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203Notes

Preface

1. Histories that deal with (and celebrate) the modernist planning agenda include Lewis Mumford’s The City in History: Its Origins and Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), Mel Scott’s American City Planning since 1890: A History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, updated ed. (London: Blackwell, 1996). Critiques of modernist urban and regional planning can be found in M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cam-bridge: MIT Press, 1983), and Leonie Sandercock, Making the Invisible Visible: A Multi-cultural Planning History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

2. For general biographical discussions on these three individuals, see Laura Wade Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Cynthia R. Field, “The City Planning of Daniel Hudson Burnham” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1974); and Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Random House, 1975).

3. My perspective on the relationship between power and urban design has been influenced greatly by Denis Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1984). For abbreviated discussions of this book’s intellectual impact upon Anglophone cultural and historical geography, see Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1989), 43–45, and Robin Butlin, Historical Geography: Through the Gates of Space and Time (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 136–46.

4. J. N. Boucher, Old and New Westmoreland (New York: American Historical Society, 1915), 3:565.

5. Later I would learn that Vandergrift was not a company town in the usual sense of that term. According to company-town historian John Garner’s typology of industrial settlements, Vandergrift was, for the most part, conceptualized and built as a “model industrial town.” Company towns are generally places where a single business enterprise maintains complete ownership over modes of production, housing, community facilities, and public space. In an industrial town, capital relinquishes some aspects of ownership and control. What makes a town “model” is the extent to which its creators build according to a premeditated social agenda and forego maximum economic profit at the outset: John S. Garner, The Model Company Town: Urban Design through Private Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 5–6.

6. Author’s field research notes, Mar. 7, 1986.

7. For example, see Andrew Hill Clark, Acadia: The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); Donald W. Meinig, Southwest: Three Peoples in Geographical Change, 1600–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); and Hildegard Binder Johnson, Order upon the Land: The U.S. Rectangular Land Survey and the Upper Mississippi Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

8. J. W. Harrington and Barney Warf, Industrial Location: Principles, Practice and Policy (London: Routledge, 1995), 129.

Introduction

1. See Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–1985 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

2. For example, many nineteenth-century Pennsylvania real-estate developers platted housing tracts according to a rectilinear grid plan. Within the grid, alleys often bisected the interior of city blocks. Originally intended as access routes that would keep delivery vehicles and night-soil collection off polite front streets, alleys became places where property owners built additional houses at the back of their front-street lots, especially in towns and cities where additional residential space was at a premium. In the process, they transformed service alleys into narrower versions of the front streets—something that the original surveyors presumably never intended: see Anne E. Mosher and Deryck W. Holdsworth, “The Meaning of Alley Housing in Industrial Communities: Examples from Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Pennsylvania,” Journal of Historical Geography 18 (1992): 174–89.

3. See Don Mitchell, “The End of Public Space? People’s Park, Definitions of the Public, and Democracy,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers (hereafter, AAAG) 85 (1995): 108–33.

4. Since the late 1960s, the literatures of urban historians and geographers have made the “public versus private” debate over land use a major theme; e.g., see Sam Bass Warner Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), and Kevin R. Cox, Conflict, Power, and Politics in the City: A Geographic View (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973). In the 1990s, two factors led to interest in this theme taking on a new tone: a number of geographers, historians, urban designers, and sociologists reformulated their understanding of the debate in light of (1) the post—World War II proliferation, and popularity, of privately owned places with significant spaces that are marketed for public use (such as shopping malls and theme parks); and (2) academic disenchantment with assimilationist models of citizenship that privileged Anglo-Saxon, property-owing males as the main actors in the public sphere. This recent work has raised important questions about conventional definitional understandings of public and private; e.g., see Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Ox-ford: Blackwell, 2000), 209–11; John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture after 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Given the intention of Apollo Iron and Steel (Apollo I&S) to create a space where their private interests would be met while a set of public interests emerged, and given my perspective on this process, Capital’s Utopia is closely related to the recent public-space literature.

5. Carville V. Earle, “Comment on Meinig’s Prospectus for Geographers and Historians,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 1206–9; Carville Earle, Geographical Inquiry and American Historical Problems (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992). For discussions regarding the context in which Earle’s ideas were initially proposed, see Michael P. Conzen, “The Historical Impulse in Geographical Writing about the United States, 1850–1990,” in Michael P. Conzen, Thomas A. Rumney, and Graeme Wynn, eds., A Scholar’s Guide to Geographical Writing on the American and Canadian Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3–90; and J. Nicholas Entrikin, “Blurred Boundaries: Humanism and Social Science in Historical Geography,” Historical Geography 26 (1998): 93–99.

6. The works that have been most important to informing my conceptual understanding of industrial restructuring include Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974); Doreen Massey, Spatial Divisions of Labor: Social Structures and the Geography of Production (New York: Methuen, 1984); Doreen Massey and Richard Meegan, The Anatomy of Job Loss: The How, Why, and Where of Employment Decline (London: Methuen, 1982); Alan Warde, “Industrial Restructuring, Local Politics, and the Reproduction of Labour Power: Some Theoretical Considerations,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6 (1988): 75–95; John Bradbury, “The Social and Economic Imperatives of Restructuring: A Geographical Perspective,” in Audrey Kobayashi and Suzanne Mackenzie, eds., Re-making Human Geography (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 21–39; Peter Dicken and Nigel Thrift, “The Organization of Production and the Production of Organization: Why Business Enterprises Matter in the Study of Geographical Industrialization,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, n.s. 17 (1992): 281; and especially Michael Storper and Richard Walker, The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology, and Industrial Growth (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

7. For general historical discussions of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S. iron and steel industries, see James M. Swank, History of the Manufacture of Iron in All Ages (New York: Burt Franklin, 1892); Peter Temin, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964); Gertrude G. Schroeder, The Growth of Major Steel Companies, 1900–1950 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953); and William T. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States, 4 vols. (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1971). For geographical and more local treatments, see Kenneth Warren, The American Steel Industry, 1850–1970: A Geographical Interpretation (Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1973), and Arthur C. Bining, Pennsylvania’s Iron and Steel Industry (Gettysburg: Pennsylvania Historical Association, 1954).

8. For historical overviews of the role of labor within the rise of big business, see Jeffrey Haydu, Between Craft and Class: Skilled Workers and Factory Politics in the United States and Britain, 1890–1922 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Studies that deal specifically with labor in the steel industry are David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Non-Union Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), and Gerald G. Eggert, Steelmasters and Labor Reform (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981). Two works that look specifically at labor relations in Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania are Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), and Carl I. Meyerhuber Jr., Less Than Forever: The Rise and Decline of Union Solidarity in Western Pennsylvania, 1914–1948 (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1987). Peter Sher-gold, Working-Class Life: The “American Standard” in Comparative Perspective, 1899–1913 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982) puts these relations into international perspective.

9. Historian John Ingham makes the point that not all steelmaking firms assumed large, hierarchically organized corporate forms. Nor did they all become subsidiaries of larger umbrella corporations. At any point in time, many different organizational structures were found in firms that operated in the Pennsylvania steel industry: John Ingham, Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820–1920 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991). To understand the emergence of the corporate form, I have made use of several general studies, including Leslie Hannah, The Rise of the Corporate Economy, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1976); Glenn A. Porter and Harold C. Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing (Balti-more, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971); Glenn A. Porter, The Rise of Big Business (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1973); Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977); Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). None of these works were written by geographers, however. They only hint at the geographical dimensions of the rise of big business.

10. Geographer John Bradbury’s model of industrial-restructuring trigger events, their geographical antecedents and outcomes, is particularly useful to understanding industrial restructuring from a spatial perspective. Bradbury, “Social and Economic Imperatives of Restructuring.” For a discussion of Bradbury’s model as it relates to Vandergrift, see my “‘Something Better than the Best’: Industrial Restructuring, George McMurtry and the Creation of the Model Industrial Town of Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1883–1901,” AAAG 85 (1995): 84–107.

ONE: Experimentation in the Kiskiminetas Valley Iron Industry

1. The Kiskiminetas Valley nevertheless contributed to Pittsburgh’s success as one of the preeminent trading and manufacturing centers of the trans-Appalachian West. Historians have carefully analyzed Pittsburgh’s relationship with most of its southwestern Pennsylvania hinterland. Historical geographer Edward K. Muller’s work has been particularly important in pointing out that interpretations of Pittsburgh as an industrial city need to look beyond iron and steel to the myriad additional resource-extraction and manufacturing activities that occurred in Pittsburgh’s hinterland. These activities included salt refining and chemical processing, coal extraction and coke manufacturing, oil production and refining, glassmaking, food processing, and metal fabrication; see Edward K. Muller, “Historical Aspects of Regional Structural Change in the Pittsburgh Region,” in Joachim Hesse, ed., Regional Structural Change and Industrial Policy in International Perspective: United States, Great Britain, France, and the Federal Republic of Germany (Baden-Baden: Nomos-Verlag, 1988), 17–48; “Metropolis and Region: A Framework for Enquiry into Western Pennsylvania,” in Samuel P. Hays, ed., City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 181–211; and most recently “Industrial Suburbs and the Growth of Metropolitan Pittsburgh, 1870–1920,” Journal of Historical Geography 27 (2001): 58–73. For other general works that include discussion of early southwestern Pennsylvania, see John W. Florin, The Advance of Frontier Settlement in Pennsylvania, 1638–1850: A Geographical Interpretation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, Department of Geography paper no. 14, 1977); David J. Cuff, William J. Young, Edward K. Muller, Wilbur Zelinsky, and Ronald F. Abler, The Atlas of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1989); and R. Eugene Harper, The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 1770–1800 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). Popular accounts include S. T. Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia of Indiana and Armstrong Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pa.: J. M. Greshem, 1891) and J. H. Beers, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, Her People Past and Present (Chicago: J. H. Beers, 1914).

2. The Conemaugh River is perhaps best known as the waterway on which the Johnstown flood occurred in 1889. The flood killed more than 2,200 people: David G. McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968).

