STEEL - 575 The Bourne-Fuller Company, incorporated in 1896, absorbed the Upson Nut Company and Union Rolling Mills Company in 1920. It was a substantial producer of pig iron for its own use, steel ingots, blooms, merchant and concrete bars, bolts, nuts and rivets. In 1930 it was merged with the big Republic Steel Corporation of Youngstown, in which Cleveland capitalists were already heavily interested. The Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, a historic institution derived from the original Jackson Mining Company which opened the Marquette ore range in 1846, has been ever since in the hands of the Mathers and their associates. The Corrigan-McKinney Steel Company is a recent metamorphosis of the McKinney Steel Company which was organized in 1901 by a Cleveland group headed by James Corrigan, a pioneer Cleveland vessel and ore man. It has long been one of the principal industries of Cleveland. Besides its four blast furnaces, steel plant and by-product coke plant on the Cuyahoga River, it has furnaces at Josephine and Scottdale, Pennsylvania. It owns and leases Superior ore mines with an annual capacity of 2,500,000 tons. Its pig iron capacity is nearly 1,500,000 tons. Control of this company was acquired in 1930 by the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company. The Empire Steel Company, which in 1925 acquired the Empire Rolling Mill Company from its Cleveland owners, is one of the smaller concerns, producing sheet iron. The Hanna Furnace Company, a large producer of foundry, malleable and basic pig iron, has no plants in Cleveland. The Lake Erie Bolt and Nut Company, a modern Cleveland enterprise whose name speaks for itself, has helped to spread diversity of control and production. National Malleable and Steel Castings Company, formed in 1923, makes castings of many kinds, from car couplers and friction draft gears to anchor chains. It owns and operates nine plants, two in Cleveland and the rest in Sharon and Illinois. Its Cleveland works on Woodhill Road have two fifteen-ton electric furnaces. The Stewart Furnace Company, producing low phospho- 576 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS rus and Bessemer pig iron at Sharon, Pennsylvania, with headquarters in Cleveland, is controlled by a local group, headed by Fayette Brown. The Cleveland Hardware Company, a veteran Cleveland institution, operates two forging plants and makes rolled steel shapes, forgings, etc. Among the smaller concerns making casting are the Cleveland Steel Casting Company, the Crucible Steel Casting Company, Interstate Foundries, the Mathews Steel Casting Company, the Ohio Steel Castings Company and the West Steel Casting Company. Many of these modest institutions might be called the independents of the independents. The wide scope and variety of Cleveland industry makes a place for all of them. Meanwhile what of the city's general progress in this industry? Mention has been made of its status in iron and steel manufacturing in 1880. In 1890 the census report said : "In general manufacturing, heavy forgings, nuts and bolts, carriage and wagon hardware (this was at the dawn of the automobile) , vapor stoves, sewing machines, steel-tired car wheels and heavy street railway machinery, Cleveland led all the cities of the country." By 1900 its establishments for bulk production of iron and steel had grown from ten to fifteen, its foundries and machine shops from fifty-three to one hundred and twenty-seven. There was a healthy growth in its plants for stoves, bolts, nuts, forgings, etc., and tools had become important. There were such stalwarts as the American Stove Company, National Carbon, American Ship Building Company, National Screw and Manufacturing Company, Champion Rivet, Cleveland Twist Drill, Co-operative Stove, Vlachek Tool, Cleveland Punch and Shear, Chase Brass and Wellman Engineering Company. Progress continued steadily, with a shifting of steel to motor car production, the city at one time possessing a dozen automobile factories. A few years later Prof. W. M. Gregory -of Cleveland wrote in the Geographical Journal: "Cleveland produces annually a product of nearly $200,000,000 in value. The most important industry is iron and steel, which is almost one-half of the entire production and STEEL - 577 more than twice as large as any other industry. Andrew Carnegie, who loves Pittsburgh, has nevertheless pointed out that for the manufacture of iron and steel products Cleveland is the ideal city on the American continent. In justification of his idea, the statistics already indicate a migration of the steel center to the south shore of Lake Erie. Many smaller industries have developed here because of the great supply of iron and steel. Some of these dependent industries are eleven bridge and building-steel plants, one hundred and thirty-four foundries, ten wire plants and a multitude of machine shops. The products of these shops are second in value to the major iron industry. Their vast output of nails, spikes, screws, tacks, drills and bolts has given the title of the Sheffield of America' to Cleveland. "The blast furnaces produce nearly 2,000,000 tons of pig iron each year, and its value ranks fifth with the other industries. There are more than ten of these iron furnaces, and their annual consumption of coke, limestone and ore keeps busily employed an army of men and a fleet of boats. "Metal-working machinery is one of the various specialties. A great many kinds of steam hammers, lathes, slotters, punches, benders, rolls, drills, chisels, shears and forges are built for home use and many of these machines are exported to France, Germany and England. The finer mechanics of the city have constructed the delicate mountings of the great Lick and Yerkes telescopes, as well as those of many of the smaller observatories in this country and abroad. "In direct contrast to the delicate instruments of the observatories are the hoisting, dredging, conveying and ship-unloading machines. The latter are built in Cleveland and are distributed to all parts of the world." From 1904 to 1914 the manufacture of iron and steel in the city increased 82 per cent, and the manufacture of foundry and machine shop products 112 per cent. A review of local industry for 1921 recognized Cleveland as the largest marketing center for iron ore in the country, and a manufacturing center using itself one-third of the iron brought here. The same review emphasized the growth of the "ma- 578 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS chine tool" industry, showing twenty-six factories producing these machines for making machines. In 1927 a manufacturers' census recorded four blast furnaces, four processing establishments and sixteen steel works and rolling mills, with a total annual production worth about $131,000,000. A review of "Cleveland, America's Industrial Capital," published by the Central National Bank in 1929, gave the value of Cleveland's iron and steel plant products as $204,000,000 a year, out of a total production of $1,095,000,000 a year, heading the list and being slightly ahead of automobiles, leading also in the number of plants. "Cleveland," it said, "is now the fastest growing industrial city in the United States. Should forces now in operation continue to function, it is not impossible that Cleveland eventually will rank as the nation's foremost manufacturing community." Big Interests.—It has been said by M. A. Bradley : "Four things make a successful combination on these Lakes—iron, ships, coal and furnaces." Leadership in this quadruple field has long been ascribed to the "Mather group," of which the best known unit is the firm of Pickands, Mather and Company, formed by Samuel Mather half a century ago. The Mather family spans Cleveland history. The first Samuel Mather connected with the city was an executive of the Connecticut Land Company and one of the chief backers of that famous real estate project. His son, Samuel Livingstone Mather, who came to Cleveland in 1846, immediately interested himself in the Lakes and became a pioneer in developing the Lake Superior region as his father had been in developing the Western Reserve. Early in the 'fifties Cleveland became "iron-conscious." Chisholm, Otis and Ford were laying the foundations of great steel companies. Mather, with them, sensed the future of iron, and in 1853 financed the organization of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company. He was interested, however, more in ore production than in manufacture. This company, absorbing the Marquette Mining Company, and becoming eventually the