Capital's Utopia Mosher, Anne E. Published by Johns Hopkins University Press Mosher, Anne E. Capital's Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855-1916. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Project MUSE. doi:10.1353/book.60334. https://muse.jhu.edu/. For additional information about this book https://muse.jhu.edu/book/60334 [ Access provided at 30 Sep 2021 16:33 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Capital’s Utopia Creating the North American Landscape Gregory Conniff Edward K. Muller David Schuyler Consulting Editors George F. Thompson Founder and Series Editor Published in cooperation with the Center for American Places, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Harrisonburg, Virginia Capital’s Utopia Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855–1916 Anne E. Mosher The Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore and London This book was brought to publication with a kind subvention from the Victorian Vandergrift Museum and Historical Society © 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2003 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 The Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218–4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mosher, Anne E., 1959– Capital’s Utopia : Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855–1916 / Anne E. Mosher. p. cm. — (Creating the North American landscape) ISBN 9-8018-7381-9 (acid-free paper) 1. Vandergrift (Pa.)—History. 2. Vandergrift (Pa.)—Social condi- tons. 3. Vandergrift (Pa.)—Economic conditions. 4. Company towns—Pennsylvania—Vandergrift—History. 5. City planning— Pennsylvania—Vandergrift—History. 6. Steel industry and trade— Social aspects—Pennsylvania—Vandergrift—History. 7. Iron and steelworkers—Pennsylvania—Vandergrift—History. 8. McMurtry, George Gibson, 1838–1915. 9. Olmsted, Frederick Law, 1822– 1903. I. Title. II. Series. F159.V2M67 2003 974.8Ј81—dc21 2002156774 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. To my mother, Lois, the memory of my father, DeWitt, and the memory of my friend and colleague, Glenda Laws This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Illustrations and Tables ix Preface xi Introduction 1 part 1: Vandergrift’s Antecedents 1 Experimentation in the Kiskiminetas Valley Iron Industry 11 2 Apollo’s Uneasy Transition from Iron to Steel 36 part 2: Vision, Plan, and Place: The Creation of Vandergrift 3 The McMurtry, Olmsted, and Eliot Plan for Vandergrift 73 4 Settling the Vandergrift Peninsula 94 part 3: Gauging Vandergrift’s Success 5 The Steel Strike of 1901 131 6 Growing Pains for the “Model Town” 152 Epilogue 180 Appendix 195 Notes 203 Bibliography 231 Index 241 This page intentionally left blank Illustrations and Tables Illustrations I.1 Plan for Vandergrift by Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot, 1896 2 1.1 Map of Southwestern Pennsylvania 13 1.2 Map of the Kiskiminetas Valley 15 2.1 Jacob Jay Vandergrift Sr. 39 2.2 Map of oil region of Northwestern Pennsylvania 40 2.3 George Gibson McMurtry Sr. 44 2.4 Layout of the Volta Iron Company mill, 1886 53 2.5 Layout of the Apollo Iron & Steel Company mill, 1889 54 2.6 Layout of the Apollo Iron & Steel Company mill, 1894 56 2.7 Map of Apollo, Pennsylvania, 1861 58 2.8 Map of Apollo, Pennsylvania, 1894 59 2.9 Bird’s-eye view of Apollo, Pennsylvania, 1896 60 3.1 Site of the Vandergrift Mill 79 3.2 Modified plan of the Village Green 86 3.3 Plan of Vandergrift Heights 90 3.4 Detail from the modified Vandergrift town plan 91 3.5 The landscape architects’ face-saving “filler” 92 4.1 Layout of the Vandergrift mill, 1899 98 4.2 The Vandergrift mill, 1901 99 4.3 Vandergrift blooming mill 99 4.4 Initial sales map of Vandergrift lots 104 4.5 View showing residential architectural styles in Vandergrift 106 4.6 Fourth of July celebration 111 4.7 Home interiors showing residents’ interests 124 4.8 Street scene in the business district 125 4.9 Residential street scene 125 x Illustrations and Tables 4.10 The Casino Building 126 5.1 McMurtry’s loving cup punch bowl 150 6.1 Vandergrift, 1915 155 E.1 Vandergrift historical marker 181 E.2 Vandergrift’s “company town” landscape 183 E.3 Victorian housing in Vandergrift 184 E.4 Washington and Franklin parklet 185 E.5 Vandergrift Heights 185 E.6 East Vandergrift 186 E.7 Vandergrift business district 187 Tables I.1 Basic Components of Industrial Restructuring within Nineteenth-Century Iron- and Steelmaking Firms 5 1.1 Ownership History of the Apollo Rolling Mill, 1855–1902 20 1.2 Occupational Structure, Kiskiminetas Valley, 1880 34 2.1 Apollo Occupational Structure, 1880, 1890, and 1895 62 2.2 Assessed Apollo Laborers and Rollers, Showing Laborer Promotions, 1891–1895 67 3.1 Suggested Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot Restrictive Covenants 83 4.1 Number and Percentage of Employed Household Heads Owning Homes in Vandergrift, by Occupation, 1900 103 4.2 Occupational Structure of Apollo, Vandergrift, Vandergrift Heights, and Morning Sun (East Vandergrift), 1900 108 4.3 Commercial Structure of Vandergrift