3. Within southwestern Pennsylvania, the Kiskiminetas watershed—known colloquially as the Kiskiminetas Valley—remains virtually unstudied. Historian Carl Meyer-huber’s study of twentieth-century unionism in the “Alle-Kiski Valley” and Danny Mitchell’s dissertation on the salt industry in the same region are two notable and excellent exceptions, but their historical and thematic coverage is limited: Meyerhuber, Less Than Forever; Danny M. Mitchell, “The History and Significance of the Salt Industry in Pennsylvania” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1963). Indeed, primary records exist for the valley, but in-depth historical and historical geographic analyses of these sources do not. For this chapter, therefore, I have marshaled some of the readily available primary evidence as well as a few of the existing secondary sources to present a brief overview of the Kiskiminetas Valley’s historical geographic development prior to 1865. My purpose is to set the regional stage on which the steel industry grew later in the century. The writing of a detailed historical geography of antebellum life in the Kiskiminetas Valley—a la James T. Lemon’s The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical-Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972)—has yet to be accomplished.

4. Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1959).

5. Kiskiminetas Valley resident William Watson had the town of Warren surveyed in November 1816. The plat consisted of five streets that ran parallel to the river. Four alleys bisected these streets, creating twenty square blocks. Each block was divided into four 66 by 165 feet lots. On the last street, known as Back Street, Watson made room for a public lot on which a meetinghouse and schoolhouse would be erected: Armstrong County deed register, vol. 6, 147; Thomas J. Henry, 1816–1916 History of Apollo, Pennsylvania: The Year of a Hundred Years (Apollo, Pa.: News-Record Publishing, 1916), n.p.

6. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, The Evolution of Transportation in Western Pennsylvania (Denver, Colo.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Denver Service Center, 1994).

7. Baltimore already possessed an advantage in the Northwest Territories after the National Road reached the Ohio River at Wheeling by 1818; construction started in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1808. The Erie Canal—New York City’s tentacle across up-state New York—had just been officially dedicated in October 1825: Karl Raitz, The Na- tional Road (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Ronald E. Shaw, Erie Water West: A History of the Erie Canal, 1772–1854 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966).

8. James McFarlane, “The Pennsylvania Canals,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 2 (1919): 38–51; Donald J. Ballas, “The Western Division of the Pennsylvania Canal: An Historical Geography,” Pennsylvania Geographer 24 (1986): 27–34; David L. Fritz and Berle Clemensen, Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, Juniata and Western Divisions: Special Study (Denver, Colo.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 1993). For a description of travel on the Pennsylvania Canal, see Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (reprint, London: Oxford University Press, 1957).

9. W. K. Cadman, “Kier’s 5-Barrel Still—‘A Venerable Relic,’” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 42 (1959): 351–62

10. By the 1880 U.S. federal manuscript census, only eight Kiskiminetas Valley residents were identifiably associated with the salt industry—three as salt boilers, two as salt-works workers, and three as salt manufacturers—a far cry from 1835, when between a thousand and fifteen hundred were recorded: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census, 1880: Population Manuscripts, Pennsylvania, Armstrong County (Arm. Co.), Westmore-land County (West. Co.); Mitchell, “History and Significance of the Salt Industry,” 60, 75; S. T. Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia, 622–23.

11. Writers’ Program, Work Projects Administration, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania: A Guide to the Keystone State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1940), 459.

12. Wilbur Zelinsky discusses the nineteenth-century practice of borrowing classical names for U.S. towns in “Classical Town Names in the United States: The Historical Geography of an American Idea,” Geographical Review 57 (1967): 463–95. Two of the best overall treatments of American booster practices are Carl Abbott’s Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), and in Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), the section entitled “The Upstarts: Boosters,” 113–68.

13. At the same time, another town called Warren existed in the northern tier of Pennsylvania counties. The post office had already been known as Apollo Station for several years to avoid confusion with the other settlement.

14. W. K. Schusler, “The Railroad Comes to Pittsburgh,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 43 (1960): 251–66; “Conemaugh Division: Notes Taken from History of P.R.R. in Valuation Engineer’s Office, Philadelphia,” typescript, n.d. (c. 1897), Pennsylvania Rail Road papers, Historical Collections and Labor Archives, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania.

15. Robert Walter Smith, History of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania (Chicago, Ill.: Waterman, Watkins, 1883).

16. Henry, 1816–1916, 55.

17. Arm. Co. deed register, vol. 21, 293; ibid., vol. 24, 327.

18. Henry states that Rock Furnace, near Warren, was the first such stack built west of the Alleghenies: Henry, 1816–1916.

19. Joseph E. Walker, Hopewell Village: A Social and Economic History of an Iron-making Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), 12; Temin, Iron and Steel, 83.

20. Using the terminology of neoclassical economics and Weberian industrial location theory, the nineteenth-century Pennsylvania iron industry serves as an excellent example of a “weight-losing” industry: Alfred Weber, Theory of the Location of Industries (1909; trans. 1929 by C. J. Friedrich; New York: Atheneum, 1971). Converse to the case of “weight-gaining” industries that tend to locate closer to the marketplace, weight-losing industries gravitate toward the location of natural resources. For a good introductory discussion regarding these basic economic geographic concepts, see J. W. Harrington and Barney Warf, Industrial Location, 18–39.

21. Walker, Hopewell Village, 121; Robert J. Sims and Harry B. Weiss, Charcoal Burning in New Jersey from Early Times to the Present (Trenton: New Jersey Agricultural Society, 1955), 11.

22. The liveliest and most interesting account of the puddling process is James J. Davis’s autobiography The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Rolling Mills and What Came of It (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1922). Davis, who became U.S. secretary of labor in the Warren Harding administration, was born in Tredegar, Wales, in 1873. He emigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1881. Davis’s father was employed as a roller in Hubbard, Ohio, and the mother and children joined him there. Later they moved to Sharon, Pennsylvania, where the younger Davis learned to puddle iron. His account discusses the technical aspects of puddling, the culture of work surrounding the puddling process, and the home life of Welsh ironworkers during the late-nineteenth century. Much of my discussion of the puddling process is based on Davis’s autobiographical sketch.

23. During the 1860s, many firms improved upon the two-high mill by installing three-high mills. Invented by John Fritz, of Johnstown’s Cambria Iron Company, in 1857, a third roll that moved opposite to the bottom roll was mounted on top of the original two-high mill. The middle roll rotated in either direction, working with either the top or bottom roll. After the first pass, the metal was lifted and pushed back through the top set of rolls in the opposite direction. Two-high reversing mills were developed in the 1860s. Although reversing engines were cumbersome and inefficient, reversing mills were installed in many works and were a vast improvement over the conventional, nonreversing mill.

24. For maps of the geographical distribution of iron furnaces, forges, and rolling mills in the northeastern United States, see Warren, American Steel Industry, 16, 17, 28. For a map of their location in Pittsburgh, see p. 34 of that volume.

25. This biographical sketch of William Rogers’s life is based on several sources—mainly, an obituary that appeared in the Leechburg Advance and the Amalgamated Journal, the 1870 U.S. federal manuscript census for Apollo, Thomas Henry’s history of Apollo, and Cronemeyer’s two-part history of the American tinplate industry; see “William Rogers,” Leechburg Advance, Oct. 11, 1901, reprinted in the Amalgamated Journal, Oct. 17, 1901; Henry, 1816–1916; and W. C. Cronemeyer, “The Development of the Tin-plate Industry: Memoirs of W. C. Cronemeyer,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 13 (1930): 23–54, 123–35.

26. Henry, 1816–1916.

27. Arm. Co. deed register, vol. 32, 238.

28. For a comprehensive and comprehendible discussion of the product-life-cycle idea, see Edward J. Malecki, “Technological Imperatives and Modern Corporate Strategy,” in Allen J. Scott and Michael Storper, eds., Production, Work, Territory: The Geographical Anatomy of Industrial Capitalism (Boston, Mass.: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 67–79.

29. See Cronemeyer, “Development of Tin-plate Industry,” and John Harry Jones, The Tinplate Industry, with Special Reference to Its Relations with the Iron and Steel Industries (London, P. S. King & Son, 1914).

30. See Jones, Tinplate Industry, 66, and Brody, Steelworkers in America, 13.

31. Hogan, Economic History, 1:168.

32. Malecki, “Technological Imperatives,” 68.

33. “William Rogers,” Leechburg Advance, and Henry, 1816–1916.

34. Rogers purchased the well “for a nominal sum and a fine suit of clothes presented to each director of the gas company . . . thus the first gas ever used for metallurgical purposes was used in the mill of Rogers & Burchfield.” Smith, History of Armstrong County, 139.

35. Smith, History of Armstrong County, 148; Jones, Tinplate Industry.

36. Arm. Co. deed register, vol. 48, 376, 404, 631. According to the article of copartnership that was filed at the Armstrong County Courthouse, Rogers, Laufman & McElroy had been formed as a partnership two weeks before Rogers & Burchfield declared bankruptcy. Laufman and McElroy were each to buy $24,000 in capital stock; Rogers would contribute his patents for tinplate making and the industrial use of natural gas. Rogers would act as general manager of the Apollo mill, while Laufman was to “attend to the financial department of the business and . . . have the sole right to use the firm name in negotiable paper of any kind.” Sarah Laufman promised that her husband Samuel would “lend his services” (what that meant is unclear): Arm. Co. deed register, vol. 53, 223.

37. Beers, Armstrong County, 138.

38. Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia, 389, 395. Geographer Anne Kelly Knowles discusses similar patterns of nineteen-century Welsh labor migration in Calvinists Incorporated: Welsh Immigrants on Ohio’s Industrial Frontier (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

39. Rogers died in Wheeling, West Virginia, on Oct. 7, 1901. He was buried Oct. 10, 1901, in the Leechburg cemetery: National Encyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White, 1901), 11:445; s.v., “William Rogers”; and Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia, 411.

