The Bost Building and the Homestead Strike

The building completed in early eighteen ninety-two at this site became the nerve center of one of the most consequential labor confrontations in American history. That summer the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers used it as strike headquarters during the Homestead Strike against Carnegie Steel. Telegraph lines ran out of these rooms, transmitting dispatches to journalists covering the conflict just across the Monongahela River.

Carnegie's partner Henry Frick hired three hundred Pinkerton agents to break the strike; the resulting battle on July sixth left ten men dead, and state militia ultimately crushed the union. The defeat set back organized labor in steel for four decades. The Bost Building stood as the workers' command post through all of it.