I never worked in a steel mill, but as a point of pride, I can tell you that my dad, grandfather and great-grandfather did.
All three of them worked at Babcock and Wilcox Steel, in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. My great-grandfather emigrated from Hungary in 1913 and moved around the Ohio River Valley before settling down in Beaver Falls. He worked at B&W until he died. My grandfather worked there until the mill closed. My dad worked there for a short time after high school.
My dad grew up in a house just across the road from one of the B&W plants. While the mill provided a livelihood for the family, they also eked out the kind of life you do with nine children. My dad and his eight siblings grew up roaming the woods behind their house. They grew some of their own food, raised chickens, made meals from scratch, recycled and reused as much as they could.
It’s the kind of life that is idealized by homesteader influencers on social media, but back in the day it was what you did.
It’s a similar story for many people all across the area. Where I came from, manufacturing of all kinds supported families in the densely populated river towns of Beaver County. It also supported people who wanted to live out a quiet rural life or to go after the agrarian dream, safely subsidized by the steady source of income the mill provided. It’s a situation we still see today, with many farmers working off-farm jobs to offset the risk that comes with farming.
In the case of my family, grandpap didn’t buy a farm or land, but he did buy a hunting camp in Forest County, Pennsylvania.
No running water. No indoor plumbing. It was a stick-built room attached to a camper, with a wood stove plopped in the middle, but I’m sure it was an oasis for him, to have his own getaway in the mountains.
The point
Why am I telling you all this? Well, our cover story this week is about a steel town — Weirton, West Virginia. When my intrepid young reporter Liz pitched the idea to me, I was all for it.
Sure, it wasn’t strictly a story about agriculture. You won’t find a farm or a dairy mentioned at all. But the story of the rise and fall of Weirton is the same situation that played out all over our region. You can fight over whether where we live is defined as Appalachia or the Midwest or something in between, but you can’t deny we’re firmly in the Rust Belt.
Read Liz Partsch’s story “Steel mills in Weirton see a rebirth of industry with Form Energy”
The rebirth that’s happening in Weirton now is what every old mill town hopes for. Maybe this can be a blueprint for other Rust Belt cities.
In Beaver County, we’ve gotten a taste of this. Shell built an ethane cracker plant along the Ohio River in Potter Township at the site of the old Horsehead plant. Or maybe you knew it as St. Joe Lead. The facility operated the nation’s largest zinc smelter and employed more than a thousand people at its peak.
The construction of the Shell plant, which “cracks” natural gas to turn it into tiny plastic pellets, employed thousands of workers, many of them locals (but not all). The company claims to have added 600 permanent jobs and invested money throughout the community. One university study, commissioned by Shell, found the cracker plant would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity for the area.
The cracker plant finally came online in November 2022, after several years of construction. By the spring of 2023, the company had been flagged more than a dozen times by the state’s environmental regulators for violating air quality standards and agreed to pay a $10 million penalty to the state. Another study, by a left-leaning environmental think tank, suggests the economic impact has not been all that was promised.
Gotta take the good with the bad, right?
It remains to be seen how this redevelopment will impact Weirton in the long term. Same goes for Beaver County. But it feels good to see people I know getting good jobs, the steady kind that the mill used to provide, the kind that have been promised for years from various industries but rarely delivered. It feels good to have a little hope.