40. Under J. C. Kirkpatrick’s ownership, the Leechburg mill became a producer of iron sheets that at first rivaled Laufman & McElroy’s Apollo mill. In 1880, four years after Rogers & Burchfield failed, both Laufman & McElroy and Kirkpatrick’s mills had nine puddling furnaces. Both companies produced pan, elbow, lock, shovel, and showcard iron, but Kirkpatrick had further specializations in stamping, tea tray, and spoon iron and continued to manufacture tinplate. Apollo may have done the same, but it did not advertise it in the 1880 American Iron and Steel Association’s annual directory. Both mills did, however, have similar occupational structures at the semiskilled and skilled levels. For example, the Apollo mill employed nine rollers; the Leechburg mill employed eight; thirteen puddlers worked at Apollo, seventeen at Leechburg; eight skilled hammermen were employed in each mill. By 1894, the Apollo mill had two 20-gross-ton open-hearth steel furnaces, whereas at Leechburg Kirkpatrick had added only one 15-gross-ton furnace. Apart from Kirkpatrick’s choice to lock out unionized workers shortly after McMurtry locked out union workers at Apollo in 1893 (and hence both workforces lent each other financial assistance and moral support), the Leechburg mill’s existence apparently did not make much difference to Apollo during the late-nineteenth century. For this reason, the remainder of this chapter focuses specifically on Philip Laufman and his tenure in the Apollo mill: American Iron and Steel Association, Directory to the Iron and Steel Works of the United States (Philadelphia Pa.: American Iron and Steel Association, 1880).

41. In 1840, at age eighteen, Laufman moved from Chambersburg to Pittsburgh. He married, had several children, and became the proprietor of two hardware firms: Huber & Laufman and Laufman & Brother. During the 1860s Laufman held several public offices in Pittsburgh, including seats on the select council and the board of education. Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia, 411. Laufman can thus be classified as a member of the mercantile class that Olivier Zunz argues was so important in the emergence of corporate capitalism: Zunz, Making America Corporate: 1870–1920 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

42. Although the 1880 Apollo census enumerator did not give the exact locations where laborers worked, at least sixty residents from Apollo and adjacent townships made iron and another fifty may have helped them as laborers: Arm. Co. deed register, vol. 61, 59; Ingham, Making Iron and Steel, 50.

43. The following discussion about the world in which most iron puddlers and rollers existed draws heavily from David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor, 16–22.

44. In Apollo, the oldest puddler or roller in 1880 was roller Henry Absalom, aged fifty-three. The average age was thirty-eight.

45. Beach Nichols, Atlas of Armstrong County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, Pa.: Pomeroy, Whitman, 1879). For a brief review of the history of county atlases in western Pennsylvania, see Edward K. Muller, “A County Revisited,” foreword to G[riffith] M[organ] Hopkins, Atlas of the County of Allegheny (N.p.: G. M. Hopkins, 1876; reprint, Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, 1988), i–iii.

46. Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 64.

47. The Apollo laborer estimate was derived from the U.S. federal manuscript census in the following way: First, local historian Thomas Henry reported that during the Apollo mill’s heyday under William Rogers it employed about 140 workers. Although many of those workers left Apollo after the Panic of 1873, given the modest expansion program undertaken by Laufman between 1876 and 1880, the mill’s overall workforce may have increased to about 160. In the 1880 manuscript census for Apollo and adjacent Kiskiminetas, Parks, Bell, and Washington Townships, 88 individuals were positively identifiable as holding nonlaboring occupations in a rolling mill, which (based on a work-force of 160) would leave 72 (or 45%) as laborers.

48. In Apollo, 4% of the population boarded with families, thus modifying the nuclear-family constellation. This figure varied by ethnic group, however. For the Welsh and English in Apollo, approximately 7% were boarders. According to James J. Davis, Welsh immigrants considered it socially responsible to take in the newest arrivals from Wales as boarders:

Our little four-room company house in Sharon had its doors open to the wayfarer. There was always some newcomer from Wales, looking for a stake in America, who had left his family in Wales. Usually he was a distant kinsman, but whether a blood relation or not, we regarded all Welshmen as belonging to our clan. Our house was small, but we crowded into the corners and made room for another. His food and bed were free as long as he stayed. We helped him find a job, and then he thanked us for our hospitality and went out of our house with our blessings upon him. This form of community life was the social law in all the cottages of the Welsh. It was like the law of tobacco among Americans.

From a structural “housing perspective,” boarding reflected pressures within the local housing market created by a mismatch of the supply of shelter suitable for single men and the labor demands of the mill. The practice was not limited to the towns: in the countryside, a few rural farm families took in boarders, who included hired farmhands and laborers working in coal mines, salt works, the railroad, and even the urban iron mills: Davis, Iron Puddler, 73.

49. Beers, Armstrong County, 358, 460; West. Co. deed register, vol. 268, 40.

TWO: Apollo’s Uneasy Transition from Iron to Steel

1. Wiley, Biographical and Historical Cyclopedia, 388.

2. Arm. Co. deed register, vol. 61, 68.

3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census 1880: Population Manuscripts, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County.

4. The following biographical sketch and discussion of Standard Oil is compiled from the Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Biography of Pennsylvania (New York: Atlantic, 1889), 1:206–11; Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934); Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: Macmillan, 1925); and Ralph W. Hidy and Muriel E. Hidy, History of Standard Oil Company, New Jersey: vol. 1, Pioneering in Big Business, 1882–1911 (New York: Harper & Row, 1955).

5. Mary Louise Briscoe, introduction to Thomas Mellon, ed., Thomas Mellon and His Times (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), xxi. Although the National Road was in place from the Ohio River at Wheeling to the port city of Baltimore, much river traffic still plied to the East Coast via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the Gulf of Mexico, and around the Florida Peninsula. Water traffic to the West Coast had to go around the Strait of Magellan. A transcontinental railroad was still twenty years away.

6. Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Biography, 208.

7. At the time, this refinery (known as the Imperial Refinery) was one of the largest in the United States.

8. While Vandergrift pioneered solutions to oil’s transportation problems and integrated several aspects of production in the oil region, Rockefeller was making an impressive ascent from grocer and small-time moneylender to master of the entire complex of Cleveland oil refineries. Through strong-arm business tactics, he pressured Cleveland’s refiners to unite their assets with his. Or he put them out of business. Rockefeller’s critics accused him of being a bloodthirsty profit seeker, but he maintained that he was only trying to stabilize prices that had been made volatile by overproduction in the oil fields. In fact, throughout his career Rockefeller argued that everything he did was for the good of the entire oil industry. If an “association” of refiners (aka Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company) could control refining, he told competitors, then it could control producers and even the railroad companies that served the oil fields, refineries, and major markets—the Erie, the PRR, and the New York Central. But Rockefeller recognized that for this scheme to work, Standard Oil needed control over all refineries—not simply those in Cleveland. Rockefeller had to bring the oil region refiners into his fold. He began approaching oil region refiners and urged them to turn over their assets to him for appraisal. After making an assessment of their worth, Rockefeller offered them cash or the opportunity to hold Standard Oil stock. He pressed them to accept his terms or face the risk of being put out of business.

9. Rockefeller obviously trusted Vandergrift’s technical knowledge of the oil business. Even after investments in other industries diverted Vandergrift’s attention away from Standard (he stepped down from a directorship in 1881), Vandergrift maintained the presidency of United Pipe Lines—a Standard Oil subsidiary—for as long as that entity existed.

10. J. J. Vandergrift Sr.’s 1889 biographical sketch in the Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Biography of Pennsylvania portrayed him as an honest, generous, and religiously devout man, but the grandiloquent language of the description made even the normal tone of the volume, which always was hyperbolic, seem modest. The sketch reads as though Vandergrift was overcompensating for his involvement in Standard Oil. It included a lengthy quote from an official investigative report that said no business wrongdoing had ever been found on the part of Union Pipe Line. Standard Oil was mentioned only once, giving the impression that it had been included almost as an afterthought.

11. Did the Vandergrifts force out Laufman and McElroy? Was this a hostile take-over? Perhaps. Under Volta Iron’s original configuration, the Vandergrift family owned 1,467 shares; Laufman and McElroy’s interest, when pooled, amounted to 1,050 shares. If this configuration persisted into 1886, it is conceivable that the Vandergrifts held the majority vote needed to approve the sale of the Apollo mill to Apollo I&S. Some of the primary evidence suggests, however, that Laufman, looking to start a new firm, may have left voluntarily. Back in 1876, Laufman and William Rogers had purchased a small tract of land across the Kiskiminetas River from Apollo. That tract became part of Volta Iron’s holdings in 1883. In November 1885, however, Laufman purchased the tract for $1 from Kirk Q. Bingham, another Vandergrift relative. In 1886, Laufman built a new works on this ground—the Apollo Sheet Iron Works of P. H. Laufman & Co., where Laufman developed a new method of electroplating metal for the Pittsburgh electrical-appliance industry. With a small workforce of highly skilled, unionized rollers (who presumably followed him from the old mill), Laufman’s management style apparently contrasted markedly with what was developing at Apollo I&S. Poems and letters to the American Federation of Labor’s National Labor Tribune frequently extolled the virtues of working for Laufman in the Paulton mill, especially during Apollo I&S’s labor problems in 1893: Arm. Co. deed register, vol. 64, 390; vol. 65, 65; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: James T. White, 1918), 11:445; and see, e.g., National Labor Tribune, Mar. 9, 1893.

12. See Robert A. Walker, “Death of George G. McMurtry,” Iron Age, Aug. 12, 1915, 366–67; “George G. McMurtry Dies,” New York Times, Aug. 7, 1915, 7; “George G. M’Murtry Dies at Sea Resort,” Pittsburgh Press, Aug. 6, 1915, 1; “McMurtry Memorial Held Sunday,” Vandergrift Citizen, Oct. 22, 1915, n.p.

13. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Tenth Census, 1880: Population Manuscripts, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County, Allegheny City.

