• 2. Apollo's Uneasy Transition from Iron to Steel
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
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36CHAPTER TWO

Apollo’s Uneasy Transition from Iron to Steel

“A canal town of the past, a railway town of the present, Apollo is destined to become an iron city in the future.”¹ This somewhat odd prognostication from an 1891 “cyclopedic” description of the Kiskiminetas Valley points out the danger in treating secondary archival material as historical fact. In 1891, steel, not iron, had already been the order of Apollo’s day for nearly a decade. Beginning in the early 1880s, new investors had entered Philip Laufman’s firm and transformed the Apollo mill yet again, this time into a major producer of steel sheets. They ripped out old iron-making equipment to make way for giant furnaces for making steel and faster rolling equipment, added even more unskilled and semi-skilled workers to the payroll, and changed the company’s name in 1886 from the Volta Iron Company to Apollo Iron and Steel to advertise the latest product shift.

This transition from iron to steel progressed fairly smoothly throughout the 1880s. In the early 1890s, however, Apollo Iron and Steel’s corporate goals started to conflict with the needs and aspirations of Apollo’s residents. The steel company desperately wanted to buy land adjacent to the mill for expansion, but surrounding property owners refused to sell. Tensions also emerged between the rapidly changing steel company and its tradition-bound unionized ironworkers over hiring practices, production techniques, and wage rates. In 1893, the tensions erupted into a full-fledged, two-year labor dispute. Unable to expand their plant and wanting to be rid of the union forever, Apollo Iron and Steel’s investors began to make plans to abandon Apollo. A canal town of the past and now an iron town of the past as well, by the mid 1890s Apollo faced a very uncertain future, even as a steel town.

Major Players in the Transition

In 1883, seven years after Laufman & McElroy assumed ownership of the Apollo mill from William Rogers, the U.S. economy entered yet another recession. Even though the downturn was nowhere near as severe as the one that had followed the 1873 Panic, some manufacturers ceased operation, waiting for conditions to improve. Many others saw their facilities seized to pay creditors. A few, however, capitalized on their competitors’ misfortune, acquiring at auction (and at bargain prices) the machinery, natural resources, and property belonging to bankrupt firms. Manufacturers thus used depressed economic conditions to put the bulwark in place to gain a greater market share and make more profits once the economy rebounded. But doing this often required new investors and infusions of capital.

At the beginning of the 1883 downturn, Philip Laufman and Sarah McElroy reorganized their Apollo iron firm. The historical record is silent regarding the motive: the firm may have been in financial trouble or it may simply have needed an infusion of capital to add more equipment to the Apollo mill. Whatever the reason, Laufman and McElroy became partners with several new investors and the company was renamed Volta Iron.

Capitalized at $300,000, ownership of Volta Iron was divided into 3,000 shares, each worth $100. Laufman and McElroy each owned 525 shares. The remaining shares were split between five investors from Pittsburgh: Herman Mechling (500 shares), John Evans (483 shares), James Bingham (483 shares), Charles Batchelor (242 shares), and Jacob Jay Vandergrift Jr. (242 shares).² Of Evans, little is known: he is untraceable through the federal manuscript census and published biographical sources. He may have been a puddler in Allegheny City in 1880, but even if so his connection with the other investors in 1883 is unclear.³ The others were all related to Pittsburgh oilman Jacob Jay Vandergrift Sr.: Mechling and Bingham were married to Vandergrift’s daughters Helen and Kate; Batchelor was married to Vandergrift’s cousin; and J. J. Jr. was J. J. Sr.’s son. Apart from Philip Laufman (and possibly Evans), none of the investors in Volta Iron had lifelong associations with the iron industry. Instead, most of the capital they brought to the firm had been earned in other lines of business—steamboat shipping, pipelines, oil refining, and real estate. By 1886 their investment in iron making proved to be so profitable (or was it that the firm was in such trouble?) that the Vandergrift family patriarch, J. J. Sr., became the principal stockholder. This Vandergrift, if compared with all previous investors in the Apollo iron industry, was a megacapitalist. The possessor of a unique résumé of business experience for southwestern Pennsylvania, he would finance the company and Apollo’s transition from iron to steel.

Jacob Jay Vandergrift Sr.

Born at Perrysville near Pittsburgh in 1827, J. J. Vandergrift Sr. (fig. 2.1) grew up on Pittsburgh’s South Side.⁴ At the time, “Pittsburgh was already a smokey industrial city of the steamboat era at the hub of commerce going upstream as well as down.”⁵ Stimulated by visits to his uncle John’s steamboat-building works on the Monongahela riverfront, Vandergrift decided at age fifteen to leave public school to become a cabin boy on the steamboat Bridgeport. For the next decade he served as deckhand, mate, captain, and then pilot on a variety of steamers and towboats that ran between Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

In 1858, Vandergrift acquired part ownership in two steamers that towed coal from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Two years later (the year after Edwin Drake successfully drilled for oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania), Vandergrift left the operation of his steamboats to his Pittsburgh-based partners and headed off to stake a claim in the newly opened West Virginia oil field. Within a year, he was back in Pittsburgh, his wells having been seized by the Confederate Army. Vandergrift’s second attempt to enter the oil industry—this time in northwestern Pennsylvania’s booming “oil region”—met with far greater success (fig. 2.2). At the time, the Pennsylvania oil region was much like the California gold fields a decade earlier: rough, rowdy, and bustling with activity.

In November 1861, Vandergrift hauled four thousand empty oil drums up the Allegheny River for delivery to various oil producers around Oil City. While there, he purchased five thousand barrels of crude oil to deliver to Pittsburgh refiners the following July. Vandergrift planned to transport this oil down the Allegheny River using the conventional method: his steamboat would push barges loaded with oil-filled barrels. But during the winter of 1861–62, Vandergrift learned that another firm had successfully transported oil in bulk in a barge hull. Convinced that this would be a cheaper way to get his crude to market (rather than buying 5,000 wooden barrels), Vandergrift commissioned a friend to build twelve “bulk boats” at the cost of two hundred dollars each. Each bulk boat carried four hundred barrels’ worth of crude. In one season, the oil Vandergrift carried on these barges more than paid for his expenses. Thus began a lucrative business that made Vandergrift rich. On a single trip, “oil purchased at point of production in 1863 at one dollar per barrel, was sold a little later in the same year at Pittsburgh for twelve dollars per barrel, at a profit of seventy thousand dollars.”⁶

Fig. 2.1. Jacob Jay Vandergrift Sr. (Photo from the Pittsburgh Photographic Library Collection, reprinted courtesy of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.)

Vandergrift moved to Oil City in 1863. Soon afterward, he turned his attention toward solving one of the more dire problems that oil producers faced: transporting oil from the wells to the refinery. At the time, oil producers relied primarily upon independent teamsters to haul barrels of oil over muddy roads in wagons. These teamsters often charged exorbitant cartage rates: figuratively, and almost literally, they had producers over a barrel. If teamsters did not like the rates producers wanted to pay, they refused to work.

Fig. 2.2. Map of oil region of Northwestern Pennsylvania. In the late 1860s, J. J. Vandergrift Sr. built a large refinery at Oil City fed by several small pipelines. Extending from Pithole to West Pithole, Fugundas to Trunkeyville, East Sandy to Oil City, and Bredinsburg to Oil City, the pipelines became the underpinnings to the United Pipe Lines of Vandergrift, Forman and Company and were critical to John D. Rockefeller Sr.’s plans to control oil production in the region.

