The gamble on Donora steel

Part IV: Dangerous jobs among deadly air

Steelworkers in America’s industrial heartland faced many dangers in the early 1900s before federal workplace safety laws. But those in Donora, Pa., would put themselves and their families at particular risk while living in the shadows of a putrid row of zinc smelters.

There were many horrific accidents as the steel belt bloomed around Pittsburgh, and Donora claimed its share of them.

A month into construction of what would become known as U.S. Steel’s Donora works, a man named Rocchi Fiavelli fractured his skull in a fall from a tall building. The same day, Mike Dzugan’s right hand was severed by a circular saw in the Donora pattern shop, while blacksmith J. W. Campbell had his arm punctured by a sliver of metal, the Donora American newspaper reported July 5, 1901.

A lad named Albert Hornbeck, working as a mill water boy, had his leg amputated after it was crushed between two rail cars in April 1905. Henry Clay Davis, 39, would die in May 1922 upon being crushed between two railroad cars serving the mill.

Thirty-year-old Roderick Hastie, a Scottish immigrant, was killed while he was unloading a river barge a few days before Christmas 1923. Meanwhile, Michael Furda, 67, who was born in Slovakia, succumbed in February 1949 after his left leg was amputated following an accident at the blooming mill.

But despite the risks, the machine continued to grind out steel and zinc while immigrant families did their best to create idyllic lives for their children in the smoky town. Promoters of Donora responded by publishing post cards, like the one shown above, that were made pretty with brush strokes of green paint to disguise the ugly surroundings.

The casualties of steel went largely overlooked elsewhere, too, until late October 1948, when a mysterious fog settled over the Monongahela River. The eyes of the nation turned on Donora over startling news that 20 people had died there and at least another 600 were sickened by the thick air. Seventeen of the deaths occurred within just 12 hours, prompting health official to fear a pneumonia epidemic.

Five days later, after rain had washed the air clean, a mill attorney ordered the cooling of the zinc smelters as mill chemists began arriving in Donora to spin the story. Investigators with the Pennsylvania Department of Health also came to town where the zinc mill had been spewing sulfurous fumes, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, along with various other heavy metal dusts into the clouds since 1915.

The downwind residents in the village of Webster, Westmoreland County, were not about to be calmed by the rush of investigations. They had been complaining for years about that acidic air that had always quickly peeled fresh paint off their clapboard houses and turned them into worthless pieces of real estate.

The acidic air had also stripped the land of nearly all of its vegetation for miles around Webster. After the smoke cleared a bit, those neighbors decided to hold secret meetings to oppose the mill, led by local restaurant owner Abe Celapino, who had a reputation for disliking the steel-making giant.

His group called itself the Society for Better Living, adopting the credo: “Clean Air and Green Grass” in a charter that was approved by the courts in May 1949. Its members wanted to conserve soil, property and plant life and eliminate poison gases from the air because they feared for their lives over the smog deaths.

The society criticized U.S. Steel for its strong influence over Donora Borough Council that had ignored its pleas for a local smog ordinance similar to the one that was on the books in Pittsburgh. No one was really surprised at council's decision because men who worked at the mill held six of the seven seats on council at the time.

The U.S. Public Health Service, in a preliminary report on the smog that was never reopened, placed most of the blame on the smog deaths on the weather. A spate of Webster lawsuits lingered in federal court for several years before paltry settlements were reached without the mill admitting to any responsibility for the tragedy.

It would take at least another decade before federal lawmakers recalled the Donora smog as a reason to enact the first federal clean air law. The folks in Webster breathed a sigh of relief while those across the river braced for the worst as the mill jobs began to disappear.

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

Click here to read Part V: Big promises and pipe dreams

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)