HISTORY

 

Youngstown Sheet & Tube was Ohio's largest employer in the 1930s, and had two of the six integrated steel mills in the Youngstown District. The two YS&T mills were the Campbell Works and the Brier Hill Works. The Brier Hill works was the older of the two, with ironmaking operations dating back to 1847. But Campbell was the larger mill and was built from scratch starting in 1900 by Youngstown industrialists George Wick and James Campbell. They previously founded the Mahoning Valley Iron Company in 1888 which was acquired in 1893 by the Republic Iron and Steel Company. With steel replacing iron as the metal of choice, they then embarked on a new project -- creation of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. which became one of the nation's largest steel producers in less than 25 years.

 

In 1900 they started big, using the name and reputation of Wick and Campbell to sell stock and raise capital necessary to build the massive Campbell Works in what was then called East Youngstown (later renamed in Campbell's honor). The mill extended several miles long, also spread into Youngstown and Struthers. It had four blast furnaces, 12 open hearth furnaces, blooming mills, two Bessemer converters, slabbing mill, butt-weld tube mill, 79-inch hot strip mill, seamless tube mills and 9- and 12-inch bar mills.

 

This is the mill under construction in 1905 (seen from the South Gate in Struthers), which also resulted in the construction of new railroad lines or the addition of tracks to old ones north to Lake Erie (to receive ore from the Mesabi Range) and south into the coalfields of Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia:

 

By the 1920s, the Campbell Works stretched several miles long. This is looking southeast from Youngstown into Campbell (left) and Struthers (right):

 

In 1923, Youngstown Sheet & Tube bought a large mill near Chicago and, closer to home, the Brier Hill Steel Company (previously called the Brier Hill Iron & Coal Works). This became YS&T's Brier Hill Works, which was substantially upgraded with Bessemer furnaces and with more production capacity. Its blast furnaces were named Grace and Jeannette (the latter, Jenny, gained fame in Bruce Springsteen's "Youngstown" in which he sang "My sweet Jenny I'm sinking down, way down in Youngstown). It also had 12 open-hearth furnaces, two huge blooming mills, plus three other finishing mills. It also had utilities that fed an electric weld tube mill, something that helped play a role in the mill's revival.

 

This is the Brier Hill plant before Youngstown Sheet & Tube acquired it in 1923....

 

Ironically, one of YS&T's Youngstown mills started -- and the other mill stopped -- the decline of the steel industry in the region. It started on "Black Monday" Sept. 19, 1977 when 5,000 employees showed up for work at the Campbell Works and were told the mill was shut down. The locally-owned YS&T was bought eight years earlier by the conglomerate Lykes Corp. which made no improvements to the aging plant. Lykes in 1977 sold the Brier Hill Works to Jones and Laughlin, later acquired by LTV, another conglomerate.

 

LTV closed the Brier Hill Works in 1979, as other mills in the Youngstown District were shuttered, including U.S. Steel's Ohio Works, Republic Steel's Haselton Works, and Sharon Steel closed many of its facilities. Each steelmaking complex had several thousand workers, and many thousands more jobs were associated with the plants among trucking companies, railroads, mines, fuel suppliers, plus retailers, restaurants and more. More than 40,000 jobs were lost in the Youngstown area between 1977-82 when unemployment in the region climbed to 24 percent. The hopelessness was most clearly shown in the city's arson statistics, in which at least one structure in Youngstown was burned down every day by professional arsonists who paid off fire department investigators. It was the only way Youngstowners could walk away from their homes or businesses with some money and hope. 

 

On St. Patrick's Day in 1979, prayers and protests on the plant closings were held outside the south gate (Struthers side) of the closed Campbell Works:

 

 

 

Despite local efforts to buy the Campbell Works and modernize it for $100 million, the funding could not be raised. It would never be reopened:

 

YS&T CAMPBELL WORKS

 

In 1978, something more lasting and positive got its start. The communities of Campbell, Struthers and Lowellville joined together to form CASTLO to promote industrial development in their communities. CASTLO began acquiring Campbell Works land and demolishing structures -- the coke plant, the four massive blast furnaces, the open-hearth furnaces -- as they were sold off by LTV Steel. But few companies were interested in building on land polluted by more than a century of metal-making. Land had to be cleaned, aging bridges, roads and other infrastructure had to be replaced, and funding was always a political fight.