Given the transportation difficulties, many oil refiners (who were usually not the same people as the oil producers) built refineries close to the wells in boom-towns such as Oil City, Pithole, and Titusville. However, refined products such as kerosene and lubricating oil were just as difficult to transport as crude. Therefore, unlike the iron industry with its big weight differential between resource and product, there was a weaker incentive for refiners to locate near their source of supply. Some firms ended up siting their refineries closer to the market and to major transportation arteries—principally the Ohio River and the Great Lakes—in cities such as Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

“Captain” Vandergrift’s experience in the riverboat trade put him at an advantage to solve the transportation problem. He had the financial resources to hire his own gang of teamsters, but the amount these teamsters could carry was insufficient to supply the oil refinery he had just built at Oil City, which required two thousand barrels per day.⁷ Thus Vandergrift began experimenting with the construction of short pipelines that would ensure a constant, large supply of oil. The earliest pipelines extended from Pithole to West Pithole, from Fugundas to Trunkeyville on the Allegheny, from East Sandy to Oil City, and from Bredinsburg to Oil City. They became the underpinnings to Vandergrift’s transportation firm, the United Pipe Lines of Vandergrift, Forman & Co.

Within five years, Vandergrift owned and operated facilities in nearly every aspect of the oil industry: resource acquisition (drilling/production), resource processing (refining), and transportation (pipelines). The only area he had not yet entered was the manufacture of the tubes and pipes needed to drill wells and to transport oil. Few others had so successfully integrated several aspects of production as—a fact that made Vandergrift important to Cleveland refinery titan John D. Rockefeller when Rockefeller set out to gain control of the northwestern Pennsylvania oil region in 1871.⁸

Like many refiners, Vandergrift initially objected to Rockefeller’s presence in the oil region. Vandergrift had worked hard to build up his part of the industry and he did not want to relinquish control. Realizing, however, that Rockefeller was in the midst of striking a preferential transportation deal with the railroads that might bring Pennsylvania’s oilmen to their knees, in 1872 Vandergrift handed over autonomous control of his pipelines and refinery (and, presumably, his wells) to Rockefeller in exchange for the vice presidency of the new National Refiners Association and a large amount of Standard Oil stock. Rockefeller would be the president. For the next decade, then, Vandergrift was one of Rockefeller’s closest business associates, joining the likes of John D. Archbold, Charles Pratt, Henry H. Rogers, and Henry Flagler.⁹

Standard Oil effectively controlled refining, transportation, and hence crude-oil production in the Pennsylvania oil region by the end of the decade. Standard Oil’s “associates” received not only rate reductions from the railroads, but Rockefeller also coerced the railroads into giving Standard Oil a rebate on any oil that the railroads hauled for Standard Oil’s competitors. As if that were not enough, Standard-friendly railroads refused to haul oil of some Standard-hostile firms or to allow non-Standard pipelines and railroads to cross their rights-of-way.

Independent producers, refiners, and transportation firms, clearly shaken by these developments, did not give in to Rockefeller and his associates without a fight. In 1878 they began pressing New York and Pennsylvania lawmakers to investigate the railroads’ relationship with Standard Oil. Under the state charters granted to the railroads, the independents argued, these companies did not have the legal authority to obstruct other pipeline and railroad companies; nor could they discriminate against oil refiners and producers by offering rebates to some and refusing to haul the oil of others. Convinced they had enough evidence against Standard Oil, a group of producers and refiners filed suit. In April 1879, the Grand Jury of Clarion County, Pennsylvania, indicted John D. Rockefeller, William Warden, Charles Lockhart, Henry M. Flagler, George W. Girty, and Jacob J. Vandergrift on the charge that they had created a business conspiracy. To the dismay of many in the Pennsylvania oil region, however, the suit was settled out-of-court when those who were charged agreed to discontinue their ignominious practices. Many independent oilmen nevertheless believed that Standard had bribed public officials to effect this compromise. As a result, the already heightened animosity toward Standard Oil in the oil region—just one county north of the Kiskiminetas Valley—intensified. It would remain intense for years.

In 1881, two years after the Standard Oil indictment and legal “compromise,” J. J. Vandergrift moved his family out of the oil region to the newly developed elite and upper-middle-class Pittsburgh suburb of East Liberty. Presumably the move occurred so Vandergrift could more closely oversee a new set of investments he had made in and around Pittsburgh. Moreover, Vandergrift’s wife, Henrietta, was ill (she died later in the year), and residency in Pittsburgh placed her close to her family and better medical treatment. An additional reason for the move may have been that, notwithstanding Vandergrift’s having maintained ties to the oil industry until his death in 1899, he wanted to put some distance between himself and the legal problems he had encountered in the oil region.¹⁰ After he moved to Pittsburgh he turned his attention to banking, real-estate speculation, and a partnership with ironmaster Joshua B. Rhodes of Pittsburgh. The Vandergrift-Rhodes firm, Penn Tube, made tubes and pipes for the oil industry. Penn Tube was Vandergrift’s first sortie into the iron industry.

Looking to secure a source of galvanized sheet iron that could be used to make oil-storage tanks and oil drums, in November 1883 Vandergrift’s son J. J. Jr. extended the family’s interest in iron when he bought a galvanizing works at Ninth and Pike in Pittsburgh’s Fifth Ward. Ultimately, it became one of several properties belonging to Volta Iron, the firm that Vandergrift Jr. et al. formed with Laufman and McElroy.

Three years later (1886), Vandergrift Jr. became a member of a new firm called Apollo Iron and Steel. It consisted of J. J. Jr. himself (with 172 shares), his father J. J. Sr. (with 2,017 shares), his cousin Charles W. Batchelor (172 shares), the elder Vandergrift’s personal secretary James I. Buchanan (2 shares), Buchanan’s brother Douglas (2 shares), and three established Pittsburgh iron manufacturers: J. M. McQuiston (who owned 459 shares), Otis H. Childs (2 shares), and George G. McMurtry (174 shares). Notably absent from this slate of investors were Philip Laufman and Sarah McElroy; they no longer had a financial interest in the mill.¹¹ From hereon, J. J. Vandergrift Sr. was the firm’s major stockholder, while George McMurtry became its guiding force.

George Gibson McMurtry

George McMurtry’s life story is more difficult to establish than are those of Philip Laufman, William Rogers, or J. J. Vandergrift Sr. In McMurtry’s obituary in the steel industry’s trade paper Iron Age, Robert A. Walker called McMurtry “one of the most modest of men”; he displayed “an unusual aversion to publicity.” The death notice in the New York Times said that his name was “never seen in print.” He left neither a voluminous set of writings nor many personal papers; nor did he contribute biographical sketches to the multitude of cyclopedias and directories that were published between 1880 and his death in 1915. The biographical sketch presented here is pieced together from McMurtry’s obituaries in the Iron Age, the New York Times, the Pittsburgh Press, and the Vandergrift Citizen. The federal manuscript censuses for 1870, 1880, and 1900 and other mentions in trade journals and labor newspapers that appeared during his lifetime corroborate some—but not all—of the points included in these obituaries.¹²

McMurtry (fig. 2.3) was born near Belfast, Ireland, in 1840. His parents died in the Great Potato Famine later that decade and the young boy went to live on the farm of a strict Covenantor (Scots-Presbyterian) uncle. A bored and somewhat unruly teenager in the 1850s, McMurtry ran away during his mid-teens to join the British army. His position as a bugle boy lasted only a few days—until McMurtry’s worried uncle discovered his whereabouts and informed the commanding officer that the boy was too young to be in the army.

