The Rubber City, the Steel City, the Glass City

Ohio made things. For most of the twentieth century, that was the core fact of life in the state's industrial belt. Not glamorous, not romantic, just the sound of machinery running, the smell of sulfur and hot metal, and paychecks that could buy a house and put kids through school.

Akron became the rubber capital of the world almost by accident. B.F.

Goodrich arrived in eighteen seventy to make rubber goods because the city offered a cash subsidy and water access. Then Goodyear came in eighteen ninety-eight, and Firestone in nineteen hundred, and by the First World War, Akron was producing most of the tires rolling on American roads and most of the barrage balloons floating over European battlefields. At its peak, eighty thousand workers made their living in Akron rubber plants.

When automobile demand exploded in the nineteen twenties, Akron swelled so fast that the city built worker housing by the neighborhood rather than the block. Youngstown was steel. Sitting at the junction of the Mahoning and Shenango valleys, with coal from Pennsylvania to the east and iron ore coming by water from the Lake Superior range, Youngstown became one of the most productive steel corridors on earth.

On September nineteenth, nineteen seventy-seven, Black Monday, workers called it, Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed its Campbell Works without warning. Five thousand jobs were gone in a day. More closures followed.

The Mahoning Valley lost fifty thousand manufacturing jobs over the next decade. Youngstown became the American archetype for deindustrialization, a word the economists had to invent because nothing like it had happened before at that scale and speed. Toledo made glass.

The natural gas fields discovered under northwestern Ohio in the eighteen eighties gave Toledo cheap fuel for furnaces; the proximity to sand and soda ash did the rest. Owens Bottle Company and Libbey Glass built factories there; later, Owens-Illinois and Owens Corning turned Toledo into the center of the global glass industry. The glass that was in your grandparents' windows and the fiber-optic cable in your walls both have roots in Toledo.

Three cities, three materials, one industrial Ohio.