 

The field in the foreground is where the YS&T Campbell Works 12 open-hearth furnaces and other structures stood. Other YS&T buildings remain in the background:

 

 

 

This is the same view as shown in the nighttime postcard shown above:

 

 

 

CASTLO has managed to get large sections of the Campbell Works cleared and cleaned, and the remaining buildings occupied. Even though some look forlorn, they are solid structures which offer low-cost space for small, new-start industries to get their legs under them:

 

 

 

 

This huge but decrepit-looking YS&T building may not reveal it, but there are several growing metal-making companies located inside here, with Munroe being the largest:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazingly, this magnetic lifting facility built by the YS&T is still operational, and the building is still painted in LTV Steel colors. Even though the Campbell Works was shut down in 1977, some parts of it continued operating for 10 more years under LTV ownership:

 

 

 

But some parts of the old Campbell Works are tougher to reuse than others. One of the largest single buildings, shown toward the lower-right of this 1920s aerial view, was demolished by Sherman International in 2010 or so:

 

 

 

This is where that building was, looking westerly toward Youngstown. This huge piece of land is the subject of an environmental assessment, but will require very expensive clean-up. It will probably have to be subdivided and cleaned one small area at a time:

 

 

 

We then move a couple miles to the southeast, to the other side of Bridge Street in Struthers, to continue looking at the Campbell Works. In the 1920s aerial, we are now in the far upper-left corner. This view below is looking at where a 300,000-square-foot finishing mill stood where YS&T made railroad spikes. The building was demolished last year and the land is being leveled and new road and rail infrastructure added thanks to a $5 million Job Ready Sites grant from the Ohio Department of Development:

 

 

 

 

 

This shows more of the area near the YS&T spike mill, including some YS&T buildings that are reused by new industrial and storage businesses:

 

 

 

 

 

We end our visit to the Campbell Works site by looking at its farthest east extremity, where production inventory from YS&T was once stored. Past is prologue! Today it is the site of Lally Pipe & Tube, which stores product delivered by rail from V&M Star Steel on a narrow strip of land extending as far as the eye can see. Although this pipe for the oil and gas industry is made by the former Brier Hill Works, it is still a former YS&T facility. So this land is doing what it has done for decades, but for a newer, and fast-growing purpose. It is also a transition photograph for an update of what's happening at YS&T's other Youngstown-area mill complex (remember, this is a tale of two mills!):

 

 

 

YS&T BRIER HILL WORKS

 

As mentioned before, hope in Youngstown wasn't in short supply for everyone. An investor in 1982 bought the Brier Hill Works and secured $40 million in financing to modernize the plant with an electric arc furnace to replace Jenny and her sister Grace who had a costly and polluting appetite for coal and iron ore. Only once did the investor fire up the electric arc furnace, called a "heat" to melt scrap steel before the plant was again shut down in bankruptcy. But the modernized plant didn't stay cold for long. North Star Steel bought the plant in 1985 and restarted it a year later. It was the start of a new day for steelmaking in the Valley, even as the Campbell Works was being demolished section by section in the late 1980s.

 

But North Star Steel had less than 100 employees at the start. It grew steadily until V & M Star Ohio, owned by the French conglomerate Vallourec Group, bought the plant in 2002. Growth came more quickly as V&M modernized and expanded the plant. The big announcement came in 2010 when V&M said it would build a 1-million-square-foot addition (roughly the size of the Southern Park Mall in suburban Boardman) to make pipe for the oil and gas industry:

 

 

 

Then V&M announced in 2011 that it would invest $57 million to reactivate and modernize a finishing mill that has been rusting away for 32 years since the old Brier Hill Works closed. It was getting renovated into a pipe-threading facility in December of 2011 when I took this picture:

 

 

 

The 200,000-square-foot finishing mill looks tiny compared to the new 1-million-square-foot addition to the right of it. Today, the V&M Steel complex stretches for two miles from Division Street in Youngstown (upper right), northwest to Interstate 80 in Girard (left). This view looks to the southeast, from Girard into Youngstown:

 

 

 

This is what much of the Brier Hill Works looked like in 1990. Most of it had become overgrown with disuse after 11 years:

 

 

 

In 2003, it wasn't much better in terms of being overgrown. This is on the old Division Street, looking east toward the old Brier Hill Works and several railroad lines:

 

 

 

Today, most of the overgrown vegetation is gone and the activity is back. Trucks come and go constantly over the old Division Street bridge. I had to wait for three trucks to pass before I could cross the narrow bridge:

 

 

 

When I got to the other side of the road bridge, I was met by the sight of the mill, new and rebuilt roads, and rebuilt rail lines, plus the removal of another rail line, the Lake Erie & Eastern which passed overhead on a series of bridges. It is amazing how opened up the area seems now without the railroad bridge and the canopy of vegetation:

 

 

 

