The gamble on Donora steel

The lighted smelters inside the Donora zinc works, circa 1915. (Photo courtesy of the Donora Historical Society)


Part V: Big promises and pipe dreams


By Scott Beveridge


The infamous and deadly 1948 Donora smog forever be linked to a dirty zinc mill in the Pennsylvania borough became a taboo subject for decades around local dinner tables and town gatherings


Yet it would long remain a popular subject of discussion among researchers.


Scientists now suspect that emissions containing fluoride and unknown metal dusts from the U.S. Steel plant strongly contributed to the fog that killed at least 20 people, giving the borough the distinction of being home to the nation’s deadliest air pollution event.


It’s an untested theory, though, because researchers into the disaster over that Halloween weekend face two obstacles: vital coroner files involving the victims have never turned up and the company claims it no longer has any records about the mill.


The borough along the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh similarly wanted to forget about the smog that stained its reputation for the next five decades after the event captured headlines across America.


Following a brief shutdown while the air cleared, the steelworkers returned to the routine of making steel in a place that was much like its sister mill towns that dot the river valleys from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River.


Donora’s main street, like its neighbors, grew to become lined with ornate storefront buildings owned by grocers and clothiers who sponsored summer festivals, parades and sales to collect their share of mill workers’ paychecks. There were at least four Roman Catholic ethnic churches and three times as many social clubs where immigrant families passed along their traditions from such countries as Russia, Italy, Slovakia and Poland.


Combined merchant sales in Donora topped $3 million in 1935 among its 147 businesses. The town had 92 grocery stores that reported $1.1 million in sales that year.


“Everybody in Donora either worked for the world’s largest nail mill, as the sign atop the factory gate announced, or worked to feed, clothe, fuel, or take care of those who did,” former Donora resident and noted environmentalist Devra Davis wrote in her 2002 book, “When Smoke Ran Like Water.”


The community weathered intense strikes, booms in production during two World Wars and layoffs when the demand for steel declined.


But they were given 10 percent increases in pay in November 1936, taking their wages from 47 cents per hour to 52 1/2 cents per hour. As labor’s efforts to unionize intensified in 1936, the company offered five percent raises if the cost of living index rose by 10 percent.


There was hope everywhere for better days to come in the borough.


“The Donora Steel and Wire Works is proud of its production achievement, especially during the war years when all facilities were utilized for producing war materials,” the company proclaimed in a pamphlet it published for an open house in 1948 that took place before the smog.


Visitors learned the plants were laid out to allow the smooth flow of steel from the blast furnaces at the southern tip of town to become finished products loaded onto rail cars at the competing end of the mill. The plants had the capacity to produce 476,000 tons of hot-rolled rods a year, along with 260,000 tons of bright wire annually.


“More coal is consumed in the mill in one month than what is required for heating 1,700 average family residences for a year,” the pamphlet boasted.


No doubt, the black coal smoke also contributed to the thick smoke that caused people to gasp for air during the smog that would come to be cited as reasons behind the nation’s first clean air legislation in the 1960s.


But three years after the deaths, however, local historian John “Moon” Clark chose to omit any mention of the tragedy in a story he wrote for the Donora Jubilee, a magazine that celebrated the borough’s golden anniversary.


In an advertisement in the booklet, U.S. Steel selected to offer its “sincere hope” that it would be around and flourishing for another five decades.


But that would end up being just another unfulfilled promise from the industry.


Mill founder Frank Donner had even boasted of creating 10,000 jobs in Donora, a number than never materialized. Employment did peak at 7,000 after the zinc mill opened in 1915. For its remaining life, the plants employed between 3,000 and 5,000 workers, depending on the economy.


As 1960 approached, the men would need to grow accustomed to punching fewer and fewer hours into the time clocks.


Click here to return to Part I, A borough rises from hell's bottoms

The Gamble on Donora Steel

Part II: Yellow smoke and big money

Few could believe their eyes at how fast Donora was growing to life beside a giant steel mill under construction in 1901 on what had been rolling hills dotted with farms.

Yet businessmen as well as the folks who worked that soil for more than a century looked on with some doubts about the mill’s promise of thousands of new jobs and prosperity. They lost the bet.

