Steelton: Where American Steel Was Born
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg sits the small borough of Steelton, and its place in American industrial history is larger than its modest size would suggest. In eighteen sixty-six, the Pennsylvania Steel Company began construction on a mill along the river's east bank. By May of eighteen sixty-eight, its first Bessemer converter had come into operation, producing what would become some of the first commercially manufactured steel rails in the United States.
The timing was no accident. America was laying railroads at a ferocious pace in the years after the Civil War, and the iron rails used until then wore out quickly under the weight of heavier trains. Steel rails lasted ten times longer. Pennsylvania Steel understood the demand before the infrastructure existed to meet it, and Steelton became the place where the bet was placed.
The process worked so well that the mill kept expanding. A rolling mill was added by eighteen sixty-eight, making the facility complete from raw iron to finished rail in a single operation. By nineteen ten the plant had doubled its output from its eighteen eighty levels, and Steelton's population had reached fourteen thousand, representing thirty-three distinct ethnic communities.
That diversity was the direct result of the mill's appetite for labor. The company's first recruits were English and Irish workers who already understood the Bessemer process. As production expanded, Germans and Italians took the skilled positions. Southern Europeans and African Americans from the South were routed to the blast furnace, the hottest and most grueling work on the floor. The borough became a textbook of the American industrial immigrant experience, each nationality occupying a particular rung of the hierarchy.
Bethlehem Steel acquired the facility in nineteen seventeen and ran it through the Second World War, when the mill employed more than six thousand workers. Steelton's railroad tracks still carry freight today, rolling past the place where American steel first found its industrial footing.
