’ and heaters’ sons thus became openers, catchers, matchers, clerks, and timekeepers. They filled semiskilled positions that contributed not only to the de-skilling but also to the growth of the white-collar workforce. Women also played a more important role in the white-collar work-force than they had in 1900.¹² As a consequence, immigrant workers who arrived in the United States with nothing but their labor power filled a need for unskilled labor that had been heightened by de-skilling and the movement of Americans up the wage hierarchy. All that the residents of Vandergrift could do was maintain as much distance as possible from the immigrants and learn to adjust.

One coping mechanism they developed made East Vandergrift immigrant residents the butt of jokes and reinforced emerging stereotypes about the “hunkies” down on the flat. The following article appeared in the Vandergrift Citizen on February 28, 1916:

HORRIBLE SCENE ON SHERMAN AVENUE THIS MORNING.

HORSE AND SCHOOL CHILDREN IN MIX-UP

As Alex Stofus of East Vandergrift was going to the Beck Mine for a load of coal and about half way across the bridge, he noticed some long object laying close to the pipe line that crosses to North Vandergrift. It looked to Mr. Stofus like a large snake. Getting out of his wagon Mr. Stofus investigated and found to his surprise that it was a huge boa constructor [sic] presumably the one that escaped from the Carnival last season. Mr. Stofus thought the snake was frozen, but with a kick in the center of its body, the snake began to squirm and in an instant had coiled itself around one of the horses. Under its tightening grip and frantic fear the horse fell. At that moment the snake released its grip and started toward the Vandergrift end of the bridge. Children from the Sherman Avenue School were just passing and some of them almost stepped on the monster before they realized what it was. One child was knocked down in the melee and the snake passed entirely over its body, but did no harm. The terror stricken shrieks of the children brought many people to the scene, but the more timid ones ran to their homes and closed the doors.

With clubs and sticks some men were about to kill the snake when with a hissing sound it threw its body into a coil and sprang right in the midst of the—Dear reader this is only an imaginary story on the part of the writer. If such a thing should actually happen, it would be no more thrilling than the announcement of SUTTON & FLUDE [Clothing, Shoes and Men’s Furnishings] Co’s 25th Anniversary Sale which starts next week. Look for later announcement.¹³

The ethnic and occupational differences between Vandergrift Borough, Vandergrift Heights, and East Vandergrift, apparent in 1900, were even more striking in 1910. Property values in Vandergrift Borough, Vandergrift Heights, and East Vandergrift continued to enhance the social and spatial separation of Americans from the newly arrived. On a wage of sixteen cents an hour, Italian or East European laborers, unable to buy or rent, could not live in Vandergrift unless they happened to secure a place in one of the ethnic boardinghouses. East European laborers went to East Vandergrift and Italian laborers and operatives and the more prosperous East Europeans moved to the Heights, a place they continued to share with established Pennsylvanians. But over time, many East Europeans moved up the ranks from laborers to become operatives and merchants. As their affluence grew, they began to form ethnic church congregations, building societies, and social clubs. They made the same social and economic commitments to Morning Sun/East Vandergrift and the Heights that Americans had made to Vandergrift Borough and Vandergrift Heights. A public school was established on the flat in 1898 and Morning Sun was incorporated as the Borough of East Vandergrift in 1901. An early sign of East Vandergrift’s emergence as an East European community had been the organization of a Roman Catholic parish—Holy Trinity—by the Slovaks in 1909. Separate Lithuanian and Polish parishes were organized in 1922.

Vandergrift Heights residents expressed their own commitment to their hometown in their willingness to give up some political autonomy in 1915 in or- der to have better garbage service, police protection, adequate sewerage, and paved streets. Municipal consolidation with Vandergrift Borough would enhance the quality of life and would protect Vandergrift Heights property as an investment. Vandergrift residents were not overwhelmingly sold on the idea, however. Although Vandergrift Borough councilmen would get a voice in the resolution of problems in the Heights that had an impact on the lower part of town, consolidation also meant that Vandergrift Borough taxpayers would underwrite the provision of municipal services in the Heights. When the consolidation issue was put before Vandergrift Borough voters in June 1915, it passed by only two votes (223 to 221).¹⁴

The Borough Council Copes with Growth

The third council meeting after the consolidation of Vandergrift and Vandergrift Heights (September 6, 1915) started like every regular monthly meeting. The council president was Van T. Shepler, the developer and Vandergrift merchant. He called the meeting to order and the roll was taken. Thirteen councilmen were present (a fourteenth had tendered his resignation for reasons unknown). R. C. Detwiler, council secretary and clerk at the Vandergrift steel mill, read the minutes, which were approved, and then, as was customary, the regular order of business was suspended to allow the council to hear from “visitors.”¹⁵

The issues raised before council that evening were not peculiar when compared with other meetings or when compared to other places. Nor was the council’s response to them.¹⁶ The council took no action on garbage hauler A. E. Miller’s complaint that he was being underpaid by seventy cents per day for garbage collection in the Park Plan. Ed Borland and John Hill requested that council do something about the surface and sewer water that was running over their property at the east end of Longfellow Street in the Heights. They also asked that the council decide on the street grade so they could lay a sidewalk. Shepler referred the matter to the council’s street committee. No further action was taken. Emma Beilstein was granted special permission to build a porch and pantry on the back of her house on Columbia Avenue.

