Reading “Meet You in Hell” got me searching online for more about the 1892 Homestead strike, and it wasn’t long before I was having a look at the actual location on Google Earth. The story is riveting. One imagines the scene as it might play out today, with “Breaking News” flashes on CNN and helicopter news cameras hovering over the winding Monongahela River to gather footage of oil fires and swarming crowds.

I’ve recounted the story on Google Earth; the post is here. The blog version also begins in Manhattan, but first you should read my review of “Meet You in Hell”.

Below on the left is the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, occupying the former home of Andrew Carnegie, the multimillionaire who’d somehow managed to earn himself the title “angel of the working man” via the terms of endearment he used in speeches about the very labourers among whom he grew up and beside whom he’d once toiled. At the beginning of summer, 1892, Carnegie had departed for his annual sojourn in Scotland and left general manager Frick to manage the situation.

Above on the right is the Frick mansion, just down the road from Carnegie’s Manhattan spread and even bigger. It’s now also a museum, housing the Frick Collection of fine art that the old man amassed on his own frequent trips to Europe. LuciaM, one of the Google Earth Community’s most talented members, has a dazzling post on the art collection here.

There is little left to see in the Pennsylvania town of Homestead itself, apart from a few haunting remnants of the vast Carnegie steel mill that thrived into the 1950s and then gradually petered out, finally closing in 1986. The once-rambunctious business district has died, and the factory site is now a modern urban sprawl of mammoth chain stores, restaurants and luxury apartment complexes, all thrown up in the ’90s.

This gigantic hydraulic forging press has stood here since 1902. It is now the only surviving American example of that era’s presses that were used to forge armour plating. Among other steel wonders, Homestead produced face plates for the battleship Missouri, on whose deck the Japanese surrendered in 1945. The information about and photos of these relics come from the Pennsylvania Labor History Journal.

The dozen 110-foot smokestacks that still cast long shadows over a sparsely used parking lot were part of a 1944 slabbing mill. The Homestead works were vastly expanded for the war effort, with 80 new buildings crowding more than 1,200 families out of their homes.

The gantry crane dates from only 1979 and was brought here two years later as part of the company’s required environmental upgrade, which necessitated a $23-million water treatment and recycling plant. In its few years of operation before the Homestead factory shut down, the crane drew slurry and heavy slag from the mill’s wastewater and deposited it in a settling pond.

This is the Homestead Public Library, actually in the neighbouring borough of Munhall. It was one of 3,000 libraries Carnegie built around the world, but one of only three for which he provided an endowment to keep open. It was built in 1898, and while some saw it as a peace offering to the community, it had been planned long before the strike. Still, as one of Carnegie’s own men complained, “What good is a book to a man who works 12 hours a day?”

Homestead and the adjacent borough of Munhall had between them a population of 12,000, and almost every male toiled at Carnegie Steel. Despite what now sound like unbelievable working conditions — 12 hours a day, seven days a week in a sprawling hell of furnaces of the type that had taken 300 lives the previous year in the Pittsburgh area (and no compensation paid) — wages were adequate.

The American Federation of Labor was founded in 1876 and quickly became the world’s largest and wealthiest union, resting largely on the strength of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. Only 325 of the 3,800 men at Carnegie Steel belonged to the Amalgamated, but most of the employees backed its negotiation plans as the company’s last contract with the union neared its expiry on June 30, 1892.

When Frick made it clear that he had no intention of listening to the union’s demands, and in fact seemed intent on shutting the men out in favour of scab labour, the local Amalgamated executives formed a strike committee under Hugh O’Donnell. It basically took charge of the town, closing the saloons, keeping the peace and operating the utilities.

The union guarded against the expected scab invasion with a fleet of small boats on the river and a chartered launch called the Edna, plus scouts on the railway bridge and pickets patrolling the perimeter of “Fort Frick”, as the men dubbed the factory after the boss erected a 12-foot-high board fence around it, topped with barbed wire.

