The Rockefeller Mill That Paid for Ludlow

Walk into the old Bessemer neighborhood south of downtown Pueblo today and you can still find the scale of what was here. The Colorado Fuel and Iron mill covered square miles. Its blast furnaces ran around the clock. In its peak years the plant produced roughly a quarter of all the steel rails in the United States. Every railroad line pushing west through the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds ran, in significant part, on iron poured in this city.

The company that owned it was not a Colorado concern. Colorado Fuel and Iron was majority owned by the Rockefeller family, through the same Standard Oil trust that would be broken up by the federal government in nineteen eleven. John D. Rockefeller Junior was the operating head of the Colorado operations. When reformers and journalists later asked him about conditions in the coal camps and the steel town, he professed ignorance of the daily details. His accountants knew every daily detail. The point of a company town was to know every daily detail.

Bessemer was a company town in every sense. The mill operated commissaries and housing and company stores. Workers were often paid in company scrip redeemable only at those stores. Debt to the company was structurally built into the wage system. The men who made America's rails could not easily leave because they could not easily get out of debt.

The same Rockefeller ownership that ran Bessemer also ran the coal camps at Ludlow, sixty miles south, where the nineteen thirteen to nineteen fourteen labor wars culminated in the deaths of miners and their families in a National Guard attack. The Pueblo steel mill was the financial engine that gave the Rockefellers the leverage to fight that war. It was where the profit came from.

The mill closed in stages through the nineteen eighties and nineties. The jobs it once supplied do not exist here anymore.