The “wheels were turning in the rod mill” for the first time at noon Aug. 9, 1901, the local newspaper, Donora American, announced.

“Almost every one of the local officials has lost a suit of clothes or two or wages as to the starting of the works.”

The new Union Steel Co. mill soon outpaced projections that it would produce a million kegs of nails and 200,000 tons each of rods and wire within a year.

Developer Frank Donner and partner Henry Clay Frick further proved themselves to have been an industrial powerhouse when their company absorbed Sharon Steel Corp. in November 1902, earning them $50 million in combined assets. Union Steel then had the capacity to produce 850,000 tons of steel by controlling 6,000 acres of coal reserves in the region.

But a month later, U.S. Steel reacted by purchasing Union Steel for $45 million, solidifying the world’s then largest manufacturing corporation, and Donner turned his attention to philanthropy.

U.S. Steel was putting a lid on a major competitor, and in return, it took possession of Donner’s valuable ore field. The Donora mill would become known as American Steel & Wire Corp.

By August 1902, there were 5,082 people living in the crowded new town, and it was hard-pressed to keep pace with the growth.

Newcomers eager for jobs faced severe housing shortages. Real estate with a combined value of $75,000 was sold that year in another rush for land.

Meanwhile, the first billets of steel were produced in an expansion three years later at Margaret Furnace, the second $2-million new blast furnace to go up in town.

Immigrants needed to be strong to survive Donora. Many of them worked a second job to build a family home after toiling long hours under the smokestacks, according to modern scientist and environmental author Devra Davis.

A typical laborer dug his home’s basement and lined its floor with concrete while his family lived in the foundation until he could afford to build additional floors, the Donora native stated in her 2002 book on air pollution, “When Smoke Ran Like Water.”

“Those who made it to the elite rank of machinist, master molder or welder could build three stories, enough for their kids, their parents, their grandparents and usually some newly arrived cousins from Central Europe,” Davis wrote.

That room-and-board problem turned into a housing famine in 1915, after U.S. Steel announced it was building a $3 million zinc mill at the northern end of town.

The local newspaper reacted by pleading in a headline: “Have You Rooms to Rent?”

Local health officials were even concerned about the spread of disease with as many as three families sharing cramped quarters alongside borders.

The zinc mill was going to become the largest and most modern such plant in the world, and employ 2,100 workers. The resulting housing crunch became so serious that some men were quitting their jobs and leaving town because they could not find a bed. The borough’s population soon swelled to its peak of nearly 15,000 residents.

Like neighboring Monessen, Donora was populated mostly by Italians and Slavs. Donora also was home to many immigrants from Poland, Croatia, Hungary, Russia and Scotland.

But the work was especially tough in the zinc mill, which employed a large number of Spanish immigrants because they had shown greater tolerance to the extreme heat at other zinc smelters in the United States.

While laborers spent between eight and 12 hours a day in the steel plant, the workers who turned out zinc could withstand just three hours a day beside the smelters. The temperatures there hovered around 120 degrees, and the men had to take turns lifting 60-pound ingots in order to keep their jobs.

“It was really backbreaking work in intolerable heat,” Davis said, while speaking in Donora in April 2004.

Former Donora resident Betty Dickie said her husband, Robert, went through clothes almost overnight when he worked next to the smelters in the 1950s. She said the acid there made his work clothes fall apart so quickly that they never lasted long enough to be washed.

The zinc plant’s chief byproduct was sulfuric acid to craft wartime explosives and to pickle steel, a chemical process that removed impurities during steel production. In addition to zinc, the zinc site also processed cadmium and lead exclusively for corporate interests. That reportedly included the turnout of “top-secret” alloys strong enough to bulletproof U.S. Army tanks during World War II.

While the zinc mill brought new, pungent yellow clouds of smoke to that end of Donora, few people seemed to care as long as money was rolling in and winds tended to carry the smoke off to the east.

Click here to return to Part I, A borough rises from hell's bottoms.

Click here to read Part III, The mill is sued over sickening air.

(Caption: The office of Real Estate Broker G. L. Neel promised results after people flocked by the thousands to Donora only to face a housing crisis during the early 20th Century. Post card courtesy of Casey Perrotta)