Kaiser Steel: The Inland Empire's War Machine

Near the spot where the Auto Club Speedway once thundered, the ground beneath you holds the ghost of the largest steel mill ever built on the West Coast. This is the site of Kaiser Steel, Fontana, and its story is inseparable from the Second World War, the postwar boom, and the slow collapse of American manufacturing.

Henry J. Kaiser was already building Liberty ships for the Navy when he decided he needed his own steel supply. He broke ground on the Fontana plant in nineteen forty-two, choosing the Inland Empire for its distance from the vulnerable Pacific coast, its rail connections, and its access to iron ore from the Eagle Mountain mines in the desert about a hundred ten miles east. On December thirtieth, nineteen forty-two, workers fired up the first blast furnace, which Kaiser named Big Bess after his wife. Within a year the plant was pouring steel plate destined for the hulls of cargo ships crossing the Pacific.

After the war Kaiser Steel transformed Fontana. At peak employment the plant carried close to ten thousand workers, mostly men drawn from Dust Bowl states, the South, and Mexico. The company built housing, ran its own newspaper, and ran a prepaid medical program that became the seed of Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest health care networks in the country today. The blast furnace could produce twelve hundred tons of pig iron every twenty-four hours, and by the nineteen fifties the plant was setting records for fuel efficiency.

But the economics of steel shifted. Cheap imported steel from rebuilt Japanese and German mills began undercutting American prices in the nineteen sixties. Kaiser closed the plant on the last day of nineteen eighty-three, and it was sold off to new owners afterward. Cleanup of the contaminated site took decades. In the nineteen nineties the land was redeveloped into the California Speedway, and today a massive distribution center covers the ground where blast furnaces once lit the desert night sky orange.