Ellwood City had a Tube Mill?
24 January 2012
The first picture of the tube mill was believed to have been taken late summer/ early fall of 1916 from the area that was formerly Tunnel Field. For the younger generations, it is easy to forget how big the National Tube Company (a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation) was.
The second picture with a close-up of “the smoke stacks” was only a portion of the tube mill that ran from the railroad tracks by the Second Street overpass to the Ewing Park Bridge. The Ellwood City Works of the National Tube Company later expanded to 127 total acres with 23 acres under a roof. Employment reached its highest point during World War II when 4,000 people were employed.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. Boy, we’ve heard that, manufacturing jobs being the ones most missed. Had a friend in 1968 who got employed at the Tube Mill after getting home from the Army. Started as a floor-sweeper, making $9.00 an hour. Army pay for a new recruit was then $90 dollars…a month. US Steel…we love’d ya!
$9.00 for a sweeper in 1968? What a great job!
I wonder why they closed.
They didn’t. They moved to Gary, Ind.
I worked at the tube mill one summer. They classified me as a General Labor, but I did a lot of floor sweeping. I worked in the hot mill and sometimes they let me be the relief guy on drilling the hole to make the tube. Don’t remember what I made, but it was a lot more than the job was worth.
After that bit of sarcasm…
About that time (1968), living in Ohio, my neighbor, who was an engineer for U.S. Steel in Youngstown was telling me about a problem he had with a steam engine. It was used for the power to draw tubes in the local factory and their mill was down. The engine was built in the teens or early twenties. It had been repaired so many times that parts were nowhere near what the originals were. I told him that I had a set of steam engine text books in the attic, that I had inherited, and I would look for them. He said “probably wouldn’t help much”. I dug them out and to our amazement there was the exact engine we were talking about with drawings and valve settings etc. He borrowed the books and they rebuilt the engine. This was one of the last investments made in that factory.
This was at the time that environmental concerns were first affecting the steel mills. Government regulations were causing the mills to clean up the waste they were dumping into the water and air in our area. Costs for installing pollution control measures were exceeding the return on the investments. Ten years later most of the area steel mills were well on their way to closing.
In Youngstown, Ohio the Mahoning River was a sewer of oil and acid that flowed into the Beaver River and then past Ellwood City. Beaver Falls drank that water then recycled it back for New Brighton to use. It then joined the acid water of the Ohio River at Rochester Pa. In Ellwood City the “Tube Mill” was dumping it’s waste over the hill into the Connoquenessing Creek just above the Ewing Park bridge. I remember the white strip of acid and trash that you could see from the bridge. In the 1950s when we went swimming in the “Connie” at the upper end of Ewing Park, we had to get out before we reached the bridge as we floated downstream. BAB (as we called it) was the last area to swim before the pollution.
When we take pictures we intentionally avoid having ugly backgrounds that show dumps and unsightly areas. So it is with most pictures of Ellwood City that we are looking at in this site. Most reading this are too young to remember the trash dumped over the hills along the river that runs through our home town. As bad as it was for the people who lost their jobs when the mills closed or had to move or take lower paying jobs, there are many benefits for our children and grandchildren.
Even with the mills closing the clean up continued and in the 1990s while living west of Youngstown I fished for bass, walleye and muskie in the Mahoning River. The stretch of Beaver River between Wampum and Rock Point is one of the most beautiful places in the area.
Those of you who regularly read and comment on this site, won’t you all please join me and commend Bob Woods for an excellant essay on our home town’s economic and environmental evolution. Beautifully written.
Bob, your story makes me think hard about the balance of available work with the pristine beauty of nature. You want to fish for bass or move out of town for a job? Hard choices. The Saigon River, the Mekong, and the Nile are all poluted. Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Egypt were “developing economies” I worked in, watching Coca-Cola take men out of the rice paddies, put them on trucks, and raise their per capita income to where they could get married, feed and house a family.
Polution could be viewed to be a biproduct of economic growth. You’d think those who prospered after us would learn from our mistakes. Now we are in the process of reclaiming what was free…water, clean air, natural habitat. We make French fries instead of steel. I’m left torn between fishing for bass and my two kids having employment opportunities like I had. I do not have an answer, and it is why I commend you for such a fine piece of writting. You make me think about the importance of balance. There must be a way.
Thanks, Bob.
My grandfather, Sidney James Millson, worked here. While I have few memories of him, I remember being struck by his deafness–which he said was due to the noise of the mill interior.
He and family moved to EC sometime between 1916 and 1920 to start work in the mill.
A Greek immigrant, he told us that chose the anglo-sounding Millson name to show, he said, he was a true “son of the mill.”
