• Epilogue
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 180-194
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180Epilogue

Around lunchtime on May 17, 1990, the officers of the Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society and the Kiski Area Historical Society stood together, stared up at the gray sky, and wondered if they had picked a bad day for a town celebration. Although the morning’s steady rain had stopped, low-lying clouds still threatened to dampen the festivities. A crowd started to assemble in front of the Casino Municipal Building. Teachers from Saint Gertrude’s Catholic School positioned their uniformed elementary students in two straight but fidgety rows. Some high school students clowned on the Casino steps for a camcorder. Elderly Vandergrift residents staked their claims in the mass of wooden folding chairs set out in front for the occasion. Other people milled around the VIP dais, periodically glancing between the sky and the newest addition to the town’s public landscape: a state historical marker (fig. E.1), whose black canvas cover flapped in the wind.¹

A little before 12:30 p.m., just as the Kiski Area High School marching band paraded into the street intersection in front of the Casino, bright rays of sun penetrated the clouds. Before a crowd that now numbered more than two hundred, the Vandergrift Borough Council president, Jack E. Jewart, asked the Reverend Claude Moorfield of the First Baptist Church to lead the assembly in prayer, and Moorfield thanked God for Vandergrift, “America’s most important industrial town.” Speaker followed speaker, the schoolchildren barely able to contain their restlessness. But some of the high school students—members of their school’s historical society—looked increasingly serious, having played a major role in obtaining the marker for the town. After five speakers, a member of the Kiski Area High School color guard stepped up to the marker and gingerly pulled away the canvas cover. The crowd erupted in a hearty round of applause. Embossed on the blue metal placard were the words:

Fig. E.1. Vandergrift historical marker. Photo taken looking northwest toward the Vandergrift mill site. The building on the left formerly served as Apollo Iron and Steel and American Sheet Steel’s Vandergrift office. (Photo by Anne E. Mosher.)

Vandergrift

Hailed by historian Ida Tarbell as America’s “most important industrial town,” with homes owned by the workers. Founded 1895 by Geo. G. McMurtry, president, Apollo Iron & Steel Co. Named for Capt. Jacob J. Vandergrift and designed by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted.

After Eugene Iagnemma, chair of the Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society, had presented the marker to Mayor James B. Kerr and the community, Kerr told the crowd that he was “glad of the history that this community had.” From the beginning, Vandergrift “had a variety of ethnic backgrounds, social backgrounds.” The town, he said, figured importantly in the Kiskiminetas Valley, western Pennsylvania, and even the nation, attested to by the number of towns and cities that annually celebrate Vandergrift Day, including Detroit, San Diego, Fort Lauderdale, Phoenix, and Cleveland. Kerr mentioned how important the U.S. Steel Corporation had been to the town, how important the old steel mill’s new occupant, Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation, would be in the future, and how proud he was to be from Vandergrift: he planned to stay there for the rest of his life.

Probably the most insightful remarks made during the ceremony came from the next speaker. Like the other participants, Richard Vidmar, from the West-moreland County Commissioner’s office in Greensburg, congratulated Vandergrift on its history. He paused, and then said: “But the best is yet to come . . . , Vandergrift is coming back.” It took Vidmar, an outsider to the community but someone familiar with the industrial decline that Westmoreland County experienced during the 1980s, to see the forest, not just the trees: the dedication ceremony, he said, highlighted Vandergrift’s creation in 1895, but it also celebrated the 1990s rejuvenation of a steel town that many inhabitants had written off as a dying place only five years before.

Vandergrift amid Global-scale Industrial Restructuring

Throughout its existence, Vandergrift’s lifeblood had been the steel industry. As a result, the Vandergrift landscape acted as an industrial barometer: when steel prices and orders were high, Vandergrift homeowners gave their houses a fresh coat of paint; late-model automobiles could be found in many garages, and downtown bustled with pedestrians, cars, and business (figs. E.2 through E.7). In the early 1980s, however, restructuring of the steel industry occurred on a global scale, and this landscape and community were threatened. Southwestern Pennsylvania steel companies had started to scale back production, close, and even dismantle their furnaces, mills, and foundries up and down the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Valleys. Other Pittsburgh satellite mill towns—Homestead, McKeesport, Aliquippa, Ambridge, New Kensington—subsequently suffered high unemployment rates, overburdened social services, crumbling infrastructure, and a great deal of anxiety about the future.² Vandergrift residents hoped that their steelworks and town would not suffer the same fate.