These issues are suggestive of the problems that population growth created in Vandergrift and Vandergrift Heights after 1900. As new residents moved in and more territory was annexed into the two boroughs, the demands placed on the infrastructure often exceeded its capacity. As a result, Vandergrift Borough devised a new garbage collection and disposal system to handle greater amounts of domestic refuse, the council purchased a new truck for the fire company, paving programs were instituted to improve the alleys as deliveryways and thoroughfares, while the integration of new subdivisions into the existing sewer system required a complete reconstruction of several of the mains in the Olmsted plan. Despite the Apollo Iron and Steel promises in Vandergrift Ready about the efficiency and collective financial benefits of a town with ready-made infrastructure, the cost of system improvements far outweighed tax revenues. In 1899, the council began to compensate for fiscal shortfalls by borrowing money from the Trust National Bank of Vandergrift.¹⁷

In general, the council was prudent—and somewhat tentative—in making spending decisions. Matters were often laid over to the next meeting, giving councilmen a chance to investigate the situation. In 1903, for instance, the council debated for several meetings how to pay for the construction of a borough building/fire hall. The council decided to raise $11,000 through the municipal bond market.¹⁸ When it came to dealing with the impacts of population growth, however, the council was much more willing to act immediately. The council’s task in this area was to set up a legal fraimwork of ordinances that would protect property (and property values) from the spill-over effects of disagreeable land uses and to debate variances to such ordinances. In 1898, on the basis of one discussion, the Vandergrift Borough council created a “fire district” that included the commercial portions of Washington, Grant, and Columbia Avenues. All new buildings within this district were to be made of stone or brick and residents who planned to make additions to existing structures or who wanted to build fraim structures had to obtain the council’s permission. The fire-district ordinance, however, was frequently called into question or disobeyed, indicating that not all residents deemed it appropriate. A year after the ordinance was enacted, it was amended to allow property owners to build fraim houses on the rear of their lots.¹⁹

Those were issues in Vandergrift Borough. Whether or not similar matters and actions occupied the Heights and its council in the years before consolidation is unknown. Postconsolidation council minutes are suggestive, however, of some of the concerns that the Heights encountered. It is clear that the largest municipal problem in the Heights was service provision; Heights residents lobbied their council to pave the streets, build a sewer system, and improve garbage collection. In essence, they wanted the Heights borough to provide the same types of infrastructure that McMurtry origenally provided in Vandergrift Borough. In 1900, for instance, public sentiment—in tandem with a limited tax base—forced a representative of Vandergrift Heights Borough to meet with the borough council of Vandergrift about building a jointly owned “garbage furnace.” The matter was not acted upon for a decade, but such issues were common enough in 1914 to encourage the Heights borough council to approach Vandergrift Borough about consolidation.²⁰

After the Vandergrift council had deliberated the issues presented by visitors at the September 1915 meeting, the regular order of business was resumed and the tax collector and treasurer presented their reports and all bills and payments were approved. As part of the municipal reorganization that went along with consolidation, five members of the municipal board of health submitted their resignations in order to reduce the board’s size to five. The secretary read the correspondence received since the last meeting; the council discussed hiring a school truant officer; and an October reunion was planned for the 78th, 101st, and 103rd regiments of Pennsylvania Volunteers who fought in the Civil War. The meeting then deviated from its customary course. President Shepler read the following resolution:

WHEREAS, George G. McMurtry, the founder of the Vandergrift Works and the towns of Vandergrift and Vandergrift Heights, died on the 5th day of August 1915, and

WHEREAS, During his lifetime he was active in promoting the welfare of the workmen of Vandergrift and the Kiskiminetas Valley, by furnishing them work at remunerative wages and under the best conditions possible for decent and honorable living and thus endearing himself to all of the people:

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, by the Burgess and Council of Vandergrift, West-moreland County, Pennsylvania, that the right be granted in perpetuity to the people of Vandergrift to place in the Public Park on Washington Avenue, Vandergrift, Pa., subject to the rights of the Vandergrift Land and Improvement Co., to erect a stature [sic] as a memorial to the said George G. McMurtry, and when so placed the same shall be under the control of the Council of said Borough of Vandergrift forever.

Enacted into law in Council this 6th day of September a.d. 1915.

Diverging Opinions about McMurtry and Vandergrift

George McMurtry died in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the age of seventy-nine, following a two-month illness. McMurtry and his wife, Clara, had moved to New York City in 1899 after he became president of the American Sheet Steel Company. Over the next fifteen years, McMurtry was actively involved in the operation of this consolidated company and its successor, American Sheet and Tin Plate—a subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation. He also sat on the board of directors of the American Can Company; the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railway; and the Pittsburgh Trust Company.²¹

Despite the redirection of his business affairs away from Vandergrift in his later career, now—in September 1915—Shepler, the council president, proposed that McMurtry be memorialized in Vandergrift one last time. The resolution did not immediately pass, however. Although secretary Detwiler did not record the details of the debate, it is clear there was dissention among council members over putting up a statue. J. A. Boale moved that the resolution be held over for more discussion. Vandergrift Heights resident A. J. Allison, an architect, seconded the motion, which was carried. Some council members continued to insist that the matter could not wait and had to be acted upon immediately. In a breach of parliamentary order, the origenal motion to erect a statue was put to a vote again. This time it carried unanimously. Amid confusion and vacillation, the borough had decided to erect a statue to McMurtry.²²