Fig. 2.3. George Gibson McMurtry Sr. (From American Magazine 80 (1915): 42. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

George clearly wanted to leave the farm, but he was not able to do so until he was twenty, emigrating to New York City in 1860. Unable to secure any work, he traveled to Detroit, supposedly arriving with only a few cents in his pocket. What employment he found there is unknown, but within a few years McMurtry had started his rags-to-riches climb to the top of the steel industry. During the early 1860s, he worked in the Chicago office of a Pittsburgh iron manufacturer, Benjamin Jones (since Jones did not have an industrial plant in this location, it must be assumed that McMurtry held the position of clerk or agent). After serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, he moved to Pittsburgh to work for Jones at Jones & Laughlins. There he began to make many business contacts within the relatively small, tight-knit group of Pittsburgh iron barons.

By 1880, McMurtry had left Jones’s employ to establish his own firm making nuts and bolts. With his wife Clara (whom he married in 1870), their three sons, two Irish servant girls, and a carriage driver, he lived on fashionable Irwin Avenue in Allegheny City, only a few blocks away from iron makers Benjamin Jones, Joshua Rhodes (Vandergrift’s partner at Penn Tube), John Moorhead, Richard Wood, William Burt, and Jacob Painter.¹³ Sometime between 1883 and 1886, McMurtry joined up with the Vandergrifts to become a part of Volta Iron. At the time of the 1886 Apollo Iron and Steel purchase of the Apollo mill, McMurtry occupied Volta Iron’s chairmanship. With Apollo Iron and Steel, from the firm’s inception until 1899, when it was integrated into the American Sheet Steel Company, he held the position of president.¹⁴

No evidence exists to indicate that McMurtry ever lived in either Apollo or Vandergrift.¹⁵ However, the historical record suggests strongly that McMurtry was very much in charge of the many industrial restructuring changes—the new management practices, technological improvements, and workforce modifications—that occurred at the Apollo mill during his tenure there, even if it was from the downtown Pittsburgh business office that Apollo Iron and Steel occupied in J. J. Vandergrift’s Fourth Avenue Vandergrift Building. To understand why McMurtry made these changes and why the company’s Apollo workforce had such a hard time adjusting to them, to the extent they would strike, it is necessary to know something about the introduction of steel production, about the rise of unionism, and about ongoing relationships between capital and labor in southwestern Pennsylvania during the 1880s and early 1890s.

Industrial Restructuring and Steelmaking

The U.S. steel industry emerged in Promethean fashion from the iron industry, beginning in the 1860s. In the shift from iron to steel, iron gradually became less important as an end product and more important as an input material necessary to steelmaking. Since the eighteenth century iron makers had known that blister steel could be made by heating stacks of wrought-iron sheets with charcoal until the surface of the iron acquired a high carbon content. The sheets were then fused together, producing a material that was stronger than iron but of inconsistent quality. Early in the nineteenth century, producers successfully made small amounts of a more homogenous steel by raising the temperature of wrought iron well beyond its melting point in a small, clay-lined crucible. But this process, too, presented difficulties. Individual heats were limited to roughly sixty pounds, and the clay suitable for crucible linings was in scarce supply. Steel thus remained an expensive, minor, and highly variable product until producers could expand crucible capacity and perfect better linings.¹⁶

During the 1850s, England’s George Bessemer developed a method for converting larger amounts of iron into steel. Carbon and phosphorus could be literally exploded (or “blown”) out of pig iron by forcing a high-pressure cold-air blast into a large, egg-shaped converter filled with molten iron. Technical problems slowed the diffusion of this innovation in the United States because Bessemer’s first converters required very special grades of iron ore—grades that were in short supply. Additionally, steelmakers could not recarburize the pure iron inside the converter to make steel with any consistency. As a result, between 1864 and 1876 only ten of the thirteen U.S. firms that attempted to make steel using the Bessemer process were successful. In 1872, only about 4 percent of all U.S. pig iron found its way into a Bessemer converter. By 1880, these difficulties had been largely resolved. Nearly 28 percent of the pig iron produced in the United States became Bessemer steel, whence it was turned into rails. Still, only eleven works, with a total annual capacity of 1,750,000 gross tons, could afford to install Bessemer converters and ensure that a steady supply of Bessemer-quality iron ore would be available to keep them in production.¹⁷

During the 1870s, smaller iron firms began to install a different technology that would allow them to make steel: the Siemans-Martin regenerative open-hearth furnace. In concept, the open-hearth process was simply an extension of the iron-puddling process. Within a large furnace lined with firebrick of high acid content, furnace workers brought pig iron to melting point. Instead of removing the iron from the furnace as it began to boil—to give to a puddler and his helpers to stir, knead, and squeeze—the iron was left inside the furnace for eight hours or more (depending upon the grade of ore being used). During this lengthy “heat,” impurities in the iron fused onto the furnace lining or floated to the top of the molten mixture. After the slag had been drained away, unskilled workers introduced scrap iron and coal to the molten metal to add the necessary carbon to make steel.

Although smaller, slower, and, therefore, incapable of producing as much steel as the Bessemer process, the open-hearth process was more affordable and practicable for smaller producers. Given the relative ease of adjusting the open-hearth process to accommodate ores of varying sulphur and phosphorus contents, open-hearth producers could worry less about searching for ores that met exactly with Bessemer converter specifications. In 1880, twenty-two U.S. steel-works had open-hearth furnaces, and the total annual capacity of these works was 275,000 gross tons. Fourteen years later, the number of open-hearth works had increased to eighty-one and the annual capacity was 1,740,000 gross tons. One of those eighty-one works was Apollo Iron and Steel’s Apollo mill. Its annual capacity was 27,000 gross tons.¹⁸

Major geographical revisions took place at several spatial scales due to the diffusion of the Bessemer and open-hearth processes. As metallurgists learned to adjust converters and furnaces to compensate for ores of fine consistency and high phosphorus content, mining and steel firms began to exploit iron-ore deposits in Minnesota and Michigan. Moreover, the spatially scattered system of independently owned and operated mines, furnaces, forges, foundries, and iron-rolling mills started to give way to functionally and spatially integrated steelmaking complexes on a single site that consisted of blast furnaces that converted ore to pig iron, Bessemer converters and open-hearth furnaces that transformed iron into steel, and rolling mills where hot steel was worked and reworked to make bars, rails, rods, and sheets. Inside these fully integrated steelworks, producers arranged the new steelmaking equipment so as to transfer hot materials from one process to the next as quickly as possible and with as little reheating as possible. Large ladles mounted on steam-powered hoists poured molten metal into ingot molds on movable cars. “Dinky engines” shunted these molds around mill yards and into the elongated steel sheds where rolling equipment and heating pits were located. Inside the rolling mill, a British visitor wrote in 1901, “it is a familiar sight to see a billet [ingot], one end still in the furnace—its length in all the reducing passes of the mill, and the other end coiled on the reel, a finished wire rod.”¹⁹

As steel plants started to appear on the southwestern Pennsylvania landscape after the 1870s, changing labor requirements precipitated an expansion of the number of people employed at all skill levels. The mills hired more laborers to reline furnaces, shovel raw materials, charge furnaces with scrap, and do other manual tasks. At the same time, they needed more clerks, bookkeepers, stenographers, and telephone and telegraph operators to oversee and keep inventories, manage payrolls, and take care of other business matters. As firms installed more rolling machines, they hired additional skilled rollers and semiskilled matchers, catchers, and roughers.