Fig. E.2. Vandergrift’s “company town” landscape. The foreground shows the back elevations of two cookie-cutter rows of houses along Sumner and Farragut Avenues. Steel-company investors, including J. J. Vandergrift Sr., erected them to house merchants, mill clerks, and managers. (Photo by Deryck W. Holdsworth. Used by permission.)

In March 1986, when I made my first visit to Vandergrift, things looked bleak for the town. USX (as U.S. Steel came to be known after its merger with Texas Oil and Gas in 1986) had reduced steel production in the mill to a trickle.³ A succession of empty storefronts marked downtown’s Grant Avenue, and houses simply were not selling. The Vandergrift Borough Council and the Kiski Area School Board spent meeting after meeting trying to figure out how best to finance public services with an eroded tax base.⁴ A few people with whom I spoke tried to be optimistic about the future, but perhaps they were in a state of denial; the majority expressed a great deal of bitterness toward USX. For the town that once boasted one of the largest and most productive sheet steel mills in the entire U.S. Steel Corporation, the demise of the mill was going to be a hard pill to swallow.

Fig. E.3. Victorian housing in Vandergrift. Not the most ostentatious of houses in the town, these three dwellings are typical of most houses in the Olmsted Plan portion of Vandergrift Borough. Most are two and one-half stories and have large front porches and three to four bedrooms. The buildings take up nearly the entire width of the lots on which they sit. (Photo by Anne E. Mosher.)

USX permanently closed the Vandergrift mill in June 1988. Almost immediately, rumors circulated through town about a buyer. Given how desperate all of the other towns around Pittsburgh were for new industry, Vandergrift residents feared that the rumors were too good to be true; however, that autumn, Allegheny-Ludlum announced that it would refurbish the plant: it would install a computerized mini-mill to roll special sheet steel orders. The town was saved—or so most people thought. But when the mill reopened, it had little local effect: nearly all of the highly skilled workers employed by Allegheny-Ludlum at Vandergrift commuted from other parts of the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area, and the people of Vandergrift felt cheated.⁵ They could hear the mill operating. They could see the glow of the mill’s yard lamps in the night sky. And yet, they could feel the continuing repercussions of “deindustrialization.” Former Vandergrift steelworkers now commuted as many as forty miles to work in distant new jobs. Or they left Vandergrift altogether. Others begrudgingly accepted golden handshakes from USX. For a number of years during the late 1980s, Mayor Jim Kerr sometimes was the only person in town who would speak optimistically about Vandergrift’s future; most of the community seemed resigned to the idea that Vandergrift might, like many southwestern Pennsylvania steel towns, become another played-out place.⁶

Fig. E.4. Washington and Franklin parklet. Looking south down Franklin Avenue toward Saint Gertrude’s Roman Catholic Church. (Photo by Anne E. Mosher.)

Fig. E.5. Vandergrift Heights. Looking northeast toward the Olmsted Plan. (Photo by Deryck W. Holdsworth. Used by permission.)

Fig. E.6. East Vandergrift. The elevated railroad bed serves as a levee. It affords some protection from the Kiskiminetas floodwaters, but not enough during extreme rainfall events. In the Saint Patrick’s Day flood of 1938, most dwellings were substantially damaged or destroyed. Nevertheless, East Vandergrift, with its modest two-story houses, now represents a much safer investment for owner-occupiers than it did in the 1900s and 1910s. (Photo by Anne E. Mosher.)

Fig. E.7. Vandergrift business district. Looking west down Grant Avenue as it curves subtly toward the Casino and the mill. (Photo by Anne E. Mosher.)

Vandergrift’s Heritage as an Urban Revitalization Tool

Amid the malaise and despair, a handful of Vandergrift residents worked quietly on a project that they hoped would rekindle some of Vandergrift’s community spirit. In 1988, the Vandergrift Borough Council learned that the Casino Municipal Building, now eighty-eight years old, needed a new roof. Inside the two-story, Greek Revival structure, plaster was falling in chunks from the ceiling and walls. When it rained, the floors became a maze of rags and buckets. Rather than spend precious public funds on renovation, the council decided that it would be cheaper to move the borough’s public library, police station, mayor’s office, and tax office to larger quarters in a public school left empty by school consolidations.

