The Gamble on Donora Steel

By Scott Beveridge
Part 1: A borough rises from hell’s bottoms

Greedy land speculators were quick to arrive at a new town named Donora alongside a sharp bend in the Monongahela River in 1901.

Bidders camped overnight beside stakes marking vacant lots on farmland before the property auction began there at 10:30 a.m. Sept. 10, 1901.

“A gun was fired and the rush for lots started,” local historian J. P. Clark wrote in a 1951 story about the quick rise of this gritty steel town.

Within a day of the first public sale of land, two hundred lots were sold for a grand total of more than $100,000 in anticipation of the mill that, five decades later, was linked to the nation’s deadliest air-pollution disaster. But, no one then was linking air pollution to poor health. That wouldn’t happen until late October 1948, when a mysterious fog hovered over the region and 20 people died breathing the fumes from Donora’s smokestacks.

In 1900, America was deep into its Industrial Revolution and steel, coal and smoke meant money to investors who built Donora and other towns like it in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

The Donora land sale was announced after Pittsburgh tycoon Richard B. Mellon purchased 230 riverfront acres there for the Union Improvement Co., an affiliate of Union Steel.

He and his brother, Andrew, had already built fortunes in coal, coke, steel and railroads. The Mellons also had a friend, coke baron Henry Clay Frick of Fayette County, who also took a chance on the once-picturesque curve in the valley known for its thick air.

Riverboat captains had already named this stretch of the Mon River “Hell’s Bottoms” because morning fogs limited their view from the pilot’s cabin and made navigation more dangerous.

They fog didn’t scare away an entrepreneur, William H. Donner, who was born in 1864 in Columbus, Ind., and dabbled in real estate after reviving his family’s failing grain mill in his early twenties.

Donner made a fortune by investing in natural gas deposits that brought industry to Indiana. He rose to president of Union Steel Co. by 1899, three years after building a tin mill in Monessen, another steel town that shot up overnight across the river from Donora. Monessen was attractive to Donner because of its proximity to the region’s rich coal and natural gas deposits, and those resources he owned in Indiana were quickly being depleted.

Donner, however, sold his Monessen business to American Tin Plate Company and concentrated his efforts on Donora. The borough incorporated in February 1901, taking its name from Donner and Nora Mellon, wife of A. W. Mellon.

He enticed Andrew Mellon to his new investment in an 1899 letter stating the national consumption of wire rods was skyrocketing. That same year, Donner wanted to build wire and rod mills on Donora farmland to compete against American Steel & Wire Co. of New Jersey. That company was forming a monopoly, threatening the interests of Carnegie Steel Co, which included Frick among its largest suppliers.

Industrialist Andrew Carnegie offered to sell steel to Donner or purchase Donner’s new mills, a plan that initially fell through.

Carnegie and Frick parted ways so Mellon took the lead in Donora and brought Carnegie back into the fold. Carnegie saw no other way to compete against American Steel & Wire unless he built blast furnaces in Donora to supply Donner’s new rod and wire plants.

Carnegie met in Scotland with Mellon and Pittsburgh steel titan Charles M. Schwab to discuss Donner’s dream for Donora. Upon his return to the United States, Carnegie focused his attention on building railroads to integrate his mills with Frick’s coke fields.

Schwab, who would later become president of Bethlehem Steel Corporation, saw Donora as a gamble because of the high costs Donner was investing in the area.

Schwab did not like Donora’s location, either. Donner, Frick, and Mellon proceeded in Donora without Carnegie, but not for long. Carnegie returned and briefly leased the property in early 1901, and established a blooming mill on the site. By then, Schwab was president of Carnegie Steel, and about to broker a secret deal to sell Carnegie out to U.S. Steel.

In short order, U.S. Steel folded Donora into its corporation and Carnegie retired into a life of philanthropy. But Union Steel held tight to its holdings in Donora, and insisted it was not out to compete with U.S. Steel.

The creation of Donora’s new mills was announced June 21, 1901, in the local weekly newspaper, The Donora American, just four months after the U.S. Steel merger.

The Donora headline forecast the creation of one of the largest steel plants in the country, at a cost of $20 million. The company also was building the largest rod, wire, and nail mills in the world, plants that would be operating within a month in Donora.

Meanwhile, Donner announced his $1 million purchase of the Mesaba Iron Ore Range in Minnesota. It was the largest iron region in the world, and its mineral reserves would provide a source for producing steel in Donora for years.

New immigrants hungry for work and merchants quickly set out to build a metropolis overlooking the new factories.

Click here to read Part II

(Post card of Carnegie Steel in Donora courtesy of Casey Perrotta)

Snookered to Philipsburg

For most of my adult life, I have endured my siblings’ romantic tales about our ancestors who settled in Philipsburg, a quaint little town in Central Pennsylvania.