His descendants still live in EC.
i remember swimming near that waste coming out from the tube mill. i developed ms in my later years; i wonder if that had anything to do with it?
by the way, the ellwood valley had the best acoustics; who can forget the sound of the tube mill ‘CLANG’ every 45 seconds?………. ‘CLANG’…………….. ‘CLANG’……………… ‘CLANG’…………….. ‘CLANG’………………. ‘CLANG’………….. ‘CLANG’…………….. ‘CLANG’……. ‘CLANG’……….. ‘CLANG’………….. ‘CLANG’…………… ‘CLANG’……………………….. ‘CLANG’…………….. ‘CLANG’………………. ‘CLANG’………….. ‘CLANG’…………….. ‘CLANG’……. ‘CLANG’……….. ‘CLANG’………….. ‘CLANG’…………… ‘CLANG’……………………….. ‘CLANG’…………….. ‘CLANG’……………….’CLANG’
Tom,
I had forgotten that sound. “CLANG” is a perfect description of it. Thinking of what I have seen in other similar plants, I would guess that it was a drop hammer in the foundry. They are BIG hammers that they raise and drop and 45 seconds sounds about like the cycle time.
Another thing that is better forgotten is the smoke and soot coming out of the smokestacks in the above pictures. When the mills were running the smoke was coming. It was my job to scrub the porches with soap water every week.
It was the worst when there was an east wind. I remember the neighborhood women calling to each other to get their clothes off the clothesline as the soot was coming. If they were late they did their wash over. They discussed how to get the black ring out of shirt collars. As the soap commercial said, “Ring around the collar”. When it snowed the snow would gradually turn black then melt into grey slush.
All happy memories in a steel mill town.
I lived all the way down on Glen Avenue 4 houses up from the 5th St. bridge and the tube mill soot found its way to our home’s window sills.
I always thought that the clanging sound came from the sound of the crane operators dropping the tubes into the cradles in the Cold Draw. That sound along with the sound of trains and train whistles put me to sleep many nights growing up in Ellwood.
Jo Ann – I lived on the North Side, First Ave., and we we not immuned from the soot. It was odd because the mill was to the south east and the wind usually blew from the south west to the north east. It should have gone over the river and into the park. There were coal furnaces in homes back them and that may have accounted for some of the soot. At any rate it did a lot of damage very quickly to new fallen snow.
Jo Ann quote: “soot found its way to our home’s window sills.”
Jim Hardie quote: “there were coal furnaces in homes back then.”
When I first read Jo Ann’s comment, I distinctly remembered the black particles on a white-painted window sill at my home on Hazel Avenue. What I remembered most when I read it is that…soot was not troubling back then. We still had billboards with Camel advertisements. Different knowledge level.
Jim, we had a coal furnace, coal bin and all. What didn’t end up as ashes taken out to the alley went up the chimney and out over the snow. The neighbor next door, whom you know well, had an oil furnace. State of the art heating system back then. Now oil heat is viewed as expensive and inefficient.
Bob Woods does a good job above covering polution. My mother’s family all lived in the Pittsburgh area. I saw those mills along the rivers as a kid, pouring out smoke and thought nothing of it. Back then, maybe unconsciously, I accepted it as part of the ambience of good old Western Pennsylvania.
Here’s my point. There’s a current GE commercial promoting manufacturing, showing electric power generating turbines being made, and the ad closes with how that electricity is used to make the Budweiser the guys are drinking in the bar scene. Thanks to GE I can get a cold Bud, owned today by another country. Thanks to soot, I was able to go down to Pittsburgh and watch my Grandpa Sauer, Uncle Joe, Uncle Ed and Uncle George take my dad’s money playing Pinnocle while drinking the Duquesne beer made from where they all worked during the week. The brand is still alive but the factory is gone.
This Bud’s for you? Give me a choice and I’ll have a Duke.
Dave, Your comments on polution brought back possibly my oldest memory. I was a toddler and my parents decided to visit her sister in Pittsburgh. They decided to take a bus and we ended up at a bus station somewhere in Pittsburgh. My sister was an infant and my Dad carried me, it was late in the evening. When we got off the bus, I felt an acrid taste in my mouth and looking at the lights there was a greenish smog all around the place. I felt frightened and was glad to get in my uncles vehicle and out to their apartment. Years later I was amazed at the new Pittsburgh. Bright and Clean- a far cry from that first impression so many years ago.
PEM, I believe you are right about the clanging sound I remember train whistles, mill whistles, clanging, my mother having to dust almost every day, got hired there after the service went for my physical and remember how dirty the place was so I took a job at B&W.
Bob, I dont know if they closed or moved but I do know that Gary couldnt make seamless tubes. I always thought they closed. Can anyone give us more info?
Pem and Don are correct about that “clanging” sound. My Dad was a craneman when he worked there. I worked there for one or two summers and remember remarking to Dad about
how I can here him, even up on Bridge Street.
I don’t remember what year it was tore down