Hearing of this plan, residents wanted to know what would happen to the Casino. Unable to pin the council down on an answer, Kiski Area High School teacher Eugene Iagnemma and several other Vandergrift citizens predicted demolition—a fate that they believed would amount to a community tragedy: the Casino occupied a conspicuous hilltop site at the end of the street that separated downtown Vandergrift from the steel mill’s yard. A key visual element in the Vandergrift landscape, the Casino had for decades been the political and social heart of the town. Besides the municipal offices it housed, during the 1900s and 1910s people from all over the Kiskiminetas Valley flocked to the Casino’s six-hundred-seat vaudeville theater to watch performers with national reputations; and during the steel strike of 1901, Vandergrift mill employees gathered there to show support for U.S. Steel. In the decades that followed, several generations of Kiskiminetas Valley residents saw their first motion pictures at the Casino; by the 1970s, however, the theater had fallen victim to competition from multiplexes, several of which opened within a half-hour’s drive from Vandergrift. Only the municipal offices and public library remained in the building. Iagnemma and his colleagues decided to launch a campaign to save the Casino, and later this group organized formally as what is known today as the Victorian Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society.

Initially, the society’s efforts received lukewarm support in town. Some residents simply did not understand the fuss over a dilapidated building, and most members of the borough council agreed with them: the Casino was an economic liability and councilors were resolute in their decision to move to the empty Adams-Lincoln School. Even among the circle of people who viewed the Casino as a community asset—a circle that grew ever wider—there was at times bitter division about the best strategy to save it. Should the structure and surrounding ground be designated a national historic place to protect it against radical alteration or demolition? Could a buyer for the property be found? Could the borough council be convinced to abandon its office relocation plans? Could the money be raised to purchase and restore the Casino?

The town did in fact become a national historic place in 1995, and with the help of donations and a series of grants-in-aid, during the early 1990s the Casino was restored to its 1900s opulence. But at the time the above questions were first posed, in the late-1980s, they were vexing to the community.⁷ No matter what strategy was chosen, the Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society had to convince someone that the Casino was worth saving, be it the Vandergrift Borough Council, the U.S. Department of the Interior, an investment group, or the community at large. While still choosing a strategy, they began to assemble information that would establish the Casino and town’s historical significance. They found and displayed Vandergrift artifacts, including two gold medals from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair that had been awarded to the Apollo Iron and Steel Company, American Sheet Steel, and the U.S. Steel Corporation for “Housing of the Working Classes” and “Industrial Betterment” at Vandergrift.⁸ Given the national resurgence of interest in the career and landscapes of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. during the 1980s, the group also publicized the links between the town and the “originators of landscape architecture in America.”⁹ They saw the “Olmsted connection” as conclusive evidence that Vandergrift was historically significant and that the Casino—the building that occupied an important location in the Vandergrift Olmstedian landscape—was worth saving.

The shrewdest move that the pro-Casino group made, however, was encouraging the Kiski Area High School Historical Society to take on the acquisition of the historical marker as their special project. If the young people of Vandergrift cared enough to raise $1,175 to obtain a historical marker that celebrated the entire town’s past, then the rest of the community should care enough to do something about a single building. While selling “historical marker” pizza and hoagies to their peers, teachers, and parents, the high school students educated Vandergrift about its history. The historical marker on the Casino’s east lawn will continue to educate for years to come.

