The Ecumenical Coalition and the Fight to Save the Mills
Near Youngstown, Ohio
Within days of the Campbell Works closure, something unexpected happened. Church leaders called a meeting. Catholic bishops, Episcopal bishops, Methodist bishops, Presbyterian ministers, Jewish rabbis, and Congregationalist representatives came together in the same room and decided they could not simply watch their community dismantle itself.
They formed the Ecumenical Coalition of the Mahoning Valley, and they put forward a proposal that was genuinely radical for its time. They argued that the Campbell Works should be reopened under worker and community ownership. The steel was still there. The knowledge was still there. The market had not vanished. What had vanished was corporate will. The Coalition argued that the community itself could supply what the corporation had withdrawn.
A feasibility study was commissioned. The study concluded the plan could work, given adequate financing. The Coalition launched a grassroots campaign called Save Our Valley, raising money from small donors across the region.
The records go quiet here on the question of why the financing never materialized. The banks did not step up. The federal government did not ultimately commit. The Coalition's proposal ended without success in April of nineteen seventy-nine, and no institution has publicly accounted for why the doors remained closed when the study said they could have opened.
What endured was a legal argument developed by attorney and labor historian Staughton Lynd: that a community holds a kind of stake in a major employer's decision to shut down, especially after generations of labor have built the plant's value. That argument did not prevail in court, but it seeded decades of debate about plant-closing laws and worker rights that continues in the present day.