Alongside these changes, there occurred a major redefinition of the roles that skilled craftsworkers played in the mills. Most notably, by converting iron ore and pig iron directly to steel, the need for puddlers waned. But even in the mills where puddlers remained, they saw declines in the autonomy they had enjoyed under iron production (rollers, too—though their craft was in demand—saw a decline in autonomy). Mill owners had started to challenge the subcontracting system in which skilled craftsworkers hired their help directly. Steelmakers now took responsibility for hiring semiskilled and unskilled helpers and the foremen who oversaw them. Furthermore, mill owners began tapping different labor pools to acquire these workers. Worker ethnicity had always been strongly correlated with occupations during the “Iron Age.” Immigrants from England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland (and their children) held skilled (and semiskilled) mill positions, and Pennsylvania-born workers with long-term ties to the agricultural parts of the region did most unskilled jobs. In the “Steel Age,” however, English, Welsh, Scots, Irish immigrants and their descendants lost some of their importance as skilled workers. They did, however, come to dominate overseeing, clerical, and some redefined skilled positions.

The most significant change in the “ethnic division of labor” occurred among the ranks of unskilled laborers. Instead of using rural Pennsylvania as a source of unskilled labor, steel producers began to look to South, Central, and East Europe. Coming to the U.S. with few skills and resources, the newest wave of immigrants worked at whatever jobs they could—even in poor conditions and for low pay. Some were lucky enough to move into permanent jobs, but most immigrant “day laborers” had little job security and toiled under nearly unbearable conditions doing menial tasks that most Americans and Northwest Europeans would not take.²⁰

From the steelmaster’s point of view, these workforce changes were desirable. Because of the massive influx of European labor into the United States, employers believed they had greater flexibility over personnel decisions. Access to a seemingly unlimited “reserve army of labor” helped them to control labor costs. Furthermore, the fragmentation of the workforce by skill and ethnicity meant that workers had little common ground on which to coalesce as a group and voice their grievances. But that did not mean that mill workers remained silent about wages and work conditions. The 1880s and 1890s go down in the annals of U.S. history as two of the worst decades for labor disputes in the iron-and-steel industry.

To some it is surprising that unskilled immigrant labor—the group that suffered generally the worst working conditions and the lowest wages in the steel industry—were not the first workers to disrupt production. Differences in language and religion, lack of job security, the fact that many viewed their sojourn in the United States as temporary, and their exclusion from existing craft unions kept them from uniting to make demands of employers. It was from the ranks of the skilled craftsworkers, who desired job security and stable wages, that, between the 1860s and 1919, labor unrest generally emanated.

The Union Response

During the 1880s, skilled craftsworkers saw steel manufacturers start to replace the puddling process (and puddlers) with open-hearth furnaces and Bessemer converters. They grew worried as Bessemer and open-hearth departments began to set the pace of production for the remaining rollers. Something had to be done. They turned to their unions, believing that, as in the past, collective action on the part of all skilled iron workers would allow them to weather the stormy conditions of industrial change.²¹

In the so-called iron age of the 1860s, puddlers, rollers, nailers, and other skilled workers had formed separate labor organizations: the Sons of Vulcan (the puddlers’ union), the Heaters and Rollers’ Union, and the Roll Hands’ Union. Among their initial concerns were wages. The Civil War had caused an increase in the price of iron, and with that there had been an increase in wages. But after the war ended, prices declined, and so did pay. As a result, the newly organized skilled ironworkers struck to maintain the higher wage. To bring this dispute to a close, Benjamin Jones (the Jones who was George McMurtry’s first boss in the iron industry) suggested and got Pittsburgh iron manufacturers and union members to adopt a sliding wage scale that would respond to the rise and fall of iron prices. This scale would also include a minimum wage below which employers could not go. The system worked fine during the relatively prosperous late-1860s. But it was a different story after the Panic of 1873.

Throughout the late 1860s and early 1870s, iron companies periodically met with union representatives in Pittsburgh to set the wage scale for the next contract period. When the economy took a downward turn after 1873, however, manufacturers announced that they could not afford to maintain the scale and would have to terminate it. The puddlers’ union—the Sons of Vulcan—countered by proposing a fifty-cents-per-ton wage reduction in the scale. This loss would be easier for skilled workers to bear than what might occur if the manufacturers were allowed to cut wages at will. The manufacturers, however, responded that they had to cut at least one dollar off the per-ton wage. Because an agreement could not be reached, in 1875 many mill owners locked out Sons of Vulcan members from their mills. Some mill owners brought in replacement workers to continue producing. But most owners did not go to such lengths because they believed that workers would capitulate. They were wrong. After several months of having production drastically affected by the dispute, the manufacturers agreed to keep the scale.

The Sons of Vulcan won this round because union leaders appealed to the puddlers’ sense of camaraderie and honor. They had achieved solidarity and discovered safety in numbers. In turn, they solidified their bargaining power by combining with the other unions—the rollers’ and heaters’ and the roll hands’—to create the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers in 1876. Membership, however, was limited to skilled craftsworkers and their supporting crews. Unskilled workers were not included. By creating an exclusionary organization, labor itself was divided.

At first, union/nonunion fragmentation along occupational lines did not have an adverse affect upon the Amalgamated. In the late-1870s it successfully gained wage increases from Pittsburgh iron makers nearly every year. But the organization’s fortunes started to change during the early 1880s. This was due to three factors: First, lack of solidarity with unskilled laborers meant that with the growth of large, integrated steelworks, an ever-larger proportion of the labor force was nonunion. Second, iron makers answered union solidarity with solidarity of their own. In 1882 they joined together to lock out union members for five months at Amalgamated mills across southwestern Pennsylvania. Third, the rank and file successively elected two conservative union presidents who accommodated technological and workforce change and capitulated to mill ownership. These leaders believed that redundant puddlers and others put out of work by industrial restructuring would be able to fill other mill jobs created by this same process. The problem was, however, that these puddlers had to compete for jobs with the children and friends of rollers and other skilled union workers who remained in the mills. Such competition led to increased fragmentation and tension among the skilled workforce. During the lean years of the early 1880s, the unions found these factors hard to combat and had difficulty gaining increases in the wage scale.

As the economy improved in the late-1880s, however, manufacturers were more willing to meet union wage demands, and the Amalgamated experienced a resurgence. By 1892 it had grown to a membership of more than twenty-four thousand workers. These members were organized into 290 local lodges (usually 1 per mill) and 90 of them were clustered in southwestern Pennsylvania. They met with manufacturers each spring to set the wage scale for the following year; they instituted work rules to combat technological change; they threatened and called strikes. Moreover, they had great success in organizing mills that were in the midst of making the transition from iron to steel. If the iron puddlers and rollers in a mill were unionized, the union found it relatively easy to extend membership to all skilled steelworkers in that mill. As historian John Ingham argues, the Amalgamated effectively promoted and spread a culture of work to nearly every southwestern Pennsylvania mill. Given the size and cohesiveness of the union during this period, iron and steelmakers regularly capitulated (with some resignation) to the demands of labor. That is, until Homestead.²²

In 1892, Andrew Carnegie and his partner, Henry Clay Frick, provided their fellow ironmasters and steelmasters with a model for eliminating union activity in mills undergoing the transition to steel. That spring, Frick announced that when union contracts ran out in June, their Homestead mill would become nonunionized. Meanwhile, he had fences and watchtowers built around the mill in preparation for the labor dispute that he believed might follow. On July 1, 1892, Frick locked out Amalgamated members with the intent of reopening the mill six days later and staffing it with nonunion replacement workers whom the company would train for skilled positions. He also hired Pinkerton guards to protect the plant. Problems arose, however, when Homestead’s union members became involved in a gun (and fireworks) battle with the Pinkertons. Despite several fatalities and many injuries, the union workers seized the plant and occupied the mill.

