McDonald, Ohio

McDonald, Ohio is a classic Mahoning Valley company town. Carnegie Steel, which later became part of United States Steel, built the mills here in nineteen sixteen and incorporated the village around them in December of nineteen eighteen. The town took the name of the local McDonald family.

Workers rented their homes from a company landlord, shopped in company-built stores, and organized their entire lives around the mill. When the steel industry collapsed across the Mahoning Valley in the late nineteen seventies, McDonald absorbed its share of the damage. Local workers eventually revived the site under the McDonald Steel Corporation, which kept the furnaces lit until December of twenty twenty-three, ending more than a century of iron and steel at a spot that had been built for nothing else.