14. After assembling all of the information that I could find about McMurtry, I was struck by how much his biographical sketch resembles the story line of a Horatio Alger novel. McMurtry’s may truly have been a classic Great American Success Story, but could it be that that is exactly what he and his supporters wanted the public to believe? By casting his image as one who, having experienced great hardship, rose above it, McMurtry could serve as a role model for industrial labor: work hard, be loyal to those who helped along the way, and with a bit of luck you, too, may become a corporate executive.

15. However, Alden McMurtry—McMurtry’s youngest son—worked as a mechanical engineer at the Vandergrift mill in 1900 and lived in an apartment in one of the commercial buildings that an Apollo I&S shareholder owned: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900: Population Manuscripts, Pennsylvania, West. Co., Vandergrift Borough.

16. For one of the clearest overviews of the development of the steel-production process, see Temin, Iron and Steel, 13–29.

17. For a list of the thirteen original U.S. Bessemer firms, see Swank, History of Manufacture of Iron; see also American Iron and Steel Association, Directory (1880). The production percentages are from Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 27.

18. American Iron and Steel Association, Directory (1894).

19. The rolling-mill description is from C. H. Morgan, “Some Landmarks in the History of the Rolling Mill,” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 22 (1901): 31–64, quoted by Brody, Steelworkers in America, 12.

20. For a discussion of the shifts that took place in the ethnic division of labor in and around Pittsburgh, see Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, and Matthew S. Magda, Mon-essen: Industrial Boomtown and Steel Community, 1898–1980 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1985). An excellent theoretical discussion of Marx’s concept of the “reserve army of labor” is in Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 386–401. Yda Schreuder looks at the spatial aspects of the ethnic division of labor in two articles, “Labor Segmentation, Ethnic Division of Labor, and Residential Segregation in American Cities in the Early Twentieth Century,” Professional Geographer 41 (1989): 131–43, and “The Impact of Labor Segmentation on the Ethnic Division of Labor and the Immigrant Residential Community: Polish Leather Workers in Wilmington, Delaware, in the Early-Twentieth Century,” Journal of Historical Geography 16 (1990): 402–24.

21. My interpretation of labor issues in the steel industry is based on four sources: Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, chapter 1; Brody, Steelworkers in America; Ingham, Making Iron and Steel; and the opening chapters of Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead, 1880–1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992).

22. Discussion of Homestead has been something of an academic and journalistic cottage industry; see Krause, Battle for Homestead; Arthur G. Burgoyne, The Homestead Strike of 1892, with an afterword by David P. Demarest Jr. (1893; reprint, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979); William Serrin, Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); John P. Hoerr, And the Wolf Finally Came: The Decline of the American Steel Industry (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988).

23. Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, 41.

24. Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association 27, no. 35 (1893): 277.

25. The largest producer of course was the Carnegie Steel Co. (annual capacity, 500,000 gross tons): American Iron and Steel Association, Directory (1894).

26. Fred Kniffen, “Folk Housing, Key to Diffusion,” AAAG 55 (1965): 549–77.

27. Between 1886 and 1894, the number of manufacturing and resource-processing establishments in Apollo increased from six to seven. The number of services more than doubled, from eleven to twenty-seven. Three new financial institutions brought the town’s total to four. The number of wholesale and retail establishments increased from forty-five in 1886 to ninety-five in 1894: Sanborn Map Co., Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps: Apollo, Pennsylvania (New York: Sanborn Map, 1886, 1889, 1894).

28. Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1941; reprint, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 122–23.

29. Ray Burkett, one of Vandergrift and Apollo’s historians, writes that “some accounts sympathetic to the company [Apollo I&S] assert that the land adjacent to the mill had been purchased by speculators, but that McMurtry refused to negotiate with them and proceeded with plans for the new mill.” Following through on this argument, McMurtry was supposedly forced to move by the major Apollo landowners: Ray Burkett, “Vandergrift: A Model Worker’s Community” (seminar paper, University of Pittsburgh, 1972), 16.

30. The company would make a fivefold profit on its original investment in this property when it began to sell the bulk of it for residential and commercial purposes in 1896: West. Co. deed register, vol. 200, 596; vol. 201, 529; vol. 207, 481; vol. 213, 241; vol. 215, 141, 455; vol. 219, 123; vol. 225, 170.

31. John C. Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years: A History of Vandergrift (Vandergrift, Pa.: News-Citizen, 1972), n.p.; National Cyclopaedia, 16: 357–58.

32. Historian David Montgomery argues that tensions had long existed between rollers and puddlers within the union, mainly over the issue of a shorter work day. Rollers and other workers wanted the shorter day, puddlers did not. The union leadership may have been unwilling to exacerbate the tension by protesting the puddlers’ termination; if they did, they stood to alienate the rollers, who were fast becoming the Amalgamated’s lifeblood. Without union intervention, puddlers were assuredly a doomed breed: Montgomery, Fall of the House of Labor, chap. 1.

33. Hope Lodge, number 17, was the Apollo and Iron Steel lodge; William Weihe Lodge, number 64, was the Laufman mill’s lodge. National Labor Tribune, May 4, 1893; Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association 28, no. 26 (1894): 205.

34. My account of the Apollo and Leechburg lockouts is based on three sources: Burkett, “Vandergrift”; National Labor Tribune; and Iron Age.

35. National Labor Tribune, June 8, 1893, Oct. 12, 1893; Bulletin of the American Iron and Steel Association 27, no. 3 (1893): n.p.; Iron Age, Oct. 12, 1893, 668. For a discussion of the Sheet Iron Association, see Cronemeyer, “Development of Tin-plate Industry,” 123–35.

36. In the absence of union lodge records, I made use of Armstrong County tax-assessment records to corroborate some of these reported occupational changes in regard to laborer promotions and the number of rollers present in Apollo between 1891 and 1895 (see appendix).

37. Arm. Co. tax-assessment records, Apollo Borough, 1892–1896; National Labor Tribune, Jan. 26, 1893.

38. Meyerhuber, Less Than Forever.

39. See National Labor Tribune, Nov. 2, 1893, Nov. 30, 1893, Dec. 7, 1893, Dec. 14, 1893, Dec. 21, 1893, Jan. 4, 1894, and Jan. 11, 1894; Iron Age, Nov. 1893.

40. National Labor Tribune, Mar. 22, 1894.

41. Ibid., Jan. 11, 1894, Mar. 22, 1894, Sept. 20, 1894.

THREE: The McMurtry, Olmsted, and Eliot Plan for Vandergrift

1. National Labor Tribune, March 22, 1894.

2. Discussions of the formation of McMurtry’s version of environmentalist thought can be found in Iron Age, June 17, 1897, 4–11 (two articles: “The New Works of the Apollo Iron and Steel Company,” and “Vandergrift”); “Vandergrift: A Workingman’s Paradise,” Iron Age, Nov. 21, 1901, 6–9; Eugene Buffington, “Making Cities for Workmen,” Harper’s Weekly 53 (May 8, 1909): 15–17; and Ida M. Tarbell, “The Golden Rule in Business, IX: Good Homes Make Good Workmen,” American Magazine 80 (July 1915): 39–43. General academic discussions of environmentalism as a social philosophy that had implications for the appearance of urban (and industrial) landscapes, include Walter L. Creese, The Search for Environment: The Garden City: Before and After (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966); Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1975); Garner, Model Company Town; Jack Reynolds, The Great Paternalist: Titus Salt and the Growth of Nineteenth Century Bradford (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1983); J. N. Tarn, Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas between 1840 and 1910 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973); and David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840–1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

3. Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967); James Burkhart Gilbert, Perfect Cities, Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, The Haymarket Bomb and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1995); R. T. Ely, “Pullman: A Social Study,” Harper’s Monthly 70 (1885): 452–66.

4. Buder, Pullman, 252; C. H. Eaton, “Pullman and Paternalism,” American Journal of Politics 5 (1894): 571–79.

5. Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and France, 1840–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); M. Edel, E. Sclar, and D. Luria, Shaky Palaces: Homeownership and Social Mobility in Boston’s Suburbanization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

6. “Vandergrift,” Iron Age, June 17, 1897, 10.

7. Apollo I&S, letter to Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., Apr. 25, 1895, Olmsted Associates Papers (hereafter, OAP), job file, box 204.

8. For discussions of Olmsted’s role in this group, see David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Cynthia R. Field, “The City Planning of Daniel Hudson Burnham”; Bender, Toward an Urban Vision; Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Jon A. Peterson, “The Origins of the Comprehensive City Planning Ideal in the United States, 1840–1911” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1967).

9. For more on Olmsted’s attitudes toward the connections between the recreative aspects of urban parks, labor’s health, and the nation’s wealth, see Peterson, “Origins of the Comprehensive City Planning Ideal.”

10. Eliot had worked for Olmsted before but had several years of independent experience in landscape design, having left Olmsted’s employ in 1885 to work on several New England parks. He rejoined the firm, renamed Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, in 1893 to take on a large part of the work associated with the World’s Columbian Exposition. John Charles, however, worked closely with his stepfather throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, his main responsibility being the day-to-day management of the firm’s many drafters, typists, clerks, and apprentices.

11. Olmsted Sr. was staying at the Biltmore estate in North Carolina when Apollo I&S initiated the Vandergrift project. For more on Olmsted’s life, see Laura Wade Roper, FLO, and Elizabeth Stevenson, Park Maker: A Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (New York: Macmillan, 1977).

12. Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot (hereafter, OOE), letter to Wallace P. Bache, Apr. 27, 1895, OAP, letterbook A40.

13. OOE, work notes, May 2, 1895, OAP, daybook E4.

14. Ibid.

15. Apollo I&S, Vandergrift Ready: Vandergrift Lots for Sale on the Ground (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Apollo I&S, 1896), 6–7.

16. Ibid., 25. For a thorough discussion of nineteenth-century prejudice toward immigrants, see Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).

