Inland Steel: Indiana Harbor and the Calumet Mills

The Calumet industrial corridor stretching south from Chicago into northwest Indiana was once the densest concentration of heavy industry in the world. The Inland Steel Company's Indiana Harbor Works, sitting just east of here in East Chicago, was one of its anchors.

Inland was incorporated in eighteen ninety-three by Joseph Block and his son Philip, investors who had absorbed pieces of collapsed Chicago-area steel ventures. The company built its Indiana Harbor mill in nineteen oh two, choosing East Chicago for the same reason every other steel company chose the Calumet shoreline: the land was flat, Lake Michigan water was abundant for cooling, and ore could arrive cheaply by lake freighter from the iron ranges of Minnesota's Upper Peninsula.

Growth was relentless. By nineteen seventeen Inland had reached a production capacity of one million tons of steel per year. During the nineteen twenties the mill accounted for roughly two percent of all steel made in the United States and employed seven thousand workers. By the nineteen sixties and seventies, twenty-five thousand people worked the Indiana Harbor plant. The mill supplied steel for everything from automobiles to bridges to the hulls of naval vessels.

The Calumet mills also shaped the demographics of the region. The promise of industrial wages drew successive waves of immigrants, Eastern Europeans in the early twentieth century, followed by Black migrants from the Deep South during the Great Migration. The steelworkers unions that formed in these mills, particularly after the bitter organizing drives of the nineteen thirties, became some of the most powerful labor institutions in the country.

Inland was acquired by Ispat International in nineteen ninety-eight, which eventually became part of ArcelorMittal. The Indiana Harbor site still operates under that name, one of the last large integrated steel mills remaining in the region where American steel was made and where it very nearly disappeared.