Infuriated, Frick called upon Pennsylvania’s governor to send in the state militia to oust the occupation force and to provide protection for his replacement workers and the mill. The militia did so, and on July 19, 1892, the open-hearth department resumed operation. Five months later, Homestead was entirely nonunion. The Amalgamated had been completely defeated.

Steelmakers soon witnessed what was possible without the union presence in the Homestead mill: “Tonnage rates were slashed, twelve-hour turns were extended to at least one-third of the workers, breaks in the working day that had once been prescribed by union rules were eliminated, and workers were reassigned at management’s discretion, while new charging machines, heating furnaces, automatic roll tables and other equipment eliminated an estimated five hundred jobs in Homestead alone by the end of the decade.”²³ Other producers, facing production problems similar to those encountered by Carnegie and Frick at Homestead before 1892, wanted to achieve this, too.

In the late-1880s, the Amalgamated had been nearly universal in southwestern Pennsylvania, but in the aftermath of Homestead the Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association reported that in less than a year more than thirty of the area’s sixty-four steel mills had become nonunion.²⁴ Thus, in 1892 the battle lines were drawn between capital and labor in the entire U.S. iron-and-steel industry. McMurtry and Apollo Iron and Steel entered into their own skirmish as they began to oust the Amalgamated from the Apollo mill.

The Effect on the Apollo Mill

The industrial restructuring changes that culminated in tensions between capital and labor began later in the Apollo mill than they did at Homestead and in most southwestern Pennsylvania iron-and-steel mills. Sanborn fire-insurance maps of the Apollo mill show that Apollo Iron and Steel entered the steel age only in the late 1880s. In 1886, the production site typified most iron-rolling mills of the day (fig. 2.4): iron making occurred almost entirely under one roof. Puddling crews transformed pig-iron ingots into wrought iron in a furnace shed near the mill’s main building. From the shed, laborers carted wrought-iron blooms into the main rolling-mill building, where a steamhammer removed the impurities. Rollers and heaters then directed their helpers as they reheated the iron and pressed it into sheets. The rolled material cooled in adjacent annealing furnaces before being shipped to customers.

Over the next three years, Apollo Iron and Steel made several changes (fig. 2.5). To increase capacity, the firm expanded the puddling shed to accommodate more puddlers. The firm tore down the charcoal house and several miscellaneous outbuildings. In the main building it installed a new set of rolls, removed the knobbling fires, and increased the horsepower of the steam-driven engines. North of the main building, the firm added a galvanizing department and new, larger warehouses to store finished sheets and supplies. The addition of a scale house tangibly reflected the new accounting measures being introduced in the industry at the time. The firm also built an internal rail system that connected several mill buildings to the WPRR spur that ran down the middle of Warren Avenue (notably, the railroad had crossed the river into Apollo). The most significant change, however, was the addition of a new, iron-clad structure south of the puddling shed, where the firm installed an ingot-heating furnace and two twenty-gross-ton open-hearth furnaces in which to make steel.

Fig. 2.4. Layout of the Volta Iron Company mill, 1886. Note the location of the knob-bling fires in the main mill building and the puddling furnaces and charcoal house immediately to the south. By 1894, they would be erased from the mill’s landscape, replaced by steel-production equipment. (After a map by the Sanborn Map Company.)

Materials moving through the mill went first to the shed that housed the ingot-heating and open-hearth furnaces. “Dinky engines” shunted cars laden with pig-iron ingots to these sheds. Laborers on the “charging” floor manually loaded scrap steel and warm pig iron into the open hearths, the amounts varying, depending upon the phosphorus and sulphur content of the pig-iron inputs and the desired steel output. The furnaces were then heated for anywhere from eight to ten hours. During the heat, the first helper kept watch over the temperature, while the melter—the man in charge of the entire open-hearth process—periodically made tests to determine if additional materials were required to make the proper bath of hot metal. For most workers around the open hearths, there was little to do between charging and tapping the furnace at the end of the heat. At Apollo, the amount of slack time was reduced by the staggering of heats between two furnaces. Between tasks, some workers may have occupied themselves in the employee reading room located near the mill gate.

Fig. 2.5. Layout of the Apollo Iron and Steel Company mill, 1889. Changes made between 1886 (see fig. 2.4) and 1889 are apparent. Most significantly, the firm installed open-hearth furnaces for making steel and a rail system that connected mill departments to the WPRR. (After a map by the Sanborn Map Company.)

The harsh working conditions during charging and tapping more than made up for any free time that furnace helpers may have enjoyed. During charging, they worked directly in front of open furnace doors in searing heat. At the end of the heat, the second and third helpers went to the back of the furnace to drill open the tap hole—an outlet sealed with clay prior to the heat. As they drilled, ladlemen hoisted huge, steam-powered hydraulic ladles down into the pit, an area that was located below the tap hole. The ladles caught the molten steel as it flowed from the furnace. At this point, furnace helpers ran up to the ladles and manually dumped bags of coal and other materials into the hot metal to recarburize the steel. Simultaneously, molten slag flowed from the top of the ladle and into the pit. The risk of injury was very high, especially for the unskilled workers. The ladlemen then hoisted the ladle out of the pit and directed it to the rail sidings, where cars carrying empty ingot molds waited to be filled. Once filled, dinky engines shunted the molds to the entrance of the rolling shop, where a mechanical stripping machine freed the hot ingots. Workers then placed the ingots (crusty black on the outside, blood red in the middle—like what today many Americans call a “Pittsburgh-style” medium-rare steak) into the soaking pits, where they were reheated to a uniform temperature before rolling.

The actual rolling process changed little over the years, save for increases in speed, capacity, and the fact that steam-driven reversing rolls and mechanical lifting tables had put hook-up men out of their jobs. Once heater’s helpers had removed the hot ingots from the soaking pits, they took them to the roughing rolls to be impressed with a rough surface that could be more easily gripped by the sheet rolls. Semiskilled roughers guided the ingots into the furnace-side of the rolls. On the opposite side stood the catcher, who directed the metal back into the rolls for a second pass. The rougher and the catcher passed the ingot back and forth through successively smaller apertures until it reached the desired shape and size. The roller oversaw this entire operation, but no longer as in the past from the rolling-mill floor; instead, the roller directed workers from the “pulpit,” a raised platform equipped with a series of levers that controlled the speed and pressure of the rolls. After an ingot had been pressed into a sheet or plate, laborers carted it away from the rolls and off to the annealing furnaces for cooling. In the galvanizing department, unskilled galvanizers coated the sheet with zinc, and after the coating cooled other laborers loaded it onto rail cars for shipment to buyers.

Fig. 2.6. Layout of the Apollo Iron and Steel Company mill, 1894. Major changes made between 1889 (see fig. 2.5) and 1894 included the demolition of the puddling furnaces. By this point, the mill’s enlarged physical plant nearly touched the edges of the property. (After a map by the Sanborn Map Company.)

The striking aspect of the 1889 mill layout is the juxtaposition of new steel-producing technologies alongside old iron-making equipment. The Sanborn Company’s 1889 map captured this iron mill in the midst of its transition to steel. Open-hearth furnaces made steel at the same time that puddlers still produced wrought iron by hand in the shed next door. By 1894, however, Apollo Iron and Steel had completed the transition to steel (fig. 2.6). That year, the mill had an annual production capacity of 27,000 gross tons. Out of twenty-five steel mills in southwestern Pennsylvania, it ranked twelfth.²⁵ Around the mill grounds, the firm had now redeployed several outbuildings for new uses. It made the employee reading room into a laboratory, where chemists, newly hired, assumed the melter’s responsibility for testing the properties of molten metal, firebricks, and ingots. The firm also fitted blacksmith shops and machine shops into the remaining free space within the mill complex and extended the entire steelworks to the Kiskiminetas River’s banks, and it demolished the puddling furnaces in order to extend the main building to accommodate a bar mill that reduced ingots to more convenient dimensions for sheet rolling.