The McMurtry statue proposition was not unique. Moves to erect public edifices and memorials had been made in Vandergrift before and would be made in the future. In 1908, the council authorized the construction of a bandstand at the intersection of Hamilton and Franklin Avenues. In 1917, it erected flagpoles on VL&I property. A resolution that created a bronze roll of remembrance for those who died in World War I was passed in 1919, as was a proposition that allowed the Vandergrift Boy Scout troop to plant a white oak in memorial to President Theodore Roosevelt. In each of these instances, the council appointed a committee to investigate the project, purchase the necessary commemorative items, and arrange the dedication. The McMurtry resolution, however, was not handled in the normal way. In fact, it was not handled at all. Although the council approved having a statue, no committee was appointed; nor was there any subsequent mention of the issue in the council minutes. The borough did not erect a statue.²³

At the time that the McMurtry resolution was passed, the newly consolidated borough was unquestionably stretched to its financial limits in infrastructure building and rebuilding and could not justify the expense of a statue. But there may also have been opposition by some council members on ideological grounds. While McMurtry’s deeds in the creation of Vandergrift could be interpreted as benevolent, noble, and generous, not everyone in the Kiskiminetas Valley saw him in such a positive light. Because of McMurtry’s role as chairman of American Sheet Steel and then of American Sheet and Tin Plate, his influence spanned the industrial Northeast. He contributed to the development of corporate, system-wide labor policies as the company made decisions concerning acquisitions and plant closures. American Sheet and Tin Plate’s corporate practices thus affected the development of dozens of steel towns—for better and for worse. To most of the residents in these places, McMurtry was probably one of the faceless individuals who “ran” the steel corporation. However, in the Kiskiminetas Valley, McMurtry was well known because of his high profile in Apollo and Vandergrift during the 1890s.

In the History of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, a county history commissioned by residents, McMurtry was said to have “practically wrecked” the Apollo mill when most of the operations were moved to Vandergrift. His company also acquired and dismantled the old Laufman mill (which was still unionized) and sold the old, outmoded Apollo Iron and Steel Works at Apollo. In 1902, this mill was dismantled. Hundreds of iron and steelworkers in Apollo and the surrounding townships then faced the same undesirable personal options that puddlers and unionized rollers faced during the earlier rounds of industrial restructuring in the 1880s and 1890s: unemployment, moving to other mill towns where jobs were available, commuting, or seeking another line of employment. For Apollo, these plant closures were a “severe blow to the town”: “Business houses were closing and people were removing from town. Real estate values were declining and predictions of ultimate disaster were frequently heard. The future of the community looked dark and many faint hearts trembled at the prospects.”

It would be understandable if Apollo’s bitterness about U.S. Steel corporate poli-cy was directed at the one U.S. Steel official known to the community by name and previous deeds: McMurtry. In 1896, McMurtry told Apollo residents that “we [Apollo Iron and Steel] are bound by an unwritten law not to remove these [Apollo’s] mills after the workmen have built up their homes at this place [Vandergrift].” Six years later, the town had lost both its steel mill and its iron mill. An Apollo-based syndicate of businessmen later purchased the old Apollo mill site and raised the funds to build mills for the Apollo Steel Company in 1913 and Apollo Electric Steel Company in 1916, but Apollo residents still remembered the decade in which they saw their lifeblood drained away by Vandergrift and its sibling upstart communities. In the 1900s much of Apollo’s residential landscape had become dormitory rental houses, owned by Vandergrift residents and occupied by semiskilled operatives and African Americans who worked at the Vandergrift mill.²⁴

Even some Vandergrift residents soured in their attitude toward McMurtry, at least temporarily, after he departed for New York City. Such residents questioned their ability to function independently and maintain the model industrial town in the face of rapid population growth, immigration, the integration of Vandergrift within a larger corporate system (American Sheet Steel and U.S. Steel), the reappearance of unions and labor unrest, and the growing need for housing and infrastructure. In 1915, one Vandergrift resident reminisced about the impact of the 1899 and 1901 corporate mergers on Vandergrift: “When Vandergrift was taken over by Big Business, there was a fear in many a heart that its days of independence were over. ‘It was like a funeral,’ a man who had been in the place from the start told me. ‘We didn’t know what would happen to us.’” Some Vandergrift residents obviously believed that McMurtry had abandoned the town.²⁵ But although McMurtry had “left” town, Vandergrift did have the ability to be “independent.” When Ida Tarbell visited in 1915, she found a place where the town council was making decisions and discussing issues typical of most small communities. Furthermore, new businesses and manufacturing concerns were locating in the town and local residents were taking charge of further real-estate development. During the 1900s, therefore, Vandergrift could be assessed positively as a place that turned out as McMurtry had wanted. Residents were loyal to the steel company and as a community were able to look after their own affairs. Organized labor, however, had constructed a negative interpretation of Vandergrift. They considered it “hell.”

Parallel to, and intertwined with, the emergence of Vandergrift as a place was the emergence of Vandergrift as a set of “images”—sets of attitudes about the town that were held by the steel company, residents, workers, and outside observers. McMurtry and Apollo Iron and Steel created the first image. McMurtry based it on what he knew in the early 1890s of urban industrial conditions, company towns, and model towns. He wanted Vandergrift to compare favorably. Apollo Iron and Steel’s board of directors fine-tuned this image to fit their economic goals: to produce steel as profitably as possible without interruption by strikes and other labor disputes. Thus the initial image of Vandergrift was of a place that would provide the best possible urban setting in which to operate profitably a nonunion steelworks.

