Beyond Rust - Allen Dieterich-Ward Politics and Culture in Modern America

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involved the incorporation and enhancement of existing local production systems. The rise of the railroads and expansion of manufacturing strengthened the connections between areas within the Steel Valley region that had previously been largely autonomous. Beginning in the 1870s, the transformation from small craft-based industries to enormous integrated mills requiring river and rail access increasingly pushed companies to search for outlying sites for new facilities. This trend was accelerated by land speculation and a desire for more control over workers as well as the region’s rugged topography and the spatial distribution of its mineral wealth. As new mills and mines sprang up throughout the rapidly urbanizing river valleys and the rural countryside, manufacturers, political leaders, and engineers developed an extensive railroad system spreading throughout the region. Trunk lines and regional carriers connected the major cities, while inter-urban lines and streetcars enabled speedy movement within communities and out to their growing hinterlands. By the late nineteenth century, a trip from Pittsburgh to Wheeling that had once been counted in days by steamboat or wagon road (if the season permitted the journey at all) could now be accomplished in a matter of hours, no matter what the weather.28

      In addition to expansion within existing municipalities, corporate managers laid out entirely new mill-oriented communities, such as Homestead (1881), Monessen (1896), Follansbee (1905), and Weirton (1909). Industrialists built dozens of enormous mills and factories that hugged the narrow flatlands up the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers from Pittsburgh and down the Ohio Valley through Steubenville and Wheeling. The concentrated growth of mill towns in the river valleys exacerbated the issue of air pollution, leaving a legacy of environmental degradation and spawning some of the region’s earliest anti-pollution legislation. By the early twentieth century, a thick smoky haze that deepened with winter’s cold air blanketed many Steel Valley communities. According to local lore, smoke from the city’s stoves and furnaces so fouled the air that business executives would often have to change shirts at lunch due to the grime. “I remember,” recalled Wheeling resident John Hunter II, when “you drove downtown in the mornings, you’d have to turn on your headlights at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning because of the smoke.”29

      As with the region’s cities, the growth of smaller Steel Valley communities during the mid-nineteenth century depended in large part on their location in relation to existing transportation systems, the vagaries of the local landscape, and the productivity of the soil. Kittanning, Pennsylvania, founded in the late eighteenth century, developed in a pattern similar to that of Pittsburgh, its neighbor down the Allegheny River. Washington, Pennsylvania, the site of the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion, was located along the Braddock Road, a major east-west route across the Appalachian Mountains. Smaller communities such as Ohiopyle on the falls of the Youghiogheny River and Barnesville, Ohio, west of Wheeling were both founded in the early nineteenth century as agricultural market towns in close proximity to the National Road. Unlike settlements in the steeper and rockier terrain of southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the gently rolling hills and fertile soils of eastern Ohio made family farming a more profitable proposition through the late nineteenth century. These small towns were hubs of regional activity, drawing local farmers weekly to downtown markets, hosting small craft-based manufacturing and artisans’ shops, and serving as centers for county government.30

      The rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth century built on this preexisting system of hinterland seats and crossroads villages that served as collection points for agricultural goods and trading centers for the region’s farmers. Beginning in the 1850s, as the superiority of the Midwest for field crops and livestock became increasingly apparent, ambitious farmers in metropolitan Pittsburgh began to specialize and modernize. Agricultural entrepreneurs made the transition to truck gardens, commercial orchards, and dairy farms to supply the region’s growing cities as well as rural mining and lumbering operations. Southwestern Pennsylvanians began to specialize in sheep and wool production and influenced their neighbors in West Virginia and Ohio to do the same. By 1860, Ohio had the nation’s highest density of sheep; Harrison County just west of Steubenville boasted more than 150 sheep per square mile, a feat directly attributable to the construction of the first woolen mill west of the Alleghenies in the city in 1812. By the 1860s, transporting wool to the markets of Pittsburgh and the Atlantic seaboard was not difficult because railroad expansion had left few parts of the region more than ten miles from a rail line.31

      Rather than a clear break between farming and manufacturing economies, urban capitalists and industrialists in the Steel Valley soon joined forces with local farmers and entrepreneurs to produce the large quantities of minerals, coal, oil, and natural gas necessary to feed the ravenous appetites of the region’s industrial revolution. This industrialized countryside existed side-by-side with earlier agricultural modes of production. Indeed, the relationship between the two was often complementary, with local farmers tending their livestock and lands during the summer and producing a supplemental winter income by working coal seams on their own property or traveling to nearby mines. The arrival of the railroads between 1840 and 1870 fostered the growth of larger factories, provided a better outlet for locally grown produce, and allowed quicker connections with the region’s cities for both work and leisure. During the 1880s and 1890s, John D. Rockefeller brought much of the chaotic landscape of individual “wildcatters” and small-time speculators under the control of his mammoth Standard Oil conglomerate. Similarly, by the end of the century, most of the hundreds of small mines dotted throughout the region producing coal for home heating, steel production, and the railroads were gradually consolidated into a handful of conglomerations generally controlled by railroad or steel interests.32

      As mines in the Steel Valley grew larger and more numerous, they quickly outstripped the local labor capacity, necessitating the increased importation of immigrants to meet greater industrial demand. Unlike the situation in the region’s more urbanized areas with pre-existing housing, these new residents often settled in shoddily constructed company towns where they were subject to the will of their employers. “At each tipple is a miner’s hamlet,” observed Thwaites of the hastily constructed communities, “a row of cottages or huts, cast in a common mold, either unpainted, or bedaubed with that cheap, ugly red with which one is familiar in railway bridges and rural barns.” This settlement pattern also had a spatial element, with the older agricultural communities occupying the flatter uplands and newer mining camps in the river and creek valleys. These “patch” towns were often ruled with an iron fist and, when coupled with the demands of a dirty, dangerous and debilitating workplace, were the site of some of the most violent labor wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.33

      If Andrew Carnegie’s transformation of the moribund iron industry through the creation of the vertically integrated corporation symbolized the rise of Pittsburgh as the world’s greatest steel producing region, his partnership with coal baron Henry Clay Frick symbolized the new relationship between city and countryside. Born on a farm near Connellsville fifty miles up the Youghiogheny River from Pittsburgh, Frick represented the generation of Upper Ohio Valley natives who transitioned away from the region’s riverine roots toward its industrial future. His grandfather, Abraham Overholt, made a fortune distilling Old Overholt whiskey, a staple of the trans-Appalachian trade. The Connellsville region was particularly appealing to mine and mill operators because of the high-quality coal, Connellsville Coke, used in the steel-making process, and because of the ease of transporting large amounts of coal by river to mills in and around Pittsburgh. Frick obtained a loan for $10,000 from Pittsburgh financier Thomas Mellon to begin mining local coal, and by 1873 he was selling all he could produce. A decade later, Frick was a millionaire with a thousand coking ovens and three thousand acres of land under his control.34

      At the same time, Carnegie was rapidly expanding his vertically integrated steel operations even as his takeover of the Homestead Works represented his first horizontal acquisition. However, the increased production capacity of the new mill created a need for greater access to coking coal, a problem he solved with the purchase of a controlling interest in the Frick Coke Company in 1883. The industrialization of the countryside had a profound effect on the physical landscape of the Steel Valley. At its peak in 1910, over 40,000 “beehive” coking ovens in the Connellsville region produced 18 million tons of coke annually, 60 percent of the nation’s total. Most of this tonnage went directly to feed the blast furnaces of J&L Steel,

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