Borough, Vandergrift Heights, and East Vandergrift, 1903 119 5.1 Major Steel Companies, 1899–1900 136 6.1 Occupational Structure of Apollo, Vandergrift, Vandergrift Heights, and East Vandergrift, 1910 154 6.2 Birthplaces of Employed Population, Percentages, 1910 158 Preface Three names figure prominently in the historical narrative that I present in this book: Frederick Law Olmsted, George McMurtry, and Jacob Jay Vandergrift. I first heard of Olmsted during an undergraduate urban geography course taught by David Lanegran at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. This course sparked my long-term research interest in the geography and history of Amer- ican urban landscape. Lanegran required students to go outside of the classroom to explore St. Paul’s downtown, inner-city residential neighborhoods, industrial districts, and suburbs. We were to use these urban spaces as proving grounds (or disproving grounds) for the models and theories we had learned about in lec- tures. Guided by a set tour itinerary and dozens of research questions to ponder in our field notes, we individually investigated and wrote about the political and social struggles that underpinned St. Paul’s urban plans, policies, spatial organi- zation, and landscape. For many members of the class, this was a perspective- altering experience. I certainly came away seeing cities in a new way. My St. Paul field notes record the germs for ideas that now occupy a central place in my thinking about urban planning and its relationship to the making of urban landscape. First, I noted that when St. Paul’s planners and politicians de- vised urban designs or enacted public policy, they did so to mitigate a perceived set of urban problems and to achieve some idealized notion of what their city should be. I would learn much later in my academic career that this basic urban- planning philosophy reflects much broader currents of modernist thought, with its practitioners’ overwhelming desire to impose order on what they perceive to be the chaos of the world.1 Second, I found that even after their plans had been implemented, there were vast differences between the planners’ “ideal St. Paul(s)” and the “real” landscape and social community in which I lived. Urban visions seldom translate directly into tangible bricks-and-mortar landscape. Third, the plans or policies that came closest to producing a concordance be- tween urban visions and urban landscape had been shepherded along by per- suasive and powerful local figures, special-interest groups, or coalitions. In lec- xii Preface ture, Lanegran provided some historical context for this last point when he taught us about some of the key personalities from American urban-planning history, including Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., Daniel Burnham, and Robert Moses.2 At various points in their careers, Olmsted, Burnham, and Moses were each effective negotiators who inspired widespread public commitment to their plans or they had the ability to marshal the economic resources necessary to translate their urban visions into reality. At other times, however, their plans fell flat or were only partially realized.3 Although I learned about the Olmsted landscape firm as an undergraduate geography major, I did not encounter George McMurtry until my Ph.D. pro- gram in geography at Penn State. I was intrigued by the history of urban plan- ning in general and by the late-nineteenth-century development of compre- hensive planning in particular. For my dissertation, I wanted to explore why early comprehensive infrastructure planning ideals were often translated into ur- ban landscape in such piecemeal fashion and with such variation from place to place. I decided to focus on, first, the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Expo- sition, a small-scale demonstration of how closely an “urban” landscape could reflect visionary urban ideals (moreover, Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. were two of the key figures involved in its planning); second, War- ren Manning’s 1901 City Beautiful plan for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (the city closest to my home in Central Pennsylvania, where an early comprehensive in- frastructure plan had been executed and partially adopted); and third, an unde- termined Pennsylvania company town (where I presumed urban visions and ideals would coincide closely, given capital’s supposed hegemony over property and residents). In the process of looking for an “accessible,” comprehensively planned, and relatively unstudied company town, I asked Edward K. Muller of the University of Pittsburgh’s history department for suggestions. In turn, Dr. Muller generated a candidate list of seven towns. When I started conducting background research on each place, I found an entry about Vandergrift in a 1915 Westmoreland County history that made this particular town seem almost too good to be true: Vandergrift—The “Iron Age,” the great trade journal of the country, in 1901, in an able descriptive article on Vandergrift, styled it as The Workingman’s Paradise.