Thus between 1886 and 1894, the Apollo mill took on a new spatial order—one intended to make steel as efficiently as possible. The general configuration of the various departments was intended to speed the flow of materials in the transition from input to output. But in this last round of additions, McMurtry and the firm started to encounter problems finding space in which to put more equipment.

The Effect on Apollo Borough

During the 1860s, the Borough of Apollo covered a little less than one square mile (fig. 2.7). Building densities were greatest near where the bridge over the old canal and the Kiskiminetas River led out of town to Paulton. Forming a commercial area in that neighborhood were an assortment of general stores, newspaper, doctor, and dentist offices, a bank, a post office, and a variety of shops—harness makers, merchant-millers, and a blacksmith. Surrounding this core was a loosely knit and variegated residential landscape. The oldest dwellings—traditional brick, Pennsylvania-variants of the “I House”—occupied the level alluvial terrace closest to the Kiskiminetas River between Coal and Mill Streets.²⁶

Fig. 2.7. Map of Apollo, Pennsylvania, 1861. The Cass company was successor to Kiskiminitas Iron. (After A. Pomeroy and S. W. Treat, Map of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania.)

Fig. 2.8. Map of Apollo, Pennsylvania, 1894. Compare with figure 2.7 to see the burgeoning steel mill’s impact on the town. New residential and business tracts gravitated north along Warren and Pennsylvania Avenues toward Apollo’s industrial sites after William Rogers introduced tin production in the 1860s and 1870s. Greatly expanded by 1894, Apollo Iron and Steel had been pinned in by the river, industry, homes, and business on all sides. (After a map by the Sanborn Map Company.)

Fig. 2.9. Bird’s-eye view of Apollo, Pennsylvania, 1896. Looking northeastward into town, the Apollo Iron and Steel Company is sandwiched into cramped quarters between the Apollo Foundry Company (the long building immediately above the WPRR bridge at upper left), the Kiskiminetas River, and the rest of Apollo. (Litho reproduced courtesy of Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University.)

Their front doors opened directly onto the street. Gardens, chicken coops, pigpens, and sundry sheds could be found at the back. East of Church Street and north of Mill, a hodge-podge collection of newer, rectilinear street blocks had been platted along the terrace and up the sides of the Kiskiminetas gorge, with no regard whatsoever for the difficult street grades that resulted. Sprinkled throughout were single-family, detached, frame dwellings of various architectural styles, a few churches, corner grocery and dry-goods stores, and tenement houses. The rolling mill, one of several manufacturing firms located in town, was down by the river, where the closest large tract of flat ground had been available when Kiskiminetas Iron built it in 1854.

After McMurtry arrived at Apollo Iron and Steel and spearheaded the mill’s transition to steelmaker, Apollo changed rapidly and dramatically (figs. 2.8 and 2.9). In the older section of town, the commercial core expanded—by half a block to the east and by two blocks to the north—as property owners selectively leveled or substantially modified the old canal-era houses to accommodate new shops and offices. The WPRR came to town, too—finally satisfying Apollo’s desire for its own rail connection by building a rail bridge north of the mill, a spur that occupied the filled-in canal bed along Warren and Kiskiminetas Avenues, and a train station in the old commercial core. Obviously, the amount of business the town now generated justified the expense.

The Apollo rolling mill became the focal point of even greater land-use change. To the south of North Fourth Street, four new streets were platted and more than twenty new houses erected. To the east of Warren Avenue, an entirely new commercial district emerged, consisting mainly of barber shops, saloons, grocery stores, milliners, and hardware stores. To the north and east of this district, carpenters built dozens of modest new homes for sale. Property owners in older sections of town subdivided larger lots and sold vacant ones to make way for new housing. Between the censuses of 1880 and 1890, Apollo expanded by more than two hundred households and 1,000 people, from 1,156 to 2,156. The 1890 tax-assessment records suggest that the majority of households owned their accommodation.

Some of these landscape and population changes were not unique to Apollo. Between 1880 and 1900, old canal towns and iron towns in western Pennsylvania grew rapidly. McKeesport, home of Dewees Wood, an old competitor of Rogers & Burchfield, increased in population from 8,212 in 1880 to 34,227 in 1900. Growth in Homestead, Leechburg, and Apollo reached similar levels. Only towns without manufacturing firms experienced slower growth (during the twenty years after 1880, for instance, the population of the canal town of Freeport grew by only 150). Pinned between revamped and newly constructed riverside mills and the rolling upland plateaus of the region, the physical fabric of streets, railroad sidings, businesses, and houses in burgeoning southwestern Pennsylvania mill towns spread quickly over the remaining vacant flat and gently sloping bottom land. Pressure for more residential space pushed the gridiron pattern of streets and alleys up steep hillsides and into deep hollows. Within central business districts, a changing mix of commercial functions reflected the new social structure and needs of the population. Flour and grist mills, saddlers, grain dealers, and general stores gave way to butchers, barbers, restaurants, saloons, dry-goods stores, photographic studios, shooting galleries, and pool halls.

Several new manufacturing firms—the Apollo Rolling Mill, the Apollo Foundry, the Pittsburgh Electro-Plating Company among others—joined Apollo Iron and Steel’s mill and the array of traditional agriculture-oriented, resource-processing activities that dated from the canal era.²⁷ Once catering to a small resident population and a large and thriving agricultural hinterland, Apollo’s merchants now looked inward to service a growing urban manufacturing population.

Apollo’s occupational structure began to reflect changes brought on by industrial restructuring (table 2.1). Manufacturing dominated the occupational structure. Within the metalworking occupations, there was a slight increase in the proportion of craftsmen, but this subtle change disguises important developments that occurred. Predictably, the removal of puddling furnaces meant that there were no puddlers living in Apollo in 1890. In terms of the census’s occupational categories, however, foremen, machinists, millwrights, and an increasing staff of rollers more than compensated for this decrease in the number of puddlers. Mechanization and specialization of tasks within the rolling process contributed to growth of the occupational category of operative. Mechanical lifting tables and reversing rolls meant that fewer unskilled laborers were needed inside the rolling mill to lift ingots, bars, and sheets. Rolling crews were reduced in size and performed more skilled and specialized tasks. Outside in the mill yard and furnace sheds, laborers were needed in increasing numbers to move raw materials. As would be expected, given the emergence of a second business district between 1886 and 1894, there was an increase in the number of sales, clerical, and service workers. Cost-accounting schemes in the mill required more clerks, timekeepers, and watchmen. Away from the mill and commercial district, the number of residents employed in farming decreased, farmers having been virtually pushed out of the borough because of residential expansion. Larger farm lots were subdivided for housing.

Table 2.1. Apollo Occupational Structure, 1880, 1890, and 1895

Note: The discrepancy in the total number of employed persons in Apollo between Tables 1.2 and 2.1 is due to a difference in data sources. Table 1.2 is based on the U.S. federal manuscript census. It most likely gives the most accurate numerical count for 1880. Comparable census data is not available for 1890, however; thus, I have used the local tax rolls between 1880 and 1895 as a means to track occupational changes during the transition to steel production in the Apollo mill.

