CHAPTER IX

THE STEEL TOWNS Pittsburgh, preëminent in steel, the home of the company with which for many years Andrew Carnegie set the pace for the rest of the world to follow in steel making; Pittsburgh, her skies blackened with the smoke of hundreds of furnaces that produce more than one quarter of the world’s supply of its most necessary metal, naturally comes to mind when one mentions steel cities--she is easily the greatest of them all. Situated in the extreme west of the state of Pennsylvania, on the border of the great coal deposits of that state, with excellent facilities for getting her ore and coal at comparatively low cost, and having an unsurpassed location in respect to markets for her finished products, Pittsburgh is likely to keep for a long time her commanding position among the steel towns. And yet Pittsburgh is not among the towns included in the title of this chapter. She is the world’s steel city. And this is the story of some of the communities that owe their existence to the United States Steel Corporation, that have sprung up as a result of the extension of its manufacturing facilities, and in the building and management of which the forward-looking influence of the biggest of all businesses has been reflected. Among such cities Gary, Indiana, holds the foremost place. Bearing, appropriately, the name of the head of the Corporation, the man who more than any other was responsible for its organization, and beyond peradventure, responsible for its policies, Gary may be said to represent, so far as a town may, the spirit of the Corporation--efficiency. Gary’s history, to the date when this is written, covers only fourteen years. The site of the city, on the borders of Lake Michigan, in the northwest corner of Indiana and about twenty-five miles from Chicago, consisted of sand dunes on which scrub oak and sage brush grew less than fifteen short years ago. Its inhabitants were wild birds and a few hardy hunters and fishermen, and on one memorable occasion a cave in the dunes gave refuge to the car-barn bandits of Chicago until their surrender was forced by the police. In 1906 the Steel Corporation’s management decided that another steel plant was needed in the Middle West, bigger than any then existing, and selected a desolate spot on the shore of Lake Michigan for its location. Thus was the plant and city of Gary conceived. The magnitude of the project and the difficulties which had to be overcome would have appalled any but so large a corporation. The proposed steel plant could not be operated successfully unless it had a town to house its many thousands of employees, and the site of Gary offered not even the ordinary facilities for town building. It had no harbor, nothing could grow on its arid soil--these were only two of the handicaps. But the Corporation set to work to build a city literally from the ground up, and Gary, with a population of 56,000 to-day, and rapidly growing, was the result. The Corporation’s management has always shown its realization of the fact that “not by bread alone does man live”; that the mere paying of employees a living wage is not sufficient, and that even the least educated worker has an aesthetic sense, even though often uncultivated, that should be developed and pandered to within reasonable limits if the best good of the worker and the employer is to be achieved. To make the big Indiana sand dune attractive seemed an impossible task, but it was accomplished. The Corporation’s engineers apparently took for their guidance the motto that hangs in the office of the big company’s chief executive, “It can be done,” and made Gary at least an attractive, if not a beautiful, residential town. To do this, nearly two million cubic yards of fertile soil was brought into the town, superimposed on the sand, and used for the laying out of parks, boulevards, and lawns. Many thousands of trees were planted on the soil with gratifying results. The lack of a harbor was compensated for, and safe haven provided for the ore boats which had to bring raw material to the proposed big plant, by the cutting of a harbor slip five thousand feet long, twenty-two feet deep, and two hundred and fifty feet wide, affording draft and anchorage for the largest lake steamers afloat, and terminating in a basin of ample size to permit these vessels to turn around. In the calm waters of this artificial harbor, protected by a breakwater, the ore boats are unloaded at the rate of 1,250 tons an hour, the ore being conveyed from their holds to a storage yard parallel to the slip until needed to feed the hungry furnaces. Work on the building of the steel plant and city was started April,