17. OOE, work notes, May 2, 1895, OAP, daybook E4; John C. Olmsted, work notes, June 27, 1895, OAP, daybook E5.

18. OOE, work notes, May 2, 1895, OAP, daybook E4; “Vandergrift,” Iron Age, June 17, 1897, 10.

19. Apollo I&S, Vandergrift Ready, 13–14.

20. Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., letter to Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., July 23, 1895, Laura W. Roper files, quoted by Roper, FLO, 469.

21. OOE, letter to Wallace P. Bache, June 2? [illegible], 1895, OAP, letterbook A41; John C. Olmsted, work notes, Aug. 28, 1895, OAP, daybook E5.

22. That McMurtry proposed that Vandergrift might become the county seat reflects the magnitude of his plans for the town. Given Vandergrift’s location on the northeastern border of the county (as well as the central location of the established Westmoreland County seat, Greensburg), McMurtry’s idea regarding the county seat was a little unrealistic: OOE, letter to James I. Buchanan, Mar. 22, 1897, OAP, letterbook A51.

23. OOE, letter to George G. McMurtry, Sept. 21, 1895, OAP, letterbook A42.

24. Ibid.; Frederick Law Olmsted and John C. Olmsted, letter to George G. McMurtry, Apr. 12, 1897, OAP, letterbook A51.

25. John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 424, 427.

26. Owens et al., First Seventy-Five Years.

27. Apollo I&S, letter (dictated by Veryl Preston) to OOE, Sept. 10, 1895, OAP, job file, box 204.

28. When this letter was written, John Olmsted was apparently running the Olmsted firm alone. Eliot died in March 1897 from meningitis. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. joined the firm later that spring: OOE, letter to James I. Buchanan, Mar. 22, 1897, OAP, letter-book A51.

29. OOE, letter to James I. Buchanan, Mar. 22, 1897, OAP, letterbook A51; Vandergrift Borough (hereafter VB) council minutes, vol. 1, June 3, 1905 and July 1, 1907.

30. OOE, letter to George G. McMurtry, Aug. 9, 1895, OAP, letterbook A41; OOE, letter to Apollo I&S, Aug. 6, 1895, OAP, letterbook A41. To meet the mill’s increasing space requirements in the open-hearth department, the Village Green was cut in half. In 1912, Vandergrift Borough vacated part of the Green to the American Sheet and Tin Plate Co. and rerouted lower Lincoln Avenue: VB council minutes, vol. 2, Aug. 17, 1912, Aug. 21, 1912, and Aug. 24, 1912.

31. John C. Olmsted, work notes, June 27, 1895, OAP, daybook E5; John C. Olmsted, work notes, May 14, 1896, OAP, job file, box 204.

32. Apollo I&S, Vandergrift Ready, 26–27; John C. Olmsted, work notes, Apr. 13–14, 1896, OAP, job file, box 204; OOE, letter to Wallace P. Bache, June 9, 1896, OAP, letterbook A46.

33. West. Co. deed register, grantor index TUVXYZ, 1815–1897; grantor index TUVXYZ, 1898–1917. Olmsted wrote that “about 90 houses are done or nearly so. Some 100 to 110 more are contracted for.... There are about 500 lots . . . cut about 300 are sold. . . . They sold all the lots in each block as fast as the surveyor got it ready”: John C. Olmsted, work notes, Dec. 18, 1896, OAP, job file, box 204.

34. Wallace P. Bache, letter to OOE, June 6, 1896, OAP, job file, box 204.

35. OOE, letter to Wallace P. Bache, June 9, 1896, OAP, letterbook A46.

36. John C. Olmsted, work notes, May 14, 1896 and Dec. 18, 1896, OAP, job file, box 204.

37. OOE, letter to Wallace P. Bache, June 9, 1896, OAP, letterbook A46; J. C. and F. L. Olmsted, letter to Wallace P. Bache, July 17, 1897, OAP, letterbook A53. In a letter written on the same day to Vandergrift’s civil engineers, Olmsted asserted that “we wish to have the lithograph show our plan only, if the Company are willing”: J. C. and F. L. Olmsted, letter to Wilkins and Davison, July 17, 1897, OAP, letterbook A53.

38. Similar to later real-estate developments, infrastructural improvements were intended as an advertisement. For a discussion of public services as a selling point in suburbs, see Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier.

FOUR: Settling the Vandergrift Peninsula

1. The crew consisted of Harry T. Henry, roller; Joseph McMullen Sr., first heater; Charles Smeltzer, pair heater; David Coulter Sr., rougher; Patsy Emmet George, matcher; James Jack, catcher; and Dean Sawyer, doubler. Other employees responsible for opening the mill included Jacob Smith, general superintendent and manager; W. D. Hall, mechanical engineer; A. F. Johnson, blacksmith; Tom Burkett, assistant blacksmith; William Watson, pipe fitter; William White, boilermaker; Samuel Gourley, carpenter and master mechanic; Otto Lindquist, chief machinist and steam expert; Andy Pinkerton, chief electrical engineer; Charles W. Henry, chief foundation and furnace builder; S. A. (Archie) Davis, mill superintendent: Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years.

2. Historian John Owens and others have argued that McMurtry was responsible for choosing the town’s name. Local legend has it that Apollo I&S’s investors urged McMurtry to name the town after himself, but McMurtry balked at the idea, believing that it was more appropriate to honor Captain Vandergrift: Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years.

3. “New Works of the Apollo Iron,” Iron Age, 4–10.

4. The employment figures come from William Stanley Ray, Tenth Annual Report of the Factory Inspector of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (N.p.: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1900). In contrast, in 1899 Apollo I&S’s older Apollo works employed 320.

5. Apollo I&S, Vandergrift Ready, 12–14, 17, 24, 18.

6. Ibid., 27, 26. The selective sales policy also covered the sale of commercial and, moreover, industrial lots; other industries would locate in the town “if we choose to sell them the land”: Apollo I&S, ibid., 20.

7. Ibid., 20.

8. Ibid., 19, 31, 32.

9. The company made available one thousand shares valued at $100 each. Nine of these shares were held by the officers, who included J. J. Vandergrift’s Penn Tube partner Joshua Rhodes, temporary president (1 share); Verle Preston, temporary vice president (1 share); J. B. Vandergrift, temporary secretary (1 share); and Wallace P. Bache, the man who had initially contacted Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm, treasurer (1 share). The remaining stockholders were J. J. Vandergrift (1 share), W. B. Rhodes (1 share), J. J. Vandergrift’s son Samuel H. Vandergrift (1 share), J. J. Vandergrift’s personal secretary James I. Buchanan (1 share); and George McMurtry (1 share). McMurtry was trustee for the remaining 991 shares.

10. Apollo I&S, Vandergrift Ready, 28; West. Co. corporation register, book 1, 337–39.

11. There are two discrepancies between the information about sales published by Apollo I&S and the deeds that were filed at the Westmoreland County Courthouse in Greensburg: (1) the date on which lots were first made available to Vandergrift buyers; and (2) discrepancies in the number and value of lots sold. As to (1), Vandergrift Ready says that the sales started on June 8, 1896, whereas the first deeds filed with the county bear the date July 17, 1896. There are several plausible explanations: the company may have chosen to wait to issue deeds until after several lots had been purchased to cut down on legal and processing costs; it would thus have been possible to process several deeds at one time; the deeds may also not have been printed and ready until that date. Another possibility is that the company wanted to file several lots at once to make it appear that the venture was on the road to success. See West. Co. deed register, grantor index TUVXYZ, 1815–1897; grantor index TUVXYZ, 1898–1917. As to (2), according to the county deed records, 152 individuals purchased 218 lots worth $220,387 on July 17, 1896—figures slightly lower than those in Vandergrift Ready, where Apollo I&S states that 276 lots worth $275,013 had been sold on June 8, 1896. Whatever the reason for this discrepancy, 17% of the 814 lots that the company made available were definitely sold and legally titled on July 17, 1896. Moreover, according to county mortgage records, the VI&L issued mortgages to 138 of the 152 first-day buyers. Buyers had a three-month grace period before payments started, after which they paid back the principal at 6% interest in sixteen quarterly installments: West. Co. mortgage books, vol. 88.

12. One was roller Harry T. Henry, who had been in charge of the first test of the Vandergrift mill. The other two rollers, James Marshall and Thomas McNutt, were permitted to buy more than two Vandergrift lots, suggesting that they, too, may have been loyal to McMurtry. Information concerning particular Vandergrift, Vandergrift Heights, and Morning Sun residents and properties was pieced together from tax-assessment records, the 1900 and 1910 U.S. federal manuscript census schedules, and property deeds. For Westmoreland County, the annual, commonwealth-mandated tax-assessment records list residents who were “gainfully” employed as well as all property owners. For the employed, occupations and a tax rate are given. For property owners, the location of the property and its assessed value are also given. The federal manuscript census, which gives occupational data as well as information on housing tenure, profiles entire households, including those who did not own property or who were not employed. No information on the value of property is given. Property deeds not only list buyers, sellers, and the date that property was exchanged, but many times they also list previous owners, the dates on which the property changed hands, and references to other deed books in which previous transfers are recorded. For several properties, I traced their histories. In many instances, these histories revealed complications such as land repossession, property sales at sheriff’s auctions, family feuds, and subdivision of single properties. They underscore the dynamic and complex nature of the urban property market.

13. Holdsworth found that real-estate developers often sold specific lots to create an evenly spread spatial pattern of lot purchases; see Deryck W. Holdsworth, “House and Home in Vancouver: The Emergence of a West Coast Urban Landscape, 1886–1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of British Columbia, 1981).

14. Johnston paid $1,421 for one and one-half lots. In 1900, his property (lots and buildings included) was assessed a value of $7,500.

15. Daugherty had trained for only six months to become a roller: Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years.

16. Therefore, it is not safe to correlate ownership with occupancy.

17. J. J. Vandergrift died in 1899. Rhodes held twenty-one lots worth a total of $10,000 and nine houses worth approximately $1,650 each.

18. Margaret F. Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Russell Sage, 1910).

19. McMullen lived on an expensive Washington Avenue lot, which he owned. On May 10, 1898, he purchased the Franklin Avenue lots. Two years later he sold his Washington Avenue lot to Milton Uncapher.