Source: Apollo Borough Tax Assessment Records, 1880–95.

Accommodating newcomers created new social geographic patterns in all of southwestern Pennsylvania’s mill towns. Novelist Tom Bell, in Out of This Furnace, a story of immigrant life in Braddock, describes the impact that increased pressure for housing had upon the landscape and social conditions of most steel towns in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries:

Real-estate speculators put up the houses that became so characteristic of the steel towns, long ugly rows like cell blocks, two rooms high and two deep, without water, gas or conveniences of any kind, nothing but the walls and the roofs: Zeok’s Row on Halket, Veroskey’s Row along the P. and L. E. railroad, Mullen’s double row on Willow Way, were typical. They were filled as soon as they were finished and made no apparent impression on the housing shortage or the rent level.²⁸

The same conditions could be found all the way up the Monongahela Valley from Homestead to McKeesport and up the Allegheny Valley to Ford City. On Pittsburgh’s South Side near the Jones & Laughlins mill and below the Point at Jacob Painter’s ironworks, they were equally bad. There was little spatial separation between dwellings and the hot, dirty, noisy, and dangerous rolling mills and blast furnaces. Roads, frequently unpaved, were cleared of debris by scavenging pigs. Inhabitants of hodge-podge collections of as many as twenty shacks, one- and two-stories tall, built around muddy courtyards, shared perhaps one well and one privy.

Pittsburgh, Braddock, McKeesport, and many other mill towns had more polite neighborhoods. Higher-paid workers—clerical, professional, and crafts people—moved to single-family or semidetached houses on separate lots up and away from the mills. In some instances, these neighborhoods had water mains and sewers, and an increasing number of new homes had indoor plumbing. Thus, in Pittsburgh and other mill towns, there usually emerged a range of residential districts—“hunky” flats, Little Italies, white working-class neighborhoods, and areas of architecturally ornate and individualized homes owned by managers, mill owners, and merchants.

Apollo, however, was different. Judging from names in the county tax-assessment rolls during the early 1890s, there were very few recent European immigrants. The social division of labor had not become equated with an ethnic division of labor. Nor, on the evidence of later rolls, would it in 1900 and 1910. Moreover, there does not appear to have been any stark segregation along socioeconomic lines. As one traveled across town, areas of modest housing occupied by unskilled and semiskilled workers segued gradually into areas of greater affluence. It appears that the majority of Apollo residents owned their accommodations and that they were not at the mercy of landlords to the same extent as in the mill towns closer to Pittsburgh.

Similar to places elsewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania, however, residential infilling and expansion of the residential portions of Apollo continued through the 1890s. While it created a real-estate and commercial boom, such growth increasingly had a negative impact on Apollo Iron and Steel. A fragmented pattern of property ownership made it difficult for the company to expand when it wanted to install new equipment. McMurtry tried to acquire more property by approaching landowners to the south and north, but they refused to sell or their asking price was too high.²⁹ Apollo’s landscape of freely held and mortgaged houses helped to tie workers to the town and the mill (which promoted a stable workforce), but those same houses and other structures got in the way of the firm’s expansion plans. Having extended the mill to the water’s edge and to the limits of the firm’s main property, Apollo Iron and Steel simply ran out of room.

Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Apollo Iron and Steel continually purchased rural properties in the Kiskiminetas Valley, but usually only for the mineral and natural gas rights. In 1892, however, the firm started a different sort of acquisition campaign in response to space limitations in Apollo. Beginning in February, the company purchased through seven separate real-estate transactions the rights, both subterranean and surface, for the equivalent of a section (640 acres) of land in Westmoreland County, about a mile downriver from Apollo. The first parcel, the Townsend farm, came at a sheriff’s auction for $15,000. Two months later, Apollo Iron and Steel convinced a farmer’s widow to sell her property for $2,100. In August and September, the firm bought two more farms, followed by two more in December. A final purchase occurred in June 1893. In total, Apollo Iron and Steel paid $59,187 for the land on which it planned to build a new steel mill.³⁰

Due to a collapse in steel prices during the spring of 1893, the idea of immediately starting construction of a branch mill on this property apparently met with opposition from the company’s shareholders, which at the time included Norman Ream (a Chicago businessman who was a key organizer of the firm that later became Nabisco), Vandergrift’s Penn Tube partner Joshua Rhodes, Vandergrift, J. D. Archbold and Henry Rogers from Standard Oil, Vandergrift’s personal secretary, James I. Buchanan, and George McMurtry. Until the economy improved, the Apollo Iron and Steel Westmoreland County tracts would remain a melange of pasture, orchards, and wooded ravines. As it stood, the company’s immediate attention was elsewhere, anyway—focused squarely upon an iron-making workforce whose skills, work culture, and wage demands had become increasingly out-of-synch with Apollo Iron and Steel’s new role as a producer of galvanized steel sheets.³¹

The Apollo Strike and Lockout of 1893–1894

Apollo Iron and Steel’s labor problems began with the demolition of the puddling furnaces between 1889 and 1894. In a stroke, the company made redundant at least a dozen highly skilled puddlers, many of whom were the sons of the workers that William Rogers had recruited from Wales and England. Given that the Amalgamated experienced record levels of membership (approximately 24,000 members) in 1892 and had lodges in nearly every southwestern Pennsylvania mill, it is almost a certainty that these puddlers were members of the Amalgamated’s Hope Lodge, number 17. Not a word was said in the National Labor Tribune about their termination, however—perhaps because puddlers were being dismissed at iron-and-steel mills all over southwestern Pennsylvania and the experience in Apollo was not unique, perhaps because the Amalgamated believed that the puddlers could find work elsewhere, perhaps because the issue of puddler termination had turned union members of different occupations against each other.³² Nor did mention of this specific case appear in the Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association, although in 1894 it reported a similar case in the Jones & Laughlins mill that abandoned more than sixty puddling furnaces and terminated the employment of well over a hundred puddlers.³³

In any event, the unionized rollers who remained in the Apollo mill became increasingly suspicious of their employer. Their wages were protected by contracts negotiated between the Amalgamated and the Sheet Iron [Manufacturers’] Association that McMurtry had helped to found (in 1892 he was vice-president of the organization), but this was small consolation for rollers. What if the rolling process were to be mechanized to an extent that would replace rollers altogether? At the very least, how much longer would rollers be able to make hiring decisions regarding their help? For Apollo’s rollers and thousands of workers in similar positions elsewhere, there appeared to be less job security and decision-making autonomy under the new steel-production regime. The rollers concluded that the union needed to take a more active role. That, in turn, posed a threat to Apollo Iron and Steel.³⁴

During the summer of 1893, orders for steel hit their lowest level since the 1873 Panic. To continue production during this cyclical economic downswing, the Sheet Iron Association, in annual negotiations with the Amalgamated Association, proposed a reduction in wages of 8 to 15 percent. Even though the manufacturers ultimately compromised with the Amalgamated for a lesser reduction, several union rollers at Apollo Iron and Steel refused to work at the lower rate and in August 1893 went on strike. The firm countered by shutting the rolling mill, arguing that the slump presented a good opportunity to make some necessary repairs.

