Homestead Strike Victims: The Battle of July Sixth
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
In these two cemeteries lie six of the seven Carnegie Steel Company workers killed on July sixth, eighteen ninety-two, during one of the most violent confrontations in American labor history. That morning, three hundred armed Pinkerton agents arrived by barge on the Monongahela River to take back the Homestead plant from striking steelworkers. The workers met them at the riverbank.
Hours of gunfire left three Pinkertons and seven workers dead. The six men buried here, including Peter Ferris, Henry Striegel, Thomas Weldon, John Morris, Joseph Sotak, and Silas Wain, became martyrs of the labor movement. The strike ultimately failed, crushing unionism at Carnegie Steel for decades.
But the Battle of Homestead changed how Americans thought about the power of capital over labor.