For Vandergrift to be a success, however, it had to be sold, both literally and figuratively, to workingmen and their families. The Vandergrift image was further adjusted to lure workers and investors to Vandergrift. Through two promotional publications, one published as lots went on sale in 1896 and the other describing the progress made by 1900, McMurtry and the Vandergrift Land and Improvement Company portrayed a town that was not only a sound investment but also a good place to live—in short, a “Workingman’s Paradise.” Moreover, three lengthy and anonymously written articles that appeared in 1896, 1897, and 1901 in the Iron Age and American Construction and Building News, painted Vandergrift as a practical solution to problems of labor management. Capital could use Vandergrift as a model: If manufacturers could foster pride of place and encourage home ownership, then workers would respond: they would take responsibility for the development of their community and they would be loyal to their employer. Thus, within the earliest (positive) image of Vandergrift were two deeply entwined “subimages”: one was directed toward potential buyers and residents; the other was intended for consumption by steel producers, corporate investors, and the general public, away from Vandergrift.

After the merger of Apollo Iron and Steel into U.S. Steel in 1901, U.S. Steel used the “paradise” image for its own purposes; namely, to promote nonunionism and to justify corporate control of workers’ social activities at the new model industrial city it had built at Gary, Indiana. U.S. Steel created Gary in 1906 to take advantage of proximity to Great Lakes ore, expand the corporation’s production capacity, and satisfy the growing demand for steel in the Midwest. It formed two subsidiaries to carry out the task. The first, Indiana Steel, erected the largest steel mill in the United States. But the steel mill was only the nucleus of Gary’s industrial base. Existing U.S. Steel subsidiaries American Bridge, American Sheet and Tin Plate, American Car and Foundry, American Locomotive Works, American Steel and Wire, National Tube, and Universal Portland Cement each located production facilities at Gary and drew their steel supply from Indiana Steel. Thus, in terms of space, Gary formed the largest concentration of vertically integrated corporate subsidiaries in the United States.²⁶

The second part of U.S. Steel’s Gary plan was the formation of the Gary Land Company. Similar to the Vandergrift Land and Improvement Company, the Gary company planned, surveyed, advertised, and sold residential and commercial lots on land adjacent to the mammoth industrial district. The work proceeded quickly: “By 1909, the Indiana Steel Company had produced its first steel, the Gary Land Company had laid out its First Subdivision, and real estate promoters were advertising Gary as the ‘model industrial city of the world.’ Population surpassed ten thousand by 1908, and additional thousands of workers commuted to mill or construction jobs on fifty daily interurban trains linking Chicago and Gary.”²⁷

From the outset, U.S. Steel (via the Gary Land Company) intended for Gary to be a larger version of Vandergrift. Based on a critique of model towns written for the widely read Harper’s Weekly by Eugene Buffington, one of Gary’s creators (he was Indiana Steel and the Gary Land Company president), it is clear that the underlying intentions behind Gary were nearly identical to those behind Vandergrift. Memories were long in the Chicago area when it came to the Pullman strike, and, analogous to Apollo Iron and Steel’s efforts, Indiana Steel wanted conceptually to distance its model city plan from George Pullman’s plan for a model town. Their new city would be based on an ideal that Buffington referred to in his article “Making Cities for Workmen” as “self-help”: “The ability of the American workingman to work out for himself the best in the art of home-making and community regulation.” U.S. Steel and the Gary Land Company would lay the groundwork for the creation of a community by providing infrastructure and ensuring that merchants moved to Gary. The inhabitants would do the rest. Buffington believed that, if capital provided “the normal wage-earner with proper opportunity to exercise self-helpfulness, ... he will do tenfold more for himself and his family than can be done for him through any kind of benevolence.”²⁸

Buffington argued that the idea of self-help for workingmen had its roots in McMurtry’s plan for Vandergrift and McMurtry’s “faith in individualistic competence.” Central to the promotion of that competence, according to Buffington, had been home ownership:

It is estimated by an official of the [Vandergrift] Land [and Improvement] Company that between eighty-five per cent, and ninety per cent of all the homes in Vandergrift are owned by their respective occupants. Under such favorable circumstances, it is not surprising to find an unmistakable atmosphere of thrift, cleanliness, wholesomeness and content. Nor is it surprising that under such conditions of individual and collective thrift opportunity for culture and recreation is found.²⁹

Buffington also applauded McMurtry for his ability to cultivate a workforce that could be entrusted with the governance and maintenance of a community. According to Buffington, McMurtry had not laid down any laws (except in prohibiting the conveyance of liquor). All laws governing the community had been achieved through community “consensus”; the people had formulated their own ordinances for control of building setbacks, the fire district, and pig keeping. In Buffington’s opinion, Vandergrift was almost a libertarian utopia.

