Monday, February 14, 2011

Youngstown

A little history of Youngstown Sheet & Tube from Wikipedia:
The home plant of YS&T was known as the Campbell Works located in Campbell and Struthers, Ohio. This plant contained four blast furnaces, twelve open hearth furnaces, blooming mills, two Bessemer converters, slabbing mill, butt weld tube mill, 79" hot strip mill, seamless tube mills and 9" and 12" bar mills at the Struthers Works. The Brier Hill Works consisted of two blast furnaces named Grace and Jeannette, twelve open hearth furnaces, 40" blooming mill, 35" intermediate blooming mill, 24" round mill, 84" and 132" plate mills and an electric weld tube mill. During much of The Depression the Brier Hill works was shut down, but reopened in 1937. Much of the reopened plant's production centered around the production of tube rounds for the Campbell seamless tube mills. Due to the imbalance of ironmaking and steelmaking facilities at the two plants, rail shipments of molten iron "hot metal" were made from Campbell to Brier Hill from 1937 until 1979.
In 1916, Sheet and Tube workers at the East Youngstown plant rioted during a strike over working conditions, which resulted in most of the town's business district being burned to the ground. The strike was quelled by the arrival of National Guard troops. After the riots, East Youngstown was renamed Campbell in honor of the company's President. In 1937, Youngstown Sheet and Tube played a prominent role in the Little Steel Strike, along with Republic Steel, Inland Steel, Bethlehem Steel, and Weirton Steel. The so-called "Little Steel" group, led by Republic's Tom Girdler, operated independently of United States Steel, which had previously signed a labor agreement with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its subordinate Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC). Violence during this strike resulted in the deaths of workers in Chicago and Youngstown.
In 1952, during the Korean War, President Harry S. Truman attempted to seize United States steel mills in order to avert a strike. This led to the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer, which limited presidential authority.
The company abruptly closed its Campbell Works and furloughed 5,000 workers on September 19, 1977, a day remembered locally as "Black Monday." The Brier Hill Works and the company's plants in Indiana were sold to Jones and Laughlin Steel, later acquired by Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), a conglomerate. The Brier Hill Works closed in 1979 as part of a continued wave of steel mill closings that devastated the Youngstown economy. The Brier Hill Works eventually reopened and are now operated as V & M Star Ohio, a recycling mini-mill owned by the Vallourec Group, a French conglomerate.
Update: A CNN story from 2008, about Youngstown's plan to abandon parts of the city and move residents to other neighborhoods, a plan that Detroit is now considering:
Already, delegations from smaller, post-industrial cities like Flint, Mich.; Wheeling, W.Va.; and Dayton, Ohio, have come to Youngstown to study the plan.

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