Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
famously declared, “Most British equipment is in use twenty years after it should have been scrapped. It is because you keep this used-up machinery that the United States is making you a back number.”20
The repercussions of Andrew Carnegie’s steel empire spread throughout the Upper Ohio Valley, pulling in new residents, reshaping community bonds, and transforming the physical landscape—in effect creating a new “Steel Valley” region that superseded even if it did not fully displace earlier regional connections. The period witnessed the creation of many works of art celebrating the triumph of mass production, while the negative environmental effects of smoke, slag, and other forms of industrial pollution were often ignored or interpreted as positive signs of economic growth. Existing industrial employers modernized their works, and new innovators, such as George Westinghouse who arrived in 1873, also contributed to the region’s rapid economic growth. Between 1860 and 1890, Pittsburgh’s population again surpassed that of Cincinnati, more than tripling from fewer than 180,000 to nearly 552,000 residents. This population increase corresponded to a growth in manufacturing employment from 20,500 in 1860 to 97,600 in 1890, compared to a growth from 30,208 to 103,010 in Cincinnati. The importance of the vertically integrated industrial firm in driving this growth is clearly visible as Pittsburgh dramatically outpaced its downriver rival in the size of manufacturers, with an average plant of forty employees in 1890, compared to only eleven per factory in Cincinnati.21
Other communities also reoriented their economies away from agriculture and small-scale craft industries toward heavy industrial manufacturing and the extraction of natural resources. Wheeling and Steubenville emerged as important subsidiary centers of heavy industry with their own steel and iron producers, railroad links, and burgeoning workforce. Wheeling carved a niche for itself as a supplier of nails and by 1880 had thirteen iron and steel works, the most prominent of which were the LaBelle Iron Works and the Riverside Iron Works where Valentine Reuther began his career. As with Carnegie Steel, after reorganizing in 1875 the LaBelle Works controlled costs through vertical integration by acquiring a stake in iron ore mines in Minnesota, coal mines and coke ovens in Pennsylvania, furnaces and mills in Steubenville, and a host of other operations connected by railroad to its sprawling facility in Wheeling. However, Carnegie’s ability to access credit during the critical period surrounding the Panic of 1873 provided an opening for ET and Pittsburgh more generally that entrepreneurs in Steubenville and Wheeling could not match.22
As a result, despite Wheeling’s success it was soon clear that it had been thoroughly outclassed by its upriver rival. The eight iron works in the city itself had a combined capitalization in 1880 of $2,274,425 with more than 2,600 employees and an output valued at $4,416,567. This compared to the 8,000 employed in 1885 at the Homestead Works alone. The 1900 census reported just over 11,000 manufacturing employees in Ohio and Marshall Counties (Wheeling), while Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) had risen to a whopping 128,000 workers. Relatively speaking, the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing was about the same, 15 percent for Wheeling and 16.5 percent for Pittsburgh, but the dramatic overall growth in the latter was directly attributable to the “capital, transportation, business facilities and successful management which could not be equaled” in the smaller city. Even the most successful of Wheeling’s iron producers, LaBelle, maintained a management structure that was more akin to the network of merchant families and artisanal ironman than the professional managers and scientists of Carnegie Steel. The company was founded by a small group of ex-Pittsburgh ironworkers who saw the potential of the community’s access to coal deposits and river transportation as well as the rail connection of the B&O. There were no capitalists in the partnership and through the 1920s, when it was reincorporated as the Wheeling Steel Corporation with more than four thousand employees, was striking in its continued reliance on management still “in the hands of descendants of the founders, many of the officials and directors being connected by blood or marriage.”23
By the end of the nineteenth century, the region that had once been a colonial frontier and later a gateway to western settlement and markets had become the Steel Valley—the world’s greatest steel-producing region with a new economic system based on the large vertically integrated corporation. Between 1870 and 1890, metropolitan Pittsburgh emerged as the nation’s most powerful industrial area due in large part to the successful application of new scientific and management strategies in the process of steel making. While Wheeling and Steubenville also steadily added to their industrial capacity, the overwhelming growth of their larger neighbor drew them into the metropolitan region as satellite communities. A 1902 history of the Upper Ohio Valley made clear this transition, when it stated that Wheeling’s modest success as a manufacturing center was due not only to “the cheapness of fuel” but also to the city’s very “proximity [to] the Pittsburg (Pennsylvania) district.”24
Mountains of Fire
By 1907 capitalists and corporate managers as well as entrepreneurs and local residents looking to participate in the heavy industrial economy had dramatically reshaped the social and physical landscape of the Upper Ohio Valley in ways that would have long-lasting repercussions. In that year the newly organized Russell Sage Foundation financed an extensive analysis of the nation’s most important industrial area, resulting in a landmark six-volume study, entitled The Pittsburgh Survey. The project’s scope was regional by design, an attempt to methodically examine workers and communities in the new system of urban factories, mill towns, and mining camps built on top of a pre-existing framework of agricultural settlements, market towns, and river-oriented cities. Survey director Paul Kellogg explained this vision of the area as an integrated unit, a complex totality that inextricably linked society and culture, humans and the natural world. “Pipe lines that carry oil and gas, waterways that float an acreage of coal barges, four track rails worn bright with weighty ore cars, wires surcharged with a ruthless voltage or delicately sensitive to speech and codes,” Kellogg declared, “bind here a district of vast natural resources into one organic whole.”25
Despite this recognition of the importance of understanding the Steel Valley as an interconnected “locality,” the survey itself reveals some of the thornier issues in conceptualizing the region as a “definite geographical area.” Part of the problem was that growth in metropolitan Pittsburgh was quite decentralized compared to other areas in the nation, a factor further complicated by the state boundaries dividing Pittsburgh from its hinterland in the south and west. Development in the older cities, such as Steubenville and Wheeling, was largely limited to the narrow floodplains between the rivers and the steep surrounding mountains. Employers looking for flat space on which to locate their enormous integrated mills and factories had little choice but to expand beyond city limits. The accompanying need for access to river and rail transportation networks resulted in a dense, ribbon-like pattern of industrialized urban development extending upstream along the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers from Pittsburgh and downstream to Wheeling. The relationship between market town and agricultural hinterland was also remade during the period with rural mining camps forming an integral part of the region’s new industrial paradigm.26
Everything in the Steel Valley’s older communities began at the water. Prior to the arrival of the railroad in the 1850s, the region’s rivers were the primary means of getting goods and people in and out of urban areas. Consequently, urban development spread away from the banks with wharfs and merchant warehouses giving way to retail establishments and central business districts and finally residential neighborhoods, which often spread to the lower slopes of the surrounding hills. Despite the region’s rough topography, city founders in Steubenville, Wheeling, and Pittsburgh each adopted a grid pattern of development, making for a haphazard patchwork of steep, often impassable streets climbing up hills and down into ravines as builders attempted to master the landscape. The broken topography of mountains and river valleys tended to concentrate the population in the narrow flatlands as well as foster the growth of numerous, politically independent communities divided by breaks in the terrain. Despite enormous population growth after 1860, for example, Pittsburgh did not begin to consolidate its political power in the region and spread across its rivers until it annexed the small towns of the South Side in 1872 and its commercial rival Allegheny City in 1907.27
The examples of Wheeling and Steubenville suggest that the development of metropolitan regions, a process that historians