Frick planned to break the siege with an army of 300 men mustered by the Pinkerton detective agency, to be towed up the river in two barges and paid $5 per day to secure the property. County Sheriff William McCleary got nowhere with his bid to pre-empt the agency’s involvement when no one would join his posse. They didn’t want to face 3,800 strikers. State Governor Robert Pattison declined to get involved, knowing he couldn’t win politically.

The mill, meanwhile, was shut down, and Frick set a date for men to apply for work once they’d renounced the union.

The Pinkertons hired 316 men in New York and Chicago, mostly unemployed or drifters, with a smattering of genuine hoodlums mixed in with the college kids on vacation. On July 5 they boarded trains, with the Chicago train carrying 250 Winchester rifles, 300 pistols and ammunition as well. Agency detectives kept watch to make sure none of the recruits bolted. The strike was already the subject of international headlines.

The trains were linked in Ashtabula, Ohio, and travelled on to Bellevue, Pennsylvania, where the men got on the two 100-foot-long barges that Carnegie Steel normally used to transport its products. The hulls and decks of the Iron Mountain and the Monongahela had been partially reinforced with metal plating for their protection. The former was to be their dormitory, the latter their dining hall.

Just before midnight, a pair of Carnegie tugboats hauled the barges into the river, with the Chicago men aboard the Monongahela under the command of Charles Nordrum. Nordrum’s superior, Pinkerton Captain Frederick Heinde, was on the Iron Mountain.

Colonel Joseph Gray, deputised by Sheriff McCleary, soon after boarded one of the tugs, the Little Bill, skippered by William Rodgers, but declined the Pinkertons’ request that their men be made deputies as well. Upstream the other tug broke down and the Little Bill had to tow both barges.

Sometime close to 4am a union scout on the Smithfield Bridge in downtown Pittsburgh spotted the tugs’ lights through the thick fog, and sent word ahead to Homestead. Hugh O’Donnell blasted a steam whistle to rouse the strikers from their beds, and within minutes the streets were full of men, women and children, both cursing and laughing. They were primed for a showdown.

Everyone ashore roared as one when the barges came into view, and strikers immediately began firing at them with rifles, pistols and shotguns, with the crowd running along the shore as the boats crawled toward the factory. On board the men were issued weapons and ammunition, though some refused to fight, saying they’d only been hired as guards.

Captain Rodgers ran both scows against the riverbank in front of the mill, adjacent to the company’s pumping station, just as dawn broke, with the Monongahela inshore. There were 10,000 strikers waiting, having smashed down the wall of Fort Frick, and thousands on other townsfolk nearby toting sticks, stones and clubs.

Nordrum appeared on the deck of his barge to announce their intention to climb the hill regardless of the opposition. He helped his men throw out a gangplank to the embankment. Heinde collected volunteers from the Iron Mountain to head ashore first, then strode down the plank in their lead, only to be showered with rocks.

Three strikers ran forward and one lay down on the walkway. When Heinde tried to push him aside, the workman pulled a revolver and shot the detective in the thigh. A volley of gunfire struck the other agents, killing one and wounding four. A swarm of Pinkertons rushed on deck and let loose with a fusillade of their own, bringing down more than 30 strikers. When Martin Murray was hit, his co-worker Joseph Sotak rushed forward, but took a bullet in the mouth. Up the hill a worker named Streigle was shot through the throat.

This drawing is from a comic-book rendition of the battle by Bill Yund, of of the directors of the Battle of Homestead Foundation, established in 1996 by historians, artists and concerned local residents to promote the rebuilt pumphouse as a “sacred site for labour”.

For three minutes gunfire rained down on the barges from both banks of the river. The Pinkertons took shelter below and finally the shooting stopped. The steelmen started erecting barricades of scrap metal while the dead and wounded were cleared away. The photo here comes from the 1912 “History of the United States”.

Meanwhile Captain Rodgers brought the Little Bill alongside the Iron Mountain and took the Pinkerton casualties off toward Pittsburgh with a promise to return. The men remaining on the barges were stranded like sitting ducks, even as the strikers produced sticks of dynamite and a small cannon.