Interpretations of Vandergrift: Both “Paradise” and “God-forsaken”

The marker unveiled in 1990 does not do the town justice. It is true that the process of obtaining it helped to rekindle Vandergrift’s sense of community and history and bolstered the Casino campaign and the effort to achieve national-historic-place status, but the wording that the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) approved for the marker’s text focuses on only a small aspect of Vandergrift’s historical significance. For a motorist passing through town on Pennsylvania Route 56, the marker might not mean much: Vandergrift is simply a praiseworthy place created by a now defunct steel company and designed by “the people who did Central Park.” Moreover, by quoting Ida Tarbell, the marker draws from—and reinforces—a single image of Vandergrift that dates from the town’s inception in 1895: that of a democratic, model paradise for the workingman, planned and built by the Apollo Iron and Steel Company but owned and governed by workers. PHMC director Kurt Zwickle’s letter of greeting read at the marker dedication neatly captures this image:

A century ago George McMurtry had a vision. His fast growing Apollo Iron and Steel Company had no room left for further expansion and in 1892 he bought 640 acres bordered by the Kiskiminetas River and the [Western] Pennsylvania Railroad. In this venture he had the financial backing of Captain J. J. Vandergrift. Trying to avoid the problems of surrounding milltowns, McMurtry studied the best industrial communities in both Europe and America and then he selected the famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to design his new town. A complete infrastructure was first created—streets, utility lines and other improve-ments—and in 1895 the lots were offered for sale to millworkers themselves. Soon Vandergrift was being hailed by industrial reformers as a model company town. In 1904 its design won two gold medals at the St. Louis Exhibition. The magazine Iron Age in 1909 named it a workingman’s paradise. The journalist and historian Ida Tarbell called it “the most important industrial town in America.”

After quoting Tarbell—“It would be difficult . . . 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”—the letter ended: “The town of Vandergrift stands in proud testimony of the vision of its founder.”

The same basic message underpins the entirety of a 229-page local history written by a committee of Vandergrift residents to celebrate their town’s centennial in 1996. Their effort, entitled Something Better than the Best—The Story of America’s First Successful, Worker-owned Planned Community, is a meticulously researched and beautifully written labor of love, filled with dozens of photographs and ephemera from the Vandergrift newspapers.¹⁰ Although no notes are included to link specific statements to their exact primary or secondary sources, nearly all of the historical “facts” that the authors have chosen to include square perfectly with information that I found, when working on my 1989 Ph.D. dissertation and subsequent projects, in the land, tax, and council records, the census, the Olmsted correspondence, and Sanborn fire insurance maps. And, while much of Vandergrift’s history is recounted and interpreted by the authors in copious detail and with a real richness that only community “insiders” could bring to the task, it appears that they have glossed over or avoided anything that detracts from the positive “workingman’s paradise” image. Only four paragraphs are devoted to the 1893–94 labor dispute in Apollo. No mention is made of the fact that Apollo Iron and Steel allowed replacement workers who had rejected unionism (and were of the “right” ethnicity) to purchase Vandergrift Borough and Vandergrift Heights property. Early Vandergrift is simply presented as a place (albeit a special place designed by the Olmsted firm) that grew in response to a housing demand created by a new mill.¹¹

When the book moves into the late 1890s and early 1900s, it says nothing about George McMurtry’s later rise within, and activities as a member of, U.S. Steel (including his company’s decision to abandon Apollo—even after it promised residents that it would not). Nor does it mention the 1901 strike in which Vandergrift’s workers played such an important role, nor the 1909 strike during which the borough believed it necessary to ban public assemblies and to crack down on the use of public space. Had these things been discussed, the authors would probably not have ended their book with such a strongly worded passage focusing on McMurtry’s integrity:

Gazing back through history, it is easy to see how the dreams and ideals of certain men and women are passed down through generations. Dreams and ideals that are founded in integrity and excellence have a way of persevering and growing. Such was the dream and the ideals of George G. McMurtry. Though he claimed his motives were based strictly on profitability, they followed the same ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness passed on to this nation by its founding fathers.

One ideal, more than others, the ideal of freedom, perpetuated by McMurtry, left a legacy upon his town that would endure though a century of trials and tests. The opportunity to own one’s own house, opportunity to govern one’s own town, opportunity to advance by one’s own efforts, and freedom of worship were all built into McMurtry’s dream. It was from such opportunities and ideals that the character of this community was forged and by which it has continued as “something better than the best.” What greater gift can a man leave future generations than quality of character?¹²

The 1990s state-sanctioned and oft-repeated “paradise” image of Vandergrift is boosterism at its best, meant to foster a stronger sense of place, create community identity, and attract tourists and investment. Vandergrift’s history, however, presents a variety of images and interpretations, facets of which are alternatively overlapping and mutually supportive, contradictory and mutually antithetical. It is indeed true that McMurtry built Vandergrift when he ran out of room at his existing mill in nearby Apollo, Pennsylvania. But it is equally true that McMurtry created Vandergrift following an 1893 labor dispute with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. McMurtry wanted not only to escape unionism, but he wanted his firm to do what it could to preclude any union resurgence that might occur in its mills in the future.

