Steelton: The First Town Built Just to Make Steel

Before the works were built in eighteen sixty-six, this land along the Susquehanna housed only six families. The Pennsylvania Steel Company chose the site that year and broke ground on what would become, in eighteen sixty-eight, the first mill in the United States dedicated exclusively to making steel. The company also rolled the first steel rails in America produced for commercial sale.

The founders included J. Edgar Thomson, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who needed rails, and Samuel Felton, recently retired from the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, who knew how to build infrastructure. They brought in English and Irish workers experienced with the Bessemer process and then kept recruiting. At its peak, Steelton housed more than fourteen thousand residents representing thirty-three different ethnic groups, workers who had arrived from England, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and the American South. The town took its name directly from its purpose. It has never been anything else.