O’Donnell called out to Nordrum and they conferred at the shoreline, but the Pinkerton man, now in charge, was unwilling to settle, and shouted to the strikers, “We were sent here to take possession of this property and to guard it for the company — if you men don’t withdraw, we will mow every one of you down!”

Shortly before 8am a group of detectives tried to get ashore. Four were quickly felled in a hail of gunfire and the rest scrambled back to shelter, and the shooting went on for another two hours. About a dozen Pinkertons dived into the river and swam to the far bank, while at the same time the men of the inshore barge abandoned it one by one for the relative safety of the Iron Mountain, the strikers aiming to pick them off individually.

They were receiving more weapons from Pittsburgh all the time — as well as reinforcements in the form of armed non-strikers from Braddock and Duquesne — and began moving back toward the shoreline to finish off the invaders. Men in the skiffs on the river fired on the Iron Mountain repeatedly from point-blank range, occasionally tossing aboard sticks of dynamite.

Strikers onshore unleashed a flurry of dynamite at the barge simultaneously, nearly lifting it from the water and tearing holes in the bow, exposing the cowering detectives to more gunfire.

By now, for the workers and their supporters watching in huge crowds from the surrounding hillsides, the battle had become festive. Thousands had hastened to Homestead from Pittsburgh to see the fun. During lulls in the action the strikers set off fireworks while enjoying meals sent them by family and admiring fans. When someone on the barge waved a white flag through a porthole, it was shot to ribbons, and a barrage awaited anyone who popped up his head to gasp for air.

Across the river in in Braddock, strikers produced a brass Civil War cannon used of late during holiday celebrations and landed a shell on the barge, tearing another hole in the roof, but when a subsequent shot flew long and beheaded a striker named Silas Wain, the gun was abandoned. The sketch below is from the National Police Gazette, filed with the Library of Congress.

Next the steel men pumped hundreds of gallons of oil into the river upstream from the barges, but couldn’t get it to ignite, so instead they set ablaze a raft filled with oil and greasy scrapwood and let it drift toward the enemy, evoking so much fear on board that an officer threatened to shoot anyone who jumped ship. In the event, the raft missed the vessels entirely.

Some of the Pinkertons hacked holes in the sides of the barges and fired sporadically on the crowd, wounding two men, George Rutter and John Morris, badly enough that both later died. But apart from a few Pinkerton regulars continuing the battle, some 300 men on the Iron Mountain were refusing to join in.

Now the strikers loaded a small rail car with barrels of oil, set it aflame, and rolled it downhill on a track that led straight to the inshore barge. The Pinkertons watched in horror and it raced toward them, but though the hurtling rail car got airborne at the end of the line, it fell well short of its target. Natural gas from a main adjacent to the pumping station was then ignited with skyrockets, yet the small explosion did no damage.

There were those who wanted to board the barges and finish off the detectives, but few of the men were ready for such outright slaughter. During the latest lull, the strike committee pondered possibilities at union headquarters on Eighth Avenue, until soon after midday a fresh tumult from the riverside announced the return of the Little Bill, this time flying the Stars and Stripes from bow and stern in the vain hope of avoiding attack. Two crew members were soon struck and the tug retreated once more.

The union headquarters, seen on the main Google Earth image above, is now known as the Bost Building. It was declared a National Landmark in 1999 and houses a Rivers of Steel Heritage Area museum and visitors’ centre.

One of the men on the Iron Mountain tried again with a white flag and was shot down, and another guard spotted in an open doorway was fatally shot, perhaps the last casualty of the day. Sources still differ on the number of dead in the skirmish, largely because fatalities mounted in subsequent weeks, but it’s generally accepted that nine strikers and seven Pinkertons died as a direct result of the events of July 6. Some 40 other strikers and 20 detectives received gunshot wounds.

Ten hours after the battle had begun, the news had spread across the nation and messages of support were arriving from far and wide. O’Donnell’s appeal to let the detectives surrender was at first shunned, but gradually the workers saw reason, encouraged by the notion of holding them prisoner until they could be officially charged with murder.