As a consequence of McMurtry’s attitudes about organized labor, several late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century writers created another, less-than-boosterish image for the town by calling it “God-forsaken Vandergrift.” They reported that McMurtry’s nonunion “sheep” not only kept the Vandergrift mill in operation during the national steel strike of 1901, they also saved U.S. Steel from having to negotiate a union agreement for the entire corporate system. According to them, McMurtry had turned his workers into U.S. Steel’s hapless pawns, ready to be moved into the corporation’s union mills whenever and wherever necessary. For some writers, Vandergrift epitomized capital’s hegemony over labor. The historical marker and the 1996 centennial history both ignore this image.

During my research on Vandergrift, I hoped that the primary evidence would allow me to say conclusively whether one of the possible interpretations of George McMurtry and Vandergrift was more correct than the other. Was McMurtry labor’s unsung capitalist hero or was he, as John Owens told me, “an SOB” who thwarted unionism and discarded the town of Apollo after it was no longer useful. Equally, I wanted to find clear evidence that either Vandergrift was a mean, hegemonic company town dressed up in Olmsted curvilinear streets and late-Victorian architecture or that it was a truly happy, democratic place such as the workingman’s paradise image implied. What I found in the primary record is anything but conclusive. McMurtry and his town had both their positive and negative attributes. The late-1980s and early-1990s local “vernacular memory” reinforces this idea.¹³ In spending many hours visiting with residents in the senior-citizen high-rise on Lincoln Avenue during the course of my research, I heard numerous stories (some passed down from the first generation of residents) about secret labor meetings, corrupt burgesses and town constables, romantic, moonlit rendezvous in the abandoned railway cut, excursions through gaps in the whitewashed fence that separated “the hunkies in East Vandergrift” from the rest of town, baseball rivalries, graduation ceremonies, uplifting Sunday sermons, racist priests, profane “mixed” marriages between Italian Catholics from Vandergrift Heights and Vandergrift Borough’s American Protestants, Halloween pranks, and mill accidents. I also heard residents talk about how much better their parents and grandparents believed Vandergrift was over Apollo, the Kiskiminetas Valley farms, and the “old country” where they had lived before. To them, Vandergrift clearly was both a workingman’s paradise and a Godforsaken place.

The resurrection of the positive image, the workingman’s paradise, is perhaps inevitable when a town is trying to hold on in the midst of economic decline. By latching on to this image, Vandergrift residents are not doing anything new (boosterism figured in Apollo’s name change from Warren in the mid-nineteenth century). The image was key also to Vandergrift’s initial success as a real-estate venture. The danger of promoting a single Vandergrift image, however, is that it creates a climate where it becomes difficult to celebrate, and unpopular to explore, other interpretations of the past that might consider a variety of political viewpoints and minority opinions. And for this reason, I suspect that my industrial-restructuring approach to Vandergrift and my discussion of the Godforsaken Vandergrift image and virulent anti-unionism among the town’s early residents will not be popular with some modern-day residents.

Having said that, however, I believe that a focus on Vandergrift’s early industrial and labor histories helps bring to empirical life some geographical aspects of industrial-restructuring theory that have been discussed only in the abstract or in late-twentieth-century situations. It highlights Vandergrift’s pivotal (but previously overlooked) role in the formation of U.S. Steel’s early management and labor-relations agendas. It also provides a slightly different context for understanding one of the first urban designs created by the Olmsted landscape firm without the assistance of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. At Vandergrift, U.S. industrial capital responded to its managerial, technological, and sociopolitical mi-lieu by drawing upon the nascent design profession to create a town that would be owned by workers and that would embody an agenda of urban social order through environmental determinism and self-help. How many corporations hired the Olmsted firm to execute an entire town plan because they were trying to forge new social relationships with their workforce? It may be that additional research into the professional careers of John C. and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. will uncover others, but Vandergrift was definitely the first.