This is a new road named after Roger Lindgren to V&M's new $650 million pipe mill. Lindgren retired in 2010 as V&M Star's president and sought the huge mill expansion as well as other improvements to modernize the mill and grow its business through productivity. His efforts are a contrast to the neglect by many Youngstown steel mill executives in the 1970s-80s:

 

 

 

And, as noted, new tracks are being added too. All of the tracks to the left of the freight train are new. This was once the Chicago-Jersey City mainline of the Erie Railroad, and today is owned by Ohio Central RR which has seen its Youngstown-area traffic bloom in the last few years:

 

 

 

This is one of the reasons why -- the revival of the Youngstown Sheet & Tube's former Brier Hill Works into V&M Star's Youngstown Works. More growth may come soon to the 2-mile-long complex, including a second electric arc furnace and its accompanying melt shop:

 

 

 

And what will that mean? More of these guys going to work each day. Already, more than 1,000 people are employed at the former Brier Hill Works:

 

 

 

Once again, the beautiful sight of lunch-box toting, hard-hatted steelworkers pouring in and out of a growing steel mill is happening in Youngstown:

 

 

 

And that is our tale of two steel mills in Youngstown.

Inspiring and hopeful narrative. Through difficult decades Youngstown has managed to preserve much of its excellent civic and urban bone structure, and it's good to see that the area's economy may see significant growth.

Great job.  Thanks.

The epitome of blue-collar industry.  Great stuff.

Good work, KJP. I am fascinated by this history as well and excited about V&M Star--which is now fully annexed into Youngstown proper (the northern piece had been in Girard).

AWESOME (as usual)

 

I love when you do these Youngstown pieces. Both my parents are from Girard, so Y-town is My-town. Although I am  a sellout moving to Cleveland-land, but that is where my wife is from and where the job was.

Good work, KJP. I am fascinated by this history as well and excited about V&M Star--which is now fully annexed into Youngstown proper (the northern piece had been in Girard).

 

Yes, the city now has a cowlick. ;)  http://shoutyoungstown.blogspot.com/2011/06/city-with-cowlick-new-map-shows.html

Well, I'll add a 3rd mill to the mix. I work at the former McDonald Works of USS, now McDonald Steel Corporation. We only have around 120 employees, but business is good and they're completing a new office building. Back in 1984 Inc. Magazine did an article on McDonald Steel that I think you'll find interesting. :)

 

"David Houck worked for Big Steel all his life -- until the mill shut down. . .

From the end of Ohio Avenue, on a rise overlooking the old steel mills, the village of McDonald, Ohio, looks quiet. Not deserted: The homes of the steelworkers in this industrial suburb of Youngstown are still pristine, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church still draws housewives to its 8 a.m. Mass. But signs of economic vitality are rare. Down the street, Austin's and the Starlight Lounge no longer fill with thirsty workers at the end of each shift. The union hall -- Local 1307, United Steelworkers of America -- is empty. "USS Industrial Park . . . Now Leasing" announces a billboard at the entrance to the former McDonald Works of United States Steel Corp. " 1,100,000 Sq. Ft. Buildings on 172 Acres." Beyond the sign sprawl the hulking structures of dark brick with corrugated steel roofs, surrounded by endless parking lots that, even on a weekday morning, remain virtually empty.

 

The Youngstown region's quietude--the shut-down factories, the area's 40,000 or 50,000 unemployed steelworkers -- has, in the past several years, become a sign of the times, a national symbol for the decline of American heavy industry. It has also become the focus for flurries of rhetoric and political activity. Candidates for the Presidency speak stirringly of the neglected responsibilities of big business and big government, of the need to protect and revitalize the domestic steel industry. Civic groups petition corporations and public leaders; unions decry the inaction. All demand that steel be returned to its position of preeminence -- and that Youngstown, rooted in the steel industry, flourish with steel once more."

 

Here's the rest of the story. Thank god for the vision of Dave Houck.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/19841101/9723.html

Thanks! Great write-up. I did the two mills because they had one owner, and two decidedly different fates. I could have thrown a fourth in there with Republic's Haselton Works, but there's not much happening down there now.

 

There is some good stuff happening up at McDonald and at the old Ohio Works site near Division Street. My client is considering helping a railyard expansion project down there to accommodate growth from V&M, and another client has some interest next to McDonald Steel but that one's not ready for prime time yet. But in terms of investment, it could end up being bigger than V&M. I hope it happens! Lots of potential projects out there. It's so good to see.

That would be great if something else would go into our industrial park up there in McDonald. Right now we've got McDonald Steel, Amrod, Larry's Truck Electric, Steel and Alloy and I think one more. I would love to see an expansion even half the size of V&M in McDonald. Great news, keep me informed!