20. For a discussion that compares Vandergrift’s alley-housing stock to that of other Pennsylvania industrial communities, see Anne E. Mosher and Deryck W. Holdsworth, “The Meaning of Alley Housing in Industrial Towns.” Rentership decreased in Vandergrift by 5% in 1910 due to the large number of houses built for owner-occupiers between 1900 and 1910.

21. Fifty-three households employed female servants. In 1900, most of these servants were in their late teens and early twenties, came from the surrounding countryside, and were Pennsylvania-born. Three were African Americans.

22. In this respect, the households of Vandergrift’s steelworkers were similar to middle-class households elsewhere in southwestern Pennsylvania; see Ethel Spencer, The Spencers of Amberson Avenue (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983).

23. The census is biased in favor of nuclear families given that the household is the primary unit of analysis. For a discussion of the role that the “extended family” played in industrialization and urbanization, see Tamara Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship between Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

24. There were three hotels in Vandergrift. Two, on Columbia Avenue, were residential; a transients’ hotel was located next to the train station.

25. See Byington, Homestead; Bell, Out of This Furnace; and Ewa Morowska, For Bread with Butter: Life-worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

26. Beers, Armstrong County, 460.

27. The biographical sketch of Dr. Howard M. Welsh (William Welsh’s son and E. H. Welsh’s brother) went on to say that William Welsh became “one of the representative business men” in Vandergrift: “He is largely interested in dealing in real estate and is vice president of the Citizen’s National Bank, of which he was one of the organizers”: Beers, Armstrong County, 491.

28. Apollo I&S, letter (dictated by Veryl Preston) to OOE, Sept. 10, 1895, OAP, job file, box 204. VL&I, Vandergrift: Its Homes and Industries (n.p., 1900), n.p.; VB council minutes, vol. 1, May 18, 1898, June 11, 1898, and May 24, 1899. For a discussion of the reemergence of “plebeian” Fourth of July celebrations during the 1880s and the holiday’s connections to the labor movement in the Pittsburgh district, see Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh.

29. VB council minutes, vol. 1, Nov. 20, 1897.

30. Ibid., Mar. 5, 1898; Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years.

31. Four (Barton Townsend, William McKim, John Johnston, and George Shaver) were rollers; William Watson was a pipefitter. Oscar Lindquist was the exception on the council; he was department superintendent in the sheet mill.

32. Words of praise for McMurtry and his donations to Vandergrift churches were a standard part of the church histories that were submitted for inclusion in Owens’s 1972 Vandergrift town history. In historical context, however, such generosity was interpreted differently. On Feb. 6, 1897, an Apollo Herald article stated: If reliance can be placed on the veracity of an employee, the widely advertised generosity of the Vandergrift [Land and] Improvement Company in donating $7,000 to a Presbyterian Church at that place, providing the congregation would realise a like sum, proves to be a purely business venture at the expense of its employees who have been assessed a pro rata amount to be deducted from their wages. The informant is a roller in the mill referred to and he claims his share of the church fund was $20. Apollo Herald, Feb. 6, 1897, quoted in Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years.

33. In Vandergrift, 7.7% of workers were foreign-born; in Apollo, 6.3% were foreign-born: West. Co. deed register, grantor index TUVXYZ, 1897–1917.

34. West. Co. register of plans, book 1, n.d.; Apollo Herald, Feb. 6, 1896, quoted in Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years. The terms of sale were reported by Ida Tarbell in New Ideals in Business (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 150.

35. In 1900, however, Thomas R. Hartley of Pittsburgh, J. J. Vandergrift’s stepson, owned ten houses and ten lots in Vandergrift Heights: West. Co. deed register, grantor index TUVXYZ, 1815–1897.

36. There is nothing in the deeds to establish which lots were to be used for commercial purposes: West. Co. deed register. From a mill employee’s perspective, the Longfellow lots were the logical place in which to place a business district. But from the perspective of the people who would probably use the businesses most—the women of Vandergrift Heights, doing marketing—this was not the best location; to shop, they would have to walk down from their houses and, laden, trudge back up the hill.

37. Corner lots within the new addition were $200.

38. John C. Olmsted, work notes, May 2, 1895, OAP, daybook E5. It also appears that not a single lot was transferred to a black family. There were probably only two black steelworkers in the area in 1900, William Cochran and his son Clare. Both lived in Washington Township. Several young black women and men worked as domestics in private homes and hotels.

39. In Vandergrift Heights, 672 residents were listed in the census as employed; 102 of the employed were foreign-born. Only 50 were from places other than Northwest Europe or Canada.

40. The average age of first-day buyers in Vandergrift Heights was thirty-one; in Vandergrift it was thirty-three. Vandergrift Heights was incorporated as a borough on Dec. 8, 1897. It is unknown if Heights operatives played roles analogous to Vandergrift craftsworkers in local politics. My search for the Heights municipal records was unsuccessful (according to Owens, they were destroyed or lost).

41. In addition to the low number of single boarders living with families, only fifteen households employed live-in servants (one of whom was black). Family members in an additional eight households supplemented the household income by “working-out” as servants in other households.

42. Only one boardinghouse was rented (by a non-English-speaking, Russian Polish galvanizer who had been in the United States for a decade). The others were owned by means of mortgages—two by Italian laborers who spoke English and had become U.S. citizens, another by a German Polish bundler (also a U.S. citizen), and two by Pennsylvanians.

43. In addition to the boardinghouses, there were only four Russian Polish, eight Italian, and eleven German Polish households in Vandergrift Heights.

44. Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years.

45. J. C. and F. L. Olmsted, letter to Wallace P. Bache, July 17, 1897, OAP, letterbook A53.

46. “Vandergrift,” Iron Age, June 17, 1897, 11.

47. On my first visit to Vandergrift, the mayor arranged a meeting with several Vandergrift residents (Mar. 7, 1986). During this meeting, I was told about the social divisions that had existed between the Borough and the Heights well into the 1950s. The local image of Vandergrift Heights was one of an Italian, Democratic, and Catholic community, whereas Vandergrift was American, Republican, and Protestant. One elderly informant spoke of how during his youth the young people from the “respectable” lower part of town (Vandergrift) were discouraged from socializing with residents of the Heights.

48. Robert Szymczak, “East Vandergrift: Across the Atlantic to Morning Sun: An Informal History of East Vandergrift,” in Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years; West. Co. deed register, vol. 100, 338; vol. 197, 160; vol. 199, 87; plan filed July 20, 1897, West. Co. register of plans, book 1.

49. The Chambers-to-Beamer land transfer of May 23, 1896, is recorded in the West. Co. deed register, vol. 249, 442.

50. Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years; West. Co. deed register, grantor index B, 1898–1917.

51. One of the live-in servants was an East European working for a Russian Polish family. The remainder were Pennsylvania-born. Three households also had daughters who worked as servants in other households. One of these daughters was born in Poland.

52. Cambria City (in Johnstown), Braddock, Homestead, Sharon, Pittsburgh’s South Side, and Avonmore each had flats. Invariably, “the poorer working people” lived in these low-lying areas: Davis, Iron Puddler, 19.

53. Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years; VB council minutes, vol. 1, Aug. 15, 1899.

54. VL&I, Vandergrift, n.p. The booklet had an embossed cover and was printed on heavy bond paper. No byline or credit was given to the artist.

55. According to Owens, Kiskiminetas Lodge 617 of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania received its charter on June 30, 1898. Charter members included mill superintendent Addison Beale and his brother Frank, mill manager Stewart A. Davis, rollers John F. Johnston and James Whitehead, pair heater John S. Barr, sheet heater Ezraiah Phillips, chief mill clerk Robert G. Scott, building contractor Frank C. Jones, merchants James E. Sutton, Milton Uncapher and Van T. Shepler, and attorney James S. Whitworth. Rollers and heaters were clearly members of the urban elite. Notably, all of the charter members of the Masons except Phillips, Shepler, and Whit-worth had also been first-day Vandergrift lot buyers. The Odd Fellows received its charter the following year, on July 22, 1899, and its charter members included merchant George Hunger, mill superintendent Oscar Lindquist, rollers David Artman, David George, Samuel Kinnard, and John Lock, and pair heater George Chapman: VL&I, Vandergrift, n.p.; Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census, 1900: Population Manuscripts, Pennsylvania, West. Co.

56. VL&I, Vandergrift, n.p.

FIVE: The Steel Strike of 1901

1. Arm. Co. deed register, Apollo I&S to American Tin Plate Co., deed, Jan. 10, 1899.

2. Hogan, Economic History, 1: 291. Moore’s goal was to control the entire tin industry and, hence, prices. Not only would this be good for National Biscuit, a major consumer of tin for biscuit boxes, but Moore could then indirectly influence the processed-food industry, including some major producers like H. J. Heinz.

3. Hogan, Economic History, 1: 290, 292.

4. The second largest works in American Sheet Steel had a capacity of 54,200 gross tons per annum. Not including the Vandergrift works, the average size of American Sheet Steel companies was 25,047 gross tons per annum: American Iron and Steel Association, Directory (1901); Iron Age, Apr. 5, 1899, 32. The directors of American Sheet Steel were McMurtry, W. T. Graham, Wm. B. Leeds, Wm. H. Moore, D. G. Reid, Henry Wick, R. M. Gilbert, W. E. Reis, J. A. Topping, R. J. Beatty, J. G. Battelle, M. I. Arms, Jas. H. Moore, A. W. Brown, and F. S. Wheeler.

5. American Steel Hoop consisted of nine companies. Four were located in Pittsburgh, and Monessen, Duncansville, and Sharon, Pennsylvania, each had one mill; two mills were located in Ohio. Of the Moore companies, American Steel Hoop was the most spatially concentrated: Iron Age, Apr. 12, 1899, 36.