Our great-grandfather James Beveridge arrived in the small metropolis following the Civil War, having relocated from Scotland to work in the surrounding coalfields and join his many relatives who had earlier settled there. He married, raised two sons and returned upon his death to be buried in his beloved Philipsburg. It was a story of romance, and then tragedy, when his young bride, Mary Canning, died while her children were still small. I usually rolled my eyes when my brothers went on about the struggles of our immigrant ancestors, as I have little, if any, interest in genealogy and Philipsburg in particular. Truth be told, we don’t even know the exact location of the family graves.

But a few weeks ago, while in State College for a conference and less than 20 miles from our homeland, I decided it was finally time to see the place where so many Beveridges once called home. There are well-kept Victorian homes on tidy tree-lined streets making up the lovely town.

There is a well-preserved Old Mud Church built with logs in 1820 surrounded on three sides by a cemetery containing a prominent plot of graves marked with the names of members of the Philips family. Indeed, this must have been a town founded by proud people, I thought.

And then I picked up the story of the town’s founding only to learn that the Philipses were a bunch of charlatans.

The cagy Mr. Henry Philips and his brothers purchased 350,000 acres in the area, beginning in 1775, and quickly set out to lure followers. They accomplish that “by the means of less than honest and down right unscrupulous advertising,” according to the story.

The brothers boasted of a town fully developed beside a navigable river. But the first 12 followers found themselves standing in total wilderness inhabited by wild animals when they arrived. All but one of them turned around and settled in other neighborhoods. Even the railroad bypassed this godforsaken place for many years. And today, the rural areas surrounding the town are dotted with crumbling and decaying farmhouses.

Take this as a warning about what you might find when you go about snooping into the past.

We love the sight of blood

By Amanda Gillooly

As I listlessly sifted through the pages of a celebrity magazine, trying to ignore the fuming rants of my uncle over the sub par performance of our Pittsburgh Penguins in the Stanley Cup finals, something in the waning moments in the game caught my attention.

The story I was reading Monday about Britney Spears’ maybe-baby bump was completely secondary when I saw the brawl break out on the ice, and for the first time in several hours, I was actually interested in the game.

And, I realized after being transfixed by grown men on skates connecting their fists with faces for a few moments, that we’re not so unlike the Romans after all. We say – and hope – that our culture has evolved, but out lust for violence wasn’t quenched when the empire faltered.

No, we still love the type of competition that goes beyond skill and athleticism. Even the most self-proclaimed gentiles among us would admit that we require some amount of violence, bloodshed even, to truly become engaged in a sport.

When the play stopped and the punches started flying, the fans in the Detroit arena were thrusting themselves against the plexiglass wall that separated them from the scuffles, making it rock precariously back in forth.

The fans were inches away from the shattering teeth and smashed noses, and their facial expressions were almost as painful to watch.

They loved it. They wanted more.

The masses nearly escalated into mobs when they saw blood. Members of the crowd worked themselves into a frenzy when they saw blood spattered on their favorite player’s jersey, or when an opponent’s helmet skidded morbidly across the ice.

But, I’m not judging. I’m just saying, is all.

I’m not into hockey, but I’m just as guilty when it comes to the Pittsburgh “Stillers,” and football in general. I guess I probably have a similar facial expression when a receiver leaps for a pass only to be bent in half by a corner.

And yes, I do get some crude pleasure out of seeing some poor bastard signal for the fair catch only to be bowled over by the opposing team.

And, God help me, but every time New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady drops back for a pass, a big part of me wants to see him get crushed by a linebacker two times his size.

I truly savor those few seconds of humility.

I’ll be driving the bus to Hell for this, but I have fantasies about the pretty boy Patriot getting blind-sided by someone like my man, Steelers linebacker Larry Foote.

I see Brady grasping his knee in a painful embrace that says, “That one’s going to be career ending.”

Oh, come on. I’m kidding. I’m not THAT cruel.

But, Roman or not, Brady still sucks.

Tribute to a victim of democracy

Joseph Roble was an idealistic young American soldier in Vietnam in 1967, hell-bent on upholding the goal of spreading democracy.

It was easy to tell from a letter the Latrobe, Pa., man penned home a few months before he was killed by enemy artillery in the infamous battle of Khe Sahn, where U.S. troops fought as if they were defending the last bastions of freedom.

In the letter, the 21-year-old lance corporal with the 26th Marines noted that he had seen a young Vietnamese boy playing in the distance who reminded him of his younger brother.

“I’m prepared to give up my life so he could have the same rights,” Roble wrote in the letter that was discussed Sunday during Memorial Day services at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies in Cecil, Pa.

Roble hailed from a time when ordinary souls could live in a free country where laws were established to allow people to govern themselves with fairness and justice, said G. William Jayne, a national cemetery coordinator.

However, Jayne said, citizen soldiers today are fighting an uncharted war against terrorism.

He said he wondered if democracy and its ideals can “continue to thrive under a new enemy who has nothing to offer us but hatred.”

“We don’t know what the future will bring us,” he said.

We didn't have a much of a clue about tomorrow in Roble's time, either. I wonder if he would think his death was noble 40 years later, when in Communist Vietnam, children and adults still don't share the luxury of freedom of speech.

