Chinese Workers in Beaver Falls: Exclusion's Pennsylvania Chapter

In eighteen seventy-two, during a labor dispute with local workers, the Beaver Falls Cutlery Company brought Chinese workers from San Francisco and New Orleans to operate its factory here. The plant was owned by the Harmonist Society, a communal religious group that had settled in western Pennsylvania decades earlier. The Chinese workers were among the first of their community in the state.

For a decade they lived and worked in Beaver Falls, but in eighteen eighty-two the national mood turned sharply against Chinese immigration. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first American law to bar a specific ethnic group from entering the country, prohibiting nearly all immigration from China. The act was supposed to be temporary. It remained in force for sixty-one years, repealed only in nineteen forty-three. What happened in this small Pennsylvania city was a local episode in a national story that reshaped American immigration law for generations.