Morewood Massacre
Pennsylvania
On March thirtieth, eighteen ninety-one, sheriff's deputies opened fire on striking workers at the Morewood Mines of the H.C. Frick Coke Company.
Seven men were killed that day; two more died from their wounds. The workers were part of a strike involving roughly sixteen thousand men in the coke region who were demanding higher wages. Thousands of mourners followed the original seven victims to a mass grave at Saint John's Cemetery in Scottdale.
The strike, weakened by the violence and the weight of Frick's resources, collapsed by late May. The Morewood Massacre came just over a year before the more famous Homestead Strike of eighteen ninety-two, when Pinkerton agents and striking Carnegie Steel workers fought a pitched battle on the Monongahela River some thirty miles away. Henry Clay Frick was at the center of both confrontations.
The killing at Morewood is less remembered, but it was part of the same industrial war over who would control the coke and steel that was building modern America.