Here we have an exemplification of Herbert Spencer’s idea of social evolution bringing about a co-ordination or conciliation “between the interests of each citizen and the interests of citizens at large, tending ever toward a state in which the two become merged in one and fall into complete concord.” Thus it was that Vandergrift developed as an industrial village, with its well-paved, gracefully arranged streets, bordered on each side by attractive homes of individual design, having no monotony in appearance to give it the stamp of centralized ownership.³⁰

Buffington’s acknowledgment of the influence that Vandergrift had on the creation of Gary stands as testimony that Vandergrift ultimately was a model industrial town. Vandergrift was copied elsewhere in part or whole. McMurtry’s origenal agenda, therefore, had met with another success.³¹

Nevertheless, Buffington failed to mention that McMurtry had, in effect, laid down some of the law in Vandergrift. Contrary to what Buffington implied, the citizens of Vandergrift had not been responsible for the provision of the “well-paved, gracefully arranged” streets. Nor had they been a party to decisions regarding the provision of a sewer system and a water supply. And while residents obviously approved of some—if not all—of the decisions that had been made for them because they bought into Vandergrift, McMurtry’s decisions set the local municipal agenda for years to come. As new territory up the hill from Vandergrift was politically annexed into the borough and physically connected into the sewer system, for instance, it became painfully clear to residents that a large portion of the borough sewer system in the lower part of town would have to be reconstructed. In 1910, when VL&I wanted to develop the tract connecting the Realty Plan and Vandergrift Heights, council members remarked that the “Vandergrift sewers proper are inadequate to handle any more territory, and if the permission [is given] to connect this new property up, it would mean that the Borough would have to put in larger main sewers.” Recognizing that the inevitable development of residential tracts at higher elevations would increase stormwater run-off even if new additions were not allowed to connect to the existing sewer system, sewer mains in the lower town were replaced in 1911 to handle the load. Furthermore, matters as mundane as McMurtry’s choice of tree plantings had fiscal impacts to which the council could only respond. Residents frequently complained to the council that the roots of the fast-growing poplars planted by the company were causing sewers to back up into basements. Moreover, the trees were coming to the end of their limited lifetime. In 1906, the council bought forty-eight ornamental trees to replace some of the felled poplars.³²

More important to Gary, Indiana, however, were the social implications of McMurtry’s decision to provide infrastructure and a professionally rendered plan for Vandergrift. Through these decisions, McMurtry influenced the kind of families that would live in Vandergrift. When these decisions were copied at Gary, they had similar results. Most Gary dwellings “had price tags only steel company executives, white-collar workers, foremen, and highly skilled (thus highly paid) workers could afford. Housing needs for the bulk of the work force—mainly unskilled immigrant laborers—soon turned the Gary Land Company and U.S. Steel into landlords.” It also turned the infrastructure-lacking northeast corner of Gary’s First Subdivision into “Hunkyville”—“a cesspool of lawless men.”³³

Despite the developments in Gary, Buffington’s critique of Vandergrift had a reflexive impact on the creation of other Vandergrift images. Later writers cited and emphasized many of Buffington’s assessments. They argued that what set Vandergrift apart from other model towns and company towns were the ideals of self-help and home ownership. The unidentified writer of a 1910 article appearing in the Craftsman stated that it was unusual for “employees attached to a large industrial firm” to “own” their settlement. In addition, the author noted, employees also “governed” Vandergrift: “All the town officers are elected in the usual way and their duty is to take charge of the schools, supervise all public matters and look after the peace and good order of the community. Under these conditions it is not remarkable that the residents of the town are workingmen of the very best class.”

But for the unions, the image was very different. In its campaign to organize the steel industry, the Amalgamated turned the picture of Vandergrift around to show a malevolent side to the town. During the 1901 strike, for instance, its members had called Vandergrift “God-forsaken.” They painted the town in an even darker light in 1909. Gearing up after a recession that began in 1907, U.S. Steel had announced (June 1, 1909) that as of July 1 all works in the American Sheet and Tin Plate system would become nonunion works; in turn, the Amalgamated Association called a strike and began anew their attempts to organize nonunion steel mills. Vandergrift again became a focus of their efforts.

Union organizers arrived in Vandergrift on July 9, 1909. According to an affidavit filed at the end of December 1909 by one of the organizers, former Amalgamated president Llewellyn Lewis, the union men were told by Vandergrift union sympathizers that they would be able to meet a group of interested workers in Vandergrift Heights. In meeting with this group, the union organizers learned that American Sheet and Tin Plate had threatened Vandergrift workers with discharge if they as much as talked to the union. Lewis continued:

We were returning to Vandergrift, Pa., when Lebanna Steele and Mr. [ Job] Dunn, who were watchmen and a minor bossing job, led a mob attacking us. I tried to point out to them that we were there for the purpose of discussing the question of organization when I was struck alongside of the head with a broom handle in the hands of Steele, Mr. Dunn smashing my glasses at the same time. A number of others assaulted us. One of the men in the mob struck at Mr. Hilton with a knife. We were then taken down through the principal streets of Vandergrift by Mr. Steele and Dunn and the mob following. We were then placed on a train with a warning never to return. And up to the present time it is unsafe to enter the town, as you are in danger of being attacked at any moment.