(Click here to read David Shribman's take on the legacy of the Vietnam War)

Repro train station

Take another look at the train station in the photo, above, because it’s not a beautifully restored version of itself.

This is a view of the brand new West Newton Station, rebuilt with modern construction materials as the latest addition to a hiking and biking trail.

The Regional Trails Corp. invested $750,000 to create a life-size model of the old Pennsylvania and Lake Erie Railroad station in West Newton, an historic borough along the Youghiogheny River in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Contractors even used the original blueprints to recreate the building on the same site as the one that was destroyed in a fire in the 1970s.

The building, which opened seven months ago, serves as a visitor center for the group that developed the Yough River Trail, which is part of the Great Allegheny Passage. The network of trails stretches for 150 miles between Pittsburgh and Cumberland, Md., and attracts 700,000 visitors a year. It’s a great park, and those of us who live nearby are so lucky to have it in our backyard.

And, West Newton is a great place to start a journey on the abandoned rail line. The borough and its Colonial and Victorian houses more resembles a quaint village in New England than part of America's industrial rust belt.

The original settlement was named Simrall’s Ferry, and later Robb’s Ferry for Isaac Robb, who laid the town out in 1794. It’s first and biggest industry was the Markle Paper Mill that opened in 1859 but eventually closed because it was polluting the river. The rail line arrive there in 1860.

Good to have met you Rose

Rose Calderone was famous in the Mon Valley for a story about her serving John F. Kennedy scrambled eggs for dinner in her kitchen while others were dining on lobster and steak in her nearby supper club.

The Massachusetts senator also drank the local beer, Stoneys, when he went to her business, the Twin Coaches in Rostraver Township, Pa., to stump for votes in the 1960 presidential election, knowing Calderone had the power to swing many ballots in his favor.

She went on to provide good-paying jobs for women while attracting the best entertainment to the club after her husband, Tony, died unexpectedly the same year.

“It was either sink or swim,” she told the Observer-Reporter when she granted the newspaper a rare interview two years before she died Monday at age 93.

A native of Italy, she was a role model for many immigrants to America who wanted to rise to the top and retire at the best of their game. She was no one to mess with, either. Calderone kept a baseball bat behind the bar in case of trouble, and was known to turn men away if they weren’t wearing a dress jacket and tie. She insisted on dealing with class acts, at no expense.

Her obituary follows:

Rose Bruno Calderone, 93, of Rostraver, died Monday, May 19, 2008 . She was born in Mendicino, Italy on June 10, 1914. At the age of three she was brought to the United States by her late parents, Joseph Bruno and Maria (Nacarrato) Bruno.

Rose grew up in Monessen before moving to Rostraver. Rose was a longtime business owner and is best known for operating the Twin Coaches Supper Club in Rostraver with her late husband, Tony Calderone and in her later years for operating the Holiday Inn in Rostraver. She was a member of the Church of St. Anne in Rostraver and its Confraternity of Christian Mothers. She was also one of the founding members and was a member of the original board of directors of the Rostraver Business Association in 1975; and in 2005 she was honored as the business person of the year for the Greater Rostraver Chamber of Commerce.

She is survived by her daughter, Carmel Calderone of Rostraver; son & daughter-in-law, Anthony & Pat Calderone of Huntington Beach, CA; 3 grandchildren; Philip Calderone of Huntington Beach, CA, Leonard Calderone and Lisa & Kenneth Waite, all of Atlanta, GA; great granddaughter, Jessica Waite; great grandson; Taylor Waite; sister & brother-in-law; Angeline & Regis J. Serinko of Rostraver; brother, Albert E. Bruno of Huntington Beach, CA; 2 nieces, Maria & Kenneth Kite of Rostraver, Judy & Gary Means of Frederick, MD; 4 nephews, Bruce Bruno of Rostraver, Dr. Gerald Bruno of Jackson, MS, Dr. Regis J. Serinko, Jr. of Bellefonte and James Bruno of New York.

In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by her husband, Tony Calderone in 1960; 2 brothers and sisters-in-law, James & Lena Bruno and Frank & Kay Bruno; 3 nieces, Marilyn Bruno, Donna Mae Beggs and Regina Ann Serinko; and a nephew, Joseph Bruno.

Friends will be received on Wednesday from 7 to 9 p.m., Thursday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. and Friday until 9:30 a.m. in the James C. Stump Funeral Home Inc., 580 Circle Drive, Belle Vernon/Rostraver Township (724-929-7934) www.jamesstumpfuneralhome.com

A Funeral Mass will be celebrated on Friday, May 23 at 10:00 am in the Church of St. Anne with her Pastor, Rev. Ronald L. Simboli presiding. Entombment will follow in the Grandview Cemetery Mausoleum in Monessen.

Rose's biggest love was St. Jude's Children's Hospital, so the family is suggesting memorial contributions to: St. Jude’s Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, the Jefferson Regional Medical Center Foundation, or to the Rostraver Food Bank.