6. The Inner Six were Moore, Graham, Reid, Wheeler, Leeds, and Reis: Hogan, Economic History, vol. 1.

7. Federal Steel had steel plants in Illinois, Ohio, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania; mining interests in Minnesota; two railroads in the Great Lakes region; and a steamship line. American Bridge consisted of twenty-five plants. Six were located in Pennsylvania; seven in New York; four in Ohio; two in Illinois; and one each in Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota, Indiana, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Michigan, Missouri, and Alabama: Hogan, Economic History, 1:274.

8. Carnegie Steel operated three steelworks in Pittsburgh and one each in Homestead, Rankin, Munhall, Cochran, and Braddock: Hogan, Economic History, 1:251.

9. Carnegie’s move to expand into finished tubes and rods was a response to the vertical integration that was starting to take place in the tube and rod industries. National Tube was building its own blast and open-hearth furnaces, as was American Steel and Wire. Previously, Carnegie had controlled the supply of iron and steel ingots to both National Tube and American Steel and Wire, and this was a way for the companies to break free from Carnegie’s grasp. At roughly the same time that other steelmakers began looking for a way to stop Carnegie’s steel-industry expansion plans, the PRR and the New York Central Railroad went on a stock-buying spree to end Carnegie’s Pittsburgh basing-point price-fixing system, a deal he had managed to secure with the railroads whereby all shipments of steel, no matter where they had been produced, were charged as if they originated in Pittsburgh. Both railroad companies placed as many of their representatives as they could on the boards of all of the railroad companies that participated in Carnegie’s rebate system. These directors voted the system out of existence. As a consequence, Carnegie decided to build his own railroad from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg. From the railroads’ point of view, such a move would be disastrous for their business and Carnegie had to be stopped.

10. Carnegie exchanged $320 million of Carnegie Company stocks and bonds for a little more than $400 million in U.S. Steel securities and received another $80 million as compensation for two years of profits. For a superb account of Carnegie’s business life, see Harold Livesay, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1975).

11. Schroeder, Growth of Major Steel Companies, 39; Hogan, Economic History, 2:476; U.S. Congress, Senate, Labor Conditions in the Iron and Steel Industry, Senate Doc. 20, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1911, 497; American Iron and Steel Association, Directory (1901), 2.

12. Brody, Steelworkers in America, 61.

13. Ibid., 61.

14. U.S. Congress, Senate, Labor Conditions, 498, 500.

15. Ibid., 501; Iron Age, July 4, 1901, 20.

16. U.S. Congress, Senate, Labor Conditions, 503.

17. Ibid., 505. The only information that I could find on Veryl Preston was in the 1900 U.S. federal manuscript census. In 1900, Preston was listed as an iron manufacturer renting a house at 3 Colonial Place, Pittsburgh. A resident of the Twentieth Ward, Preston lived only a few blocks away from 5302 Westminster Street, the home of Eugene Pargny, who later became superintendent of all American Sheet Steel mills in the Kiskiminetas Valley; Henry R. Cornelius, aged thirty-five, an iron agent who was a first-day investor in both Vandergrift commercial and residential property (4735 Bayard); and the Spencers, of Amberson Avenue: Spencer, Spencers of Amberson Avenue.

18. U.S. Congress, Senate, Labor Conditions, 506.

19. National Labor Tribune, July 11, 1901, n.p., quoted in Brody, Steelworkers in America, 84.

20. Vandergrift Citizen, July 20, 1901.

21. All the following quotes, including that from the McMurtry telegram, are from the July 17, 1901, Citizen.

22. Amalgamated Journal, July 25, 1901, 4.

23. This article was reprinted in the Amalgamated Journal, July 25, 1901, 4. Apollo Borough tax-assessment records show that Klingensmith entered the Apollo workforce as a laborer in 1895, aged twenty-two. The following year, he was listed in the tax-assessment records as a pair heater. I could find no evidence that he actually became a roller. Nevertheless, Klingensmith had been one of the laborers to benefit from McMurtry’s policy of promoting laborers to semiskilled positions during the 1893 lockout. Unlike many of his co-workers, however, Klingensmith chose to remain in Apollo after McMurtry opened Vandergrift. In the 1900 federal manuscript census he lived in Apollo and worked for American Sheet Steel as a sheet heater. According to Apollo Borough tax-assessment records, John Buzzard, aged thirty-three, was a roller who had apparently come to the Apollo mill as a replacement roller in 1894. Charles Lloyd was listed as a laborer in the Apollo mill in 1893. Arm. Co., Apollo Borough tax-assessment records, 1893, 1894.

24. Amalgamated Journal, July 25, 1901, 4.

25. Iron Age, July 10, 1901, 23; Brody, Steelworkers in America.

26. Brody, Steelworkers in America.

27. Amalgamated Journal, Aug. 8, 1901, 1; Aug. 22, 1901, 1.

28. Ibid., Sept. 19, 1901, 1; Brody, Steelworkers in America, 68.

29. Iron Age, Aug. 22, 1901, 26.

30. “Vandergrift: A Workingman’s Paradise,” Iron Age, Nov. 21, 1901, supp. 6–9.

31. Vandergrift Citizen, Nov. 2, 1901.

32. New York Times, Oct. 12, 1902, 12.

33. Daugherty’s speech continued: “The founder of Vandergrift, a lovable character, and possessor of many noble qualities, who by his generous deeds has proved himself a true friend of the workingman.” Behold his portrait encircled by a wreath of laurel leaves, emblematic of the success that has so signally crowned his every effort. We thank him to-day for Vandergrift, we thank him for our beautiful homes, and rubber-tired carriages, we thank him for ponies and pony carts for the children, these are luxuries that many enjoy, but most of all we thank him for that which we all have and enjoy,—a full dinner pail. We are grateful too that when Christmas comes we are not made subjects of charity by having a car load of turkeys thrown from the top of some high building for us to scramble for, but that we have the money saved from our daily toil to buy such as we need.

34. Vandergrift Citizen, Oct. 4, 1902.

SIX: Growing Pains for a “Model Town”

1. Ultimately, Vandergrift became only a thirty-nine-mill plan: Owens et al., First Seventy-five Years; “Vandergrift: A Workingman’s Paradise,” Iron Age, Nov. 21, 1901, 6.

2. E. M. Thierry, “Wonderful Town of Prosperous Toilers,” Leslie’s, The People’s Weekly 106 (1912): 106–7, 109, 111. The manuscript census is not helpful in calculating the number employed in the Vandergrift mill in either 1900 or 1910. Enumerators did not record place of employment in 1900 and failed to specify exact places of employment in 1910. Vandergrift residents may have worked in any one of a number of steel mills in the Kiskiminetas Valley, especially after an intra-urban rail line was built in 1906 over the old Pennsylvania canal bed between Leechburg and Saltsburg; see Armstrong County Historical and Museum Society, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania: A Collection of Topical and Family Sketches (Kittanning, Pa.: Armstrong County Historical and Museum Society, 1980), 24. McMurtry approved the sale of a large tract of land on the northeastern side of the Vandergrift peninsula to United Engineering and Foundry of Pittsburgh in 1901. This company produced iron and brass castings and specialized in manufacturing rolls for rolling mills. No approximate employment figures are available for this firm until 1909, when the Sanborn Fire Insurance Co. recorded that the works had three hundred employees. The upshot was that Vandergrift residents now had another industrial employment option in the immediate vicinity. Residence in Vandergrift did not necessarily mean employment at American Sheet Steel or its successor American Sheet and Tin Plate.

3. “Vandergrift: A Workingman’s Paradise,” 8.

4. VB tax-assessment records, 1900, 1910; Vandergrift Heights Borough tax-assessment records, 1900, 1910; West. Co. deed register, vol. 475, 88, 91, 130, 225.

5. For a detailed tabular breakdown of property owners, renters, and mortgage holders in Vandergrift, Vandergrift Heights, and East Vandergrift in 1910, see Anne E. Mosher, “Capital Transformation and the Restructuring of Place: The Creation of a Model Industrial Town” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1989), Table 6.2.

6. This property abstract was constructed from deeds registered in Westmoreland County, the federal manuscript census of population, the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for Vandergrift, and VB tax-assessment records.

7. VB tax-assessment records, 1910.

8. West. Co. deed register, vol. 263, 366. Beck purchased his lot in 1896 for $1,091. West. Co. deed register, vol. 268, 110.

9. In conducting my research, I faced a major problem over the issue of wages for all of Vandergrift’s workforce—American and immigrant, skilled and unskilled. Several readers of my 1995 article in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers as well as participants in a 1997 staff workshop of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission have suggested that wage data would pin down more closely the motives of McMurtry, Apollo I&S, and American Sheet Steel for building and sustaining a model town: Mosher, “Something Better than the Best.” Were the mill owners acting benevolently or malevolently toward their workforce? Higher wages than the regional norm might reflect benevolence; lower wages might suggest that the company figured it had done enough for workers by providing infrastructure and a model-town design—it could get away with paying low wages because mortgages and fixed investments would keep workers in line. Anecdotal material suggests that skilled Vandergrift workers believed they were well paid, but without the mill payroll it is impossible to corroborate this quantitatively. The only pertinent wage information that I found for the mill was in the borough council’s minutes on the ongoing discussion about laborer wage rates for its street crews. For several years, the going rate was sixteen cents per hour, a figure deemed commensurate with valley steel-mill rates. I am unwilling to use this single piece of evidence to justify using wage scales from other local steelmills (or from government sources that mask mill identity or are averages) as a surrogate for Vandergrift. More importantly, even if laboring wages were commensurate, it may not have been the same for semiskilled and skilled wages. The answer to the question “benevolent or malevolent?” must be built upon other evidence, which so far has not been found.

10. VB council minutes, vol. 1, Mar. 5, 1906; vol. 2, Sept. 4, 1911, Aug. 7, 1911, Oct. 7, 1912, Mar. 9, 1914, June 1, 1914.