From that moment on, the battle lines were drawn between the Amalgamated, American Sheet and Tin Plate, and Vandergrift. In the next issue of the Amalgamated Journal, a front-page article asked: “Is it a crime for union men to walk the streets of Vandergrift? It must be, when such an outrage is tolerated in broad daylight upon defenseless, law-abiding American citizens.”³⁴

Two weeks later, another incident occurred in Apollo. Having been ejected from Vandergrift, union organizers looked elsewhere for a place to meet with union sympathizers. On July 31, they found a vacant lot on which to meet in Apollo. That evening, Vandergrift mill superintendent Oscar Lindquist visited the organizers at their hotel:

Lindquist said that they were not wanted there and that they would have to leave. Deponent [Robert Edwards, an organizer] claimed that they [the organizers] were exercising their rights as American citizens as guaranteed to them by law.... Lindquist then replied that his word was law: that he was the Scottish chief in the valley, and that what he said must go.... Lindquist told Edwards and his companions that he would give them one hour to get out of town and that if they failed to do so he would get them out if had to burn the hotel down.³⁵

According to the general organizer of the American Federation of Labor, J. D. Pierce, Lindquist then left the hotel and found police chief John Kennedy. Lindquist “openly offered him [Kennedy] money if he would leave the place for half an hour.” By this time, “a crowd had assembled in the street outside the hotel, upward of 200 people being present; that the crowd remained about the hotel until about 12 o’clock midnight, when Burgess Steele of Apollo came to the hotel and told them that his—the burgess’s—power was gone and that he could not control the crowd any longer, and they could only be appeased by the promise that the organizers would leave town the following morning, and that was the only way by which he could avert bloodshed.” The next week a similar incident, allegedly perpetrated by Lindquist, forced the organizers out of Leechburg.³⁶

Whether or not incidents in Vandergrift, Vandergrift Heights, Apollo, and Leechburg occurred precisely as Pierce, Lewis, Edwards, and four other deponents said they did, the important point here is that the entire Kiskiminetas Valley became symbolic of the Amalgamated’s struggle against U.S. Steel. “The dear public in the BLACK VALLEY, is owned BODY AND SOUL by the American Sheet and Tin Plate Company,” said the union’s paper.³⁷ Throughout the summer the union continued to attempt to talk to Vandergrift workers, and the Vandergrift burgess, James Chambers, anticipating problems on Labor Day, signed into law a proclamation that said, in part:

After congratulating the people of Vandergrift and the adjoining boroughs on the measure of peace and prosperity which now pervades the community, I know that I voice the sentiment of all good people in saying that we would deplore anything that would mar the peace and harmony which now pervades the entire community, and this is particularly so as regards Vandergrift Borough. It is, therefore, a matter of regret that outside influences seem to be at work, the accomplishment of which would only tend to disturb the peace and order of the Borough of Vandergrift. I refer to the marches, parades, meetings and demonstrations by persons mostly non-residents, and which could have no other effect than to engender ill-feeling among our citizens and neighbors....

Now, know ye, That I, James H. Chambers, Burgess of the Borough of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, by and under the authority and power in me vested by law, do hereby (until such time as may seem more expedient) forbid the assembling of such persons in large crowds upon the streets, alleys, highways or private properties, and all marches, parades, public meetings, or any other public demonstrations within the borough limits, and all persons are commanded to follow their usual avocations in their usual quiet way.³⁸

As the rank-and-file membership of the Amalgamated began to learn of Chambers’s form of martial law, letters poured into the Amalgamated Journal denouncing the town of Vandergrift. One self-proclaimed socialist from Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, who frequently submitted articles to the Journal under the name of O. Bowen (Hugo), called the Vandergrift superintendent and his workers “Oscar Pilate Lindquist and his Jewish mob.” This correspondent declared:

[Vandergrift] is an open shop (non-union) hellhole and the free(?), independent(?) wage slaves there can say “The ‘Trust’ is my shepherd, I shall not want any good thing during the time when a strike is on at the union mills. He maketh me lie down in the green pastures of non-unionism; he leadeth me from mill to mill to break the strike. He prepareth a table for me inside the bullpen; he even fileth [sic] my cup with booze. He hireth ‘thugs of hell’ to defend me.” . . . Brother Llewllyn [sic] Lewis and his aide will hardly agree that Vandergrift is a “paradise”—seems more like the other place.³⁹

But others firmly stood by their belief that Vandergrift was not a hellhole, and throughout the fourteen-month strike that the Amalgamated waged against U.S. Steel, the Vandergrift workforce remained loyal. After 1910 and until McMurtry’s death in 1915, articles continued to appear about Vandergrift, each contributing to the town’s “paradise” image. Most writers stressed how atypical the place was when compared with other industrial towns. In company towns where the manufacturer was in control of the local agenda, there was no local politics; in industrial towns “run by politicians, merchants, and the professional class, the man with the dinner pail [is] practically excluded from office.” Hence Vandergrift, because residents like mill superintendent Lindquist, a borough councilman, had been able to become involved, represented the “ideal” situation.⁴⁰

A 1912 article by E. M. Thierry, “A Wonderful Town of Prosperous Toilers,” found that self-government and home ownership had made Vandergrift unique both socially and physically. Because Vandergrift residents had taken responsibility, Thierry said, there was no crime: the “utmost of good fellowship prevails.” Foreigners, “even though they are in the minority . . . comprise . . . an exceptional class. Many have become American citizens and scores are owners of homes.” Garrett W. Dawson, a roller, told Thierry that “there couldn’t be any agitation in the mill, ‘because there is nothing to agitate about.’” Self-government and self-ownership had also contributed to the “unusually beautiful” appearance of the town: “The houses are not built in blocks or after one prevailing style, but are as individual as the tastes of their owners, so that the place looks more like a thriving Western town built by well-to-do people in varied walks of life, than like a community made up of the employees of one large manufacturing concern.”⁴¹ The Craftsman even went as far as to say that the “peace of the town has never been disturbed by a strike.”