O’Donnell boarded the outer barge and assured the Pinkertons that they would be held in safety if they gave up their weapons. A hundred armed strikers clambered onto the Iron Mountain and, as their foes began their exodus, doused it and its sister vessel with oil and set them afire.

The watching crowd cheered, and continue to do so when the nearby company pumphouse also caught fire and burned to the ground. The building has since been replaced and is now seen as a shrine to the labour cause.

The Pinkerton men were marched around the western edge of the plant amid jeers, but remained untouched until the first captives were halfway up the hill and people began slapping their faces. Next, clubs were used, and children pelted the prisoners with rocks. The women joined in, one poking out a detective’s eye. Another guard who fell to his knees begging for mercy was instead kicked, and when he tried to flee he was clubbed into unconsciousness.

As depicted in the Corbis-Bettmann image at the top of this post, an engraving by WP Synder based on a photograph that appeared in Harper’s Weekly, the Pinkertons found themselves in a gauntlet of insanely furious townspeople, one man coolly bashing their heads with a leather-wrapped rock on a sling. One of the young university students made a break for it and was chased through town by dozens of people. The beating he received, once caught, ended only when men with rifles drove the mob away.

No Pinkerton agent went unharmed. More than 40, unable to walk, had to be dragged into confinement at the town’s skating rink and the opera house nearby. Two would die that evening from the injuries they received after surrendering. Another killed himself with a pocketknife. O’Donnell and other union men were hurt while attempting to protect the Pinkertons.

The opera house, where the detectives with held without food and water, was surrounded by armed strikers debating their fate. While the sheriff was allowed to remove the badly injured to a Pittsburgh hospital, the mob was torn between executing the rest outright or selecting some for a mock trial and hanging. Finally, however, union president William Weihe managed to secure the crowd’s mercy, and sometime after midnight the Pinkertons were put on a special train bound for Pittsburgh, many townspeople still baying for their blood.

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In the end, the steel workers paid a high price for their “victory”. Governor Pattison ordered in the state militia on July 11 to protect strikebreakers, and these outsiders soon had the mill producing again at speed. Some 13,000 strikers company-wide held firm, but their cause was lost. Public opinion turned definitively against them when an anarchist named Alexander Berkman tried to murder Frick in his office. The Amalgamated was crushed, wages in all Carnegie mills were cut and the 12-hour day was again enshrined, even as company profits soared.

It took some time for the slain steelworkers to receive a proper burial. Five of the seven were finally given marked graves at the Homestead Cemetery, seen here, and nearby St Mary’s Cemetery. A sixth already had a marked grave and the seventh was buried in Verona.

Steelworkers struck time and again after the Homestead debacle, always in vain, and not until 1936 did a Steel Workers Organisation Committee manage any progress. Five years later the committee unveiled a monument to the seven men killed in the battle of 1892, which still stands at Eighth and West streets.

The battle, Charles McCollester of the Pennsylvania Labor History Society wrote a few years ago, “marked a watershed in American labour relations, a defining moment, where issues that are still relevant to the organisation of work in the global economy were posed in particularly stark terms.

“The first issue was whether people could freely associate in the workplace, form organisations of their own choosing, and speak freely about the employment relationship. After the battle, free speech and association virtually disappeared in the community of Homestead, as well as on the job in the mill, for more than 40 years.

“The second issue relates to the right of workers to freely choose their own representatives in discussions and negotiations with employers, to collectively bargain over wages, hours, and working conditions without fear of retaliation.

“Finally, Homestead workers demanded the fight to participate in the process of workplace change. A key issue for the workers at Homestead, as it is for workers today, was the pace and impact of technological change …

“Fundamental human rights to association, representation and participation in the workplace are still problematic in the US despite their assertion 50 years ago by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Homestead 1892 stands as an event that crystallises, in stark and dramatic expression, issues that retain their relevance for America and the world on the threshold of the 21st century.

My account of the battle is based on a chapter in “Lockout” by Leon Wolff, which appears online at AmericanHeritage.com.