11. During my visits to Vandergrift, several residents of Italian descent told me variations on the same story: “When my grandfather arrived in America, a man met him at the dock in New York and told him to go to Vandergrift, Pennsylvania: ‘There are plenty of jobs because Vandergrift is the biggest steel mill in America, it is a nice place to live because it is in the countryside, and there are many other Italians living there.’”

12. In 1910, women constituted 13% of the entire Vandergrift peninsula workforce (222 women): twenty-eight held professional positions (nurse, reporter, librarian, teacher, etc.). Four worked in industrial occupations (e.g., newspaper typesetter, industrial baker, heater’s helper). The vast majority (86%) were employed as servants, sales clerks, boardinghouse keepers, bookkeepers, dressmakers, waitresses, and in other clerical, sales, and service occupations: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, 1910: Population Manuscripts, West. Co.

13. Vandergrift Citizen, Feb. 28, 1916.

14. Vandergrift Borough’s First Precinct, the area bounded by Lincoln, Custer, Washington, Columbia, and Sherman Avenues, voted 135 for and 90 against consolidation, reflecting that much of the electorate in that part of town rented property and owned smaller lots. Any tax burden placed on the borough by consolidation would have had less of an impact on them. In the Second Precinct, which included the eastern half of town as well as newer residential districts that were being built, the proposition lost 88 to 131: VB council minutes, vol. 3, July 7, 1915.

15. Because of the legal consolidation of Vandergrift Borough and Vandergrift Heights Borough that occurred in July 1915, council membership had doubled, to fourteen; the seven members of the Vandergrift Borough Council were joined by the Vandergrift Heights Council: VB council minutes, vol. 3, Sept. 6, 1915.

16. Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870–1900 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

17. See VB council minutes, vol. 1, Aug. 5, 1905, Oct. 8, 1905, May 1, 1906, Feb. 4, 1907, Mar. 27, 1910, and Aug. 7, 1912.

18. Ibid., vol. 1, May 24, 1899, Apr. 6, 1903, Nov. 7, 1903, Dec. 5, 1905, and Feb. 6, 1904.

19. The ordinance fixing the fire limits was read at the July 9, 1898, council meeting and was reprinted in the Apollo Herald that month. The ordinance was passed into law at the Aug. 13, 1898, council meeting. VB council minutes, vol. 1, July 9, 1898, Aug. 13, 1898, Nov. 11, 1899.

20. The council minutes for Vandergrift Heights have been lost; VB council minutes, vol. 1, May 12, 1900.

21. “George G. McMurtry Dies,” 7; “George G. M’Murtry Dies at Sea Resort,” 1.

22. VB council minutes, vol. 3, Sept. 6, 1915.

23. Ibid., vol. 1, May 4, 1908; vol. 3, May 7, 1917, Jan. 6, 1919, Feb. 3, 1919, and May 5, 1919.

24. See the Apollo Sentinel, 1909. Beers, Armstrong County, 15; F. W. Jackson and R. H. Ankeny, History of First Presbyterian Church of Apollo, Pa. (Apollo, Pa.: n.p., 1925; revised ed. Apollo: n.p., 1950), 29; Henry, 1816–1916, 56. The 1900 manuscript census data for Apollo corroborate these findings.

25. Tarbell, New Ideals in Business, 155.

26. In the late 1900s, the only steel town that could rival Gary in terms of the size and intensity of steelworks concentration and integration was Essen, Germany: Raymond A. Mohl and Neil Betten, Steel City: Urban and Ethnic Patterns in Gary, Indiana, 1906–1950 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986).

27. Mohl and Betten, Steel City, 13.

28. Eugene Buffington, “Making Cities for Workmen,” Harper’s Weekly 53 (May 8, 1909): 15–17. Vandergrift was used by Buffington as an example where corporate capital allowed workers to “help themselves,” Vandergrift thus being part of the debate over the extent to which manufacturers should become involved in social-welfare programs.

29. Buffington, “Making Cities for Workmen,” 16. His informants were incorrect about the level of home ownership, but the rest of Buffington’s assessment was correct for Vandergrift.

30. Ibid., 16.

31. The town was model in yet another sense. At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Apollo I&S was awarded two gold medals for its “industrial betterment” scheme and for the way in which it provided “housing of the working classes.” There is no record of the specific content of the fair exhibits: James H. Lambert, The Story of Pennsylvania at the World’s Fair: St. Louis, 1904 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Commission, 1905).

32. VB council minutes, vol. 1, Feb. 26, 1902, May 14, 1902, May 7, 1906, Sept. 14, 1910; vol. 2, Aug. 7, 1911.

33. Mohl and Betten, Steel City, 17–19. Mohl and Betten cite the Gary Daily Tribune as the source of the “lawless men” quote.

34. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on the Investigation of the United States Steel Corporation, Hearings, 62nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1912, 3142; Amalgamated Journal, July 15, 1909.

35. U.S. Congress, House, Hearings, 3143.

36. Ibid., 3143–45.

37. Amalgamated Journal, Aug. 12, 1909, 1.

38. Ibid., Sept. 9, 1909, 1.

39. Ibid., Oct. 9, 1909, 3; Oct. 14, 1909, 3.

40. “The Town of Vandergrift, an Industrial Settlement Owned and Governed by Workmen,” Craftsman 17 (1910): 566; Tarbell, New Ideals in Business, 119.

41. Thierry, “Wonderful Town of Prosperous Toilers.” In the absence of police records, it is difficult to assess the validity of the statement that no crime could be found in Vandergrift. There are indications from the council minutes that some problems required police action. Extra police were hired to keep the peace during Halloween, the Fourth of July, and labor disputes. And councilmen charged in 1905 that Burgess George Hunger had embezzled borough funds; see VB council minutes, vol. 1, Dec. 17, 1904, Jan. 7, 1905, Mar. 11, 1905, Apr. 1, 1905, May 6, 1905, and June 3, 1905. Union organizers would undoubtedly have contested the statement that the peace had never been disrupted. Some residents, too, would have disagreed: “Town of Vandergrift,” 565.

42. Tarbell, New Ideals in Business, 151–52. One of Tarbell’s first examinations of industrialization was her 1904 history of the Standard Oil Co.: Tarbell, History of Standard Oil Company. For an excellent biography, which places Tarbell firmly within historical and geographical contexts of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social-reform movements as well as western Pennsylvania and the industrial northeast, see Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); Vandergrift Citizen, Apr. 19, 1915.

43. Tarbell, New Ideals in Business, 152.

44. Ibid., 153.

45. T. E. Deal and A. A. Kennedy, Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1982).

46. The United Steel Workers organized the Vandergrift workforce in 1936. The logic regarding the relationship between home ownership and worker complacency is exactly the same as that which underpinned William Levitt’s massive post–World War II suburban real-estate ventures. Historian Barbara Kelly quotes him as saying “homeowners do not have time to be Communists”; see her excellent historical analysis of Levittown, Expanding the American Dream: Building and Rebuilding Levittown (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); see also David Harvey, “Labor, Capital, and Class Struggles around the Built Environment in Advanced Capitalist Societies,” in Kevin R. Cox, Urbanization and Conflict in Market Societies (Chicago, Ill.: Maaroufa, 1978), 9 – 37.

47. John Nolan, New Ideals in the Planning of Cities, Towns, and Villages (New York: American City Bureau, 1919).

48. For an excellent discussion regarding Vandergrift’s place in the entire sweep of U.S. company-town history, see Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London: Verso, 1995). Crawford, however, mistakenly attributes the Vandergrift plan’s design to Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.

Epilogue

1. The dedication ceremony for the historical marker was captured on videotape and supplied to me by Eugene Iagnemma: “Vandergrift Historical Marker Dedication, May 17th, 1990,” in the author’s videotape collection, Department of Geography, Syracuse University.

2. Several books discuss the 1970s and 1980s round of industrial restructuring in the U.S. steel industry; e.g., see Hoerr, And the Wolf Finally Came; Serrin, Homestead; and the epilogue of Mark Reutter, Sparrow’s Point: Making Steel (New York: Summit Books, 1988).

3. In late-2001, when the company’s oil-related components splintered off so that Marathon Oil would exist as an independent company, USX underwent another name change. It is currently known as USS.

4. See Vandergrift News-Citizen, 1986–89.

5. Ironically, this same situation was repeated in Gary, Indiana, in 1989. During the late-1980s, Gary’s USX mills were refurbished and automated with new steelmaking technologies. The USX workforce decreased from a one-time high of twenty-one thousand people to seventy-five hundred. Furthermore, many workers in the USX mills were not employed directly by USX; they were out-of-town contract workers employed by firms located in places other than Gary. Gary’s mayor stated publicly that this development had been “a great success story for the company, but it has been a painful experience for us”: William E. Schmidt, “A Steel City Needs Help Despite Big Steel’s Comeback,” New York Times, Sept. 4, 1989, 1.

6. For a discussion of de-industrialization in the Monongahela Valley, see Hoerr, And the Wolf Finally Came (1988).

7. “Vandergrift in History Books,” Valley News Dispatch, June 19, 1995.

8. Lambert, Story of Pennsylvania, 360.

9. “A Walking Tour of Vandergrift, Pa.”—pamphlet published by the Victorian Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society, n.d. (c. 1990).

10. Kenneth M. Blose (principal author), the 1995 Vandergrift Centennial Committee, and the Victorian Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society, Vandergrift, Pennsylvania: Something Better than the Best—The Story of America’s First Successful, Worker-owned Planned Community (n.p., 1996).

11. Both the historical marker and the centennial book play somewhat fast and loose with Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.’s not having had a direct hand in designing this town (see Blose, Something Better than the Best, 20–22). Even Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. played a very minor role, having been brought into the landscape firm late in the planning and construction process. The credit for the design should be shared—between John Charles Olmsted, Charles Eliot, civil engineers Wilkins and Davison, and McMurtry and his secretary Wallace Bache.

12. Blose, Something Better than the Best, 229.

13. Historian John Bodnar makes a useful distinction between vernacular (popular) memory and official public history. These versions of the past have interacted at a variety of spatial scales as “memory politics”: John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).