By October, the repairs had been made, orders had increased, and Apollo Iron and Steel wanted to reopen, but following Carnegie and Frick’s lead, the firm decided that it would restart the mill without union labor and Amalgamated-set wages. The firm withdrew its membership from the Sheet Iron Association (thus nullifying the union wage scale at the Apollo mill) and McMurtry resigned his leadership position in that organization. The company locked unionized workers out of the mill and declared that only those workers who renounced union membership would be allowed to resume their jobs. A month later, Kirkpatrick & Co., in Leechburg, locked out their workers, too.³⁵ Trade and union papers reported that over the next several months, Apollo Iron and Steel successfully resumed operation because it did four things: first, it hired experienced rollers from other nonunion mills; second, it trained nonunion mill operatives, clerks, and foremen to take skilled positions; third, it promoted laborers to semiskilled operative positions; and fourth, as laborers it brought in farm boys, their farmer fathers, and miners from the surrounding countryside. A trace of individual workers through the county tax-assessment records during this period corroborates these reports (see Table 2.2 and the appendix).³⁶ Basing my search on the experiences of 456 skilled rollers and unskilled laborers between 1892 and 1896, I found that the promotion of laborers to semiskilled positions increased significantly during the strike and lockout.

Table 2.2. Assessed Apollo Laborers and Rollers, Showing Laborer Promotions, 1891–1895

Note: Apollo strike and lockout years are highlighted in italics.

Source: Apollo Borough Tax assessment Records, 1891–95.

James Jack Jr. stands out as one of these laborers. Most of the replacement rollers came from the semiskilled ranks, the pool of clerical workers, or elsewhere. But Jack was a laborer in 1892—one of only three to be fast-tracked to the position of roller. In 1894 the tax rolls listed him as a heater; in 1895, he had become a roller; in 1896, he occupied the position of catcher. Apollo Iron and Steel rewarded Jack for his apparent willingness to fit in where the firm needed him: he was the catcher on the inaugural Vandergrift rolling crew.

The tax records also corroborate the assertion that most unionized Apollo rollers did not accede to Apollo Iron and Steel’s demands. They honored the strike. Only three of twenty-seven rollers listed in the 1892 assessment remained in their rolling jobs every year until 1896. One of the three persistent rollers—who would have been considered a “sheep,” or blackleg, by union members—was Harry T. Henry, the roller in charge of the crew that rolled the first steel sheet at Vandergrift. There is a high probability that the others, James Owen and Harry Shaner, worked across the river at Laufman, where there was no labor dispute. Eighteen of the remaining twenty-four union rollers apparently refused to work under nonunion conditions. Either these workers permanently left town or they never resumed their old jobs. One of those rollers was Griffith Davis, the First District trustee for the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers. Significantly, with the exception of Henry, none of the 1892 rollers moved to Vandergrift.

The tax records also suggest that Apollo Iron and Steel hired a number of replacement rollers. Seventeen rollers appeared in the tax-assessment records for the first time in 1894 and 1895. Unfortunately, the destruction of the 1890 federal manuscript census of population makes it impossible to trace the origins of these workers (possibly they were from other nonunion mills in southwestern Pennsylvania). Two-thirds of the recruited rollers who stayed until 1896 purchased property in or moved to Vandergrift by 1900.

Notably, all but two of the entire population of laborers and rollers in Apollo between 1892 and 1896 had surnames of northern European origin. In tracing them to the 1900 census, none were born in southern, eastern, or central Europe.³⁷ Unlike mills closer to Pittsburgh that had growing numbers of foreign-born laborers (e.g., Carnegie’s Homestead works and National Tube in McKees-port), McMurtry did not rely upon immigrant labor for replacements at the unskilled and semiskilled levels during the labor dispute. He hired replacements from the surrounding countryside—specifically, the teenage farm boys of the Kiskiminetas Valley who were looking for opportunities off the farm, as their older brothers, cousins, uncles, and fathers had done in the 1870s and 1880s. This is one of the reasons why, during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the entire Kiskiminetas Valley came to be known as Black Valley, after “blackleg” replacement farmers, miners, and other “sheep” from rural areas.³⁸ Immigration did not play a significant role in providing a supply of cheap labor for the mills in the Kiskiminetas Valley until after 1900.

In the final analysis, Apollo Iron and Steel’s training and promotion schemes effectively wiped out the union’s presence in the mill by (1) transforming unskilled, nonunionized laborers into semiskilled, nonunionized operatives, and (2) making semiskilled, nonunionized operatives and clerical workers into skilled, nonunionized craftsworkers. Locked-out union workers did not acquiesce by going back to work under nonunion conditions. At first, they organized meetings to promote their cause and give mutual moral support. The National Labor Tribune reported that support for the lockout was widespread, and lodges across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and even Alabama contributed funds to the “boys in Leechburg and Apollo.” Several articles also appeared saying that there had been fist fights in Apollo and Leechburg between union members and replacements, a knife fight, several incidents of spitting, and more than one attempted shooting. The tensions between the sides became so severe in the Kiskiminetas Valley that in November 1893, Kirkpatrick and Co. obtained a court injunction to stop Amalgamated members from trespassing on their property or interfering with nonunion workers at Leechburg.³⁹

There is, however, some evidence that a few skilled workers renounced their union memberships and remained loyal to Apollo Iron and Steel and George McMurtry. One of these workers wrote to the union newspaper to say that “there has been nothing but lies printed about the workings in the mill since it started up non-union” and “if that is the kind of stuff it [the National Labor Tribune] is filled up with don’t send it to me any more.”

Throughout the lockout, most union workers assumed that McMurtry would eventually grow weary of “trying to make rollers and heaters out of civil engineers, railroad firemen, and farmers.” As the lockout wore on through 1894, however, some union rollers and their families appeared to tire. They started looking for opportunities elsewhere, including the new unionized iron plants that were opening in Ohio, Indiana, and in Pennsylvania at nearby New Kensington, Hyde Park, and Saltsburg. Indignant at McMurtry’s success at keeping the mill open, in the spring of 1894 one locked-out worker wrote in a letter to the National Labor Tribune:

I think it is an outrage on American citizens that men like George G. McMurtry should be allowed to drive men from their homes to seek work elsewhere because they have too much honor to become his slaves and let him walk on them. It is not safe for a[n] honest upright man to walk the streets of Apollo now; he is sure to be insulted by the kind of man McM. has got working for him, and they are armed to the teeth with revolvers, knives, and all kinds of death-dealing instruments. But I expect to see the most of them go back to farming again, now that the sun begins to shine, where they ought to have stayed.⁴⁰

Judging from the number of replacement workers who moved to the Vandergrift mill in 1896 (see chapter 5 and the appendix), the author’s prediction was wrong. Many replacements decided to leave the farm forever in order to work for McMurtry. McMurtry was to reward them by giving them first chance at buying lots in Vandergrift.

Throughout late 1894 and into early 1895, an occasional letter from Apollo or Leechburg appeared in the National Labor Tribune from a striking/locked-out worker. Most stated that “we are still here,” but their tenacity had earned them nothing. A settlement was never reached with Apollo Iron and Steel or Kirkpatrick & Co. Both mills became nonunion.⁴¹

Unlike Homestead, the Apollo lockout and strike attracted little attention outside of the steel industry and the region. This sort of friction was common in the United States during the 1880s and 1890s, and perhaps politicians, social reformers, and the American middle class had become anesthetized to such a relatively quiet and localized disagreement between capital and labor. Nevertheless, the event profoundly influenced McMurtry and Apollo Iron and Steel as he and the company made plans for the recently acquired Westmoreland County property. There the company could escape the disadvantages of the Apollo mill site. There George McMurtry could make a new social environment sans unionization and uncooperative property owners. Apollo Iron and Steel began building a mill, and George McMurtry joined with John C. Olmsted and Charles Eliot to plan a town that would enhance and not hinder the company’s ability to make steel. Ultimately, Apollo would be left behind.