Geneva Steel, The Mill That War Built

Before Vineyard was a suburb, before the condos and the retail strips, this ground along the lake held the largest steel mill west of the Mississippi. It did not grow here organically. It was built in a hurry, for reasons that had nothing to do with the peacetime economy.

The plans for a West Coast steel mill had been discussed and shelved since the mid-nineteen thirties. Then Pearl Harbor changed the math. The Navy needed steel on the Pacific side of the continent, not steel that had crossed three thousand miles of rail from Pittsburgh, but steel made close to the shipyards of California and Oregon.

In November nineteen forty-one, the month before the United States entered the war, the government approved the Geneva Works. Construction began immediately. Ten thousand workers built the mill, and the mill began producing plate steel in December nineteen forty-four.

At its wartime peak, Geneva employed four thousand two hundred workers and turned out over six hundred thousand tons of steel. Women filled twenty-five percent of the workforce while men were overseas. The federal government sold Geneva to US Steel in nineteen forty-six for forty-seven and a half million dollars.

It continued operating as a private mill for more than half a century. But the cost was visible: epidemiological studies in the nineteen eighties found that on winter days when Geneva was running, fine particulate pollution in Utah Valley nearly doubled, and children's hospital admissions for respiratory illness tripled. Geneva declared bankruptcy and closed for good in two thousand two.

The cleanup of its one thousand seven hundred and fifty acres took years and is still ongoing.