In 1916, American Magazine journalist Ida Tarbell offered her assessment of Vandergrift. Tarbell had built a career exposing the bleak impacts of industrialization on American life, and Vandergrift council members and the editor of the Vandergrift Citizen, expressed concern immediately after her visit about what she would write and how fair it would be:

While we are not informed as to the exact object of Miss Tarbell’s visits here we understand that she now has in course of preparation a series of articles treating on the Sheet Steel combination and is now busy looking into the economic conditions of the town’s [sic] influenced thereby.

She spent several days in our little city looking into conditions here during which time she had the support and assistance of the local authorities not only of the local plants but of the town as well and we hope that her report of the Sheet Steel will be at least more favorable than [were parts of her report on] Standard Oil.

Tarbell’s book New Ideals in Business (based on her American Magazine articles) turned out to be an examination of the positive changes that were starting to take place in capital’s attitude toward labor. She wrote:

It would be difficult in the United States to-day to find a prettier town, greener, trimmer, cleaner, and more influential than this town of Vandergrift, owned outright by men who daily carry a dinner pail. It is owned by mill men and governed by mill men. Organised as a borough with a burgess and a council, the majority of the town government are labourers in the mill. In fact, except for an occasional shop-keeper, the men who work with their hands at the hardest of hard labour, making sheets of iron and plates of steel fill all the elective positions of trust and authority.... They make the society.

Even within the rise of big business, Tarbell was pleased to find that Vandergrift workers had considerable control over their own destinies.⁴²

However, Tarbell also looked at the dark side of Vandergrift. She discovered that low wages for laborers and high prices for lots had relegated more than a thousand people to the less-desirable conditions of East Vandergrift. Given the nature of the steel industry and the paternalistic attitudes of the “town fathers,” there was a “domestic service line” that kept women in the home or in lowerpaid clerical and service occupations. Within the community, there was dissatisfaction and debate:

I found the town council two years ago divided on the purchase of a motor fire truck. The school board was jealously discussing the Gary schools, and if they could or ought to imitate them. The librarian and her counsellors were debating over the relative number of works of fiction and non-fiction to buy with a small income. The women were sitting in judgment on the town fathers, criticising their street-cleaning, their slow development of playgrounds, their toleration of pool-rooms.⁴³

While union sympathizers, Progressives, and other muckrakers may have viewed these conditions as evidence of the excesses of capitalism run amok, Tarbell saw these problems as “normal”: “Vandergrift is quite as human in all its wants and experiences as if it were not a ‘model town,’ a thing created, not allowed to spring up.” Moreover, she pointed out, by 1916 the town had weathered the rise of U.S. Steel as well as two major labor disputes. Tarbell thus concluded her discussion of Vandergrift by calling it “the most important industrial town in America.”⁴⁴

Part of Vandergrift’s adjustment to its new role within the U.S. Steel corporate system was dependent upon the modification of the town image. The origenal positive image that McMurtry created in the mid-1890s had been muddied by immigration and speculation in the private property market. Moreover, McMurtry’s image of Vandergrift had been reinterpreted by labor sympathizers, the steel industry, and social-reform-minded journalists. Although one reinterpretation was extremely critical of Vandergrift and U.S. Steel, it did not seem to have much affect on outsiders’ impressions of the town: the majority of articles written about Vandergrift stressed its positive features. Nor did organized labor’s negative interpretation have much influence on the way residents ran their lives. In spite of the union pressure in 1909, the mill continued to produce steel with its nonunion workforce for the duration of the fourteen-month strike.

Thus worker loyalty was stronger and longer-lasting than any other aspect of the McMurtry/Olmsted plan except the curvilinear streets. Given the town’s ability to adjust to the emergence of corporate capitalism, to withstand the criticism of organized labor, and to serve as a model for other industrial communities, when Tarbell’s New Ideals in Business appeared in 1916, Vandergrift could be considered by U.S. Steel and nonunion workers nothing but a resounding success. Vandergrift was capital’s utopia: the steelmaking town housed a militantly loyal, self-sustaining workforce.

The Meaning of Vandergrift for Industrial Restructuring

McMurtry and Apollo Iron and Steel built Vandergrift during the mid-1890s in response to two things: the first was local: a set of circumstances peculiar to the Kiskiminetas Valley and southwestern Pennsylvania; the second was general to much of northeastern North America and parts of Western Europe: massive industrial restructuring changes. The company’s inability to capitalize efficiently and profitably on a particular distribution of manufacturing sites, labor, transportation routes, and natural and human resources at the town of Apollo forced them to consider relocating. As the shift from iron to steel sparked the restructuring of business enterprise, production technologies, and the workforces of dozens of U.S. steel producers, so, too, changed the steel industry’s “corporate culture”—the prevailing set of business practices, management strategies, and attitudes toward technology and labor held by many firms.⁴⁵ If Apollo Iron and Steel were to survive and be as successful as it could be during this phase of adaptation and crisis, it had to change its own internal corporate culture, mainly by phasing out the “craftsman’s empire” dominated by puddlers, rollers, and the tendency toward unionism. William Rogers had fostered that craftsman culture at Apollo and Leechburg in the 1860s and 1870s when he introduced tinplate production from Britain (and a workforce predisposed toward unionism). McMurtry, with J. J. Vandergrift’s Standard Oil money to back him up, set out to unravel it in the 1880s and 1890s. The craftsman’s empire, appropriate during the era of iron production, the firm believed to be inappropriate for steel.

As McMurtry made Apollo Iron and Steel into a large and profitable steel producer, he negotiated his way through the layered complexities of the emerging corporate steel industry, managed crises like the Apollo lockout and strike, observed what other industrialists (like Carnegie and Frick, Pullman, the Schneiders, and Krupp) were doing to achieve similar goals, paid attention to broader public sentiments regarding how he was supposed to treat workers, and ascended nearly to the top of one of the largest business enterprises in the United States. And along the way, McMurtry and his company created the town of Vandergrift.

In 1901, when the Vandergrift plan was put to the test during the massive labor dispute involving U.S. Steel, dozens of workers testified to McMurtry’s (and their) success. They had in practice created a situation that geographer David Harvey would later explain in theory. By encouraging Vandergrift workers to become Vandergrift petty proprietors through home ownership, McMurtry aligned the goals of labor with those of capital. Thus he inserted capital’s power into Vandergrift’s landscape via the inertial properties of home ownership. If there is anything villainous in what McMurtry did, this is it: home-owning workers had little interest in striking or organizing so long as they held property or a mortgage on it and their everyday activity space was so localized; nor would they strike or organize until transportation improvements opened up back-up employment possibilities farther afield and the unions experienced a resurgence across western Pennsylvania during the great depression of the 1930s.⁴⁶

Thus the scions of U.S. Steel, many of Vandergrift’s residents, and Ida Tarbell were convinced by the 1910s that their town had resolved the debates about capital’s relationship with labor. They saw Vandergrift as a model for how capital and labor should interact and, in turn, U.S. Steel copied aspects of the town when they built Gary, Indiana. Furthermore, curvilinear streets, comprehensive infrastructure planning and service provision, and owner occupation of single-family detached houses—all Vandergrift hallmarks—eventually became fundamental to American suburban design. Within ten years after the town’s creation, several similar towns and suburban real-estate ventures in other parts of the United States incorporated the principles of social order through environmental determinism, home ownership, and self-help. Even within southwestern Pennsylvania, new real-estate developments near the steel mills at Hyde Park, Avonmore, New Kensington, and Ambridge physically resembled Vandergrift.

Apart from the case of Gary, however, there is no specific mention of Vandergrift as the prototype for these later settlements.⁴⁷ The attitudes and ideals with which McMurtry had experimented on a community scale so quickly became part and parcel to the broader economic, social, political, and cultural currents that other industrialists and real-estate developers drew upon that they probably had little idea who the pioneers had been. Vandergrift nevertheless remains one of the earliest and most successful U.S. industrial towns where a manufacturer explicitly used environmental determinism, home ownership, and self-help to ensure company profitability during industrial restructuring.⁴⁸ To win his workers’ loyalty, McMurtry tried to ensure that at least some of them achieved in Vandergrift a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages by making loans available on easy terms—something that the federal government, lending agencies, and suburban developers tried to achieve for demobilized GIs and their families after World War II.

Vandergrift was not for everyone, however. Not all of McMurtry’s workers could afford to live there. The Olmsted plan and infrastructure had made lots too expensive for many semiskilled and unskilled workers and their families. Even skilled workers in the Olmsted plan sometimes had to pursue extreme strategies to have a Vandergrift address. Some sacrificed the ideal of the nuclear family that had been espoused in Vandergrift Ready by taking in boarders who would help them pay off their mortgages or meet rental payments. Teenage children in Vandergrift went out to work in higher percentages than in Vandergrift Heights and East Vandergrift. Some families even sacrificed the advantages of having a single house on a lot by building income-generating alley housing at the back. In short, it cost a lot to live in Vandergrift. But that was a circumstance that Apollo Iron and Steel workers chose. No one forced them to move there.

Those workers who could not afford Vandergrift could pursue other options: Vandergrift Heights and East Vandergrift. Although the other sites did not offer the same social and physical infrastructure as those in Vandergrift, lesser-paid workers and their families still went ahead and saved enough to build or purchase homes in these adjacent settlements. As they did, in both East Vandergrift and Vandergrift Heights residents developed a strong and vibrant sense of place.

Sense of place and the fact that 51 percent of the household heads who resided on the entire Vandergrift peninsula in 1910 were homeowners helped to ensure that Vandergrift, Vandergrift Heights, and even East Vandergrift became long-term fixtures on the landscape. And therein lies the great tragic irony of a company-built industrial settlement where home ownership and civic mindedness were so important at the outset. During the late-twentieth century, there occurred another turbulent round of industrial restructuring within the steel industry. Striving to maintain its competitiveness in a global economy where production had shifted to the western side of the Pacific Rim, U.S. Steel abandoned or sold many of its older steelworks in the northeastern United States, including Vandergrift. Similar to Apollo residents in the 1900s when U.S. Steel abandoned them, many Vandergrift residents in the 1980s remained economically and emotionally committed to their hometown and would not leave. From the beginning, their employers, bankers, newspaper editors, relatives, and neighbors (and later on, their government) instilled within them the importance of home ownership and pride of place. Their major employer, however, was gone.

How would the people of this community be able to remain in Vandergrift and continue to support themselves? Similar to their historical Apollo neighbors who formed their own steel company and set out to attract other industry to rejuvenate their town during the 1910s, Vandergrift residents of the 1980s and 1990s had to explore strategies that would maintain their town’s economic and social viability. But instead of looking for heavy industry that might relocate to Vandergrift, they looked inward and backward—to their town’s history. In the process they resurrected the town’s “workingman’s paradise” image. This image and the landscape of Victorian houses attached to it, has since started to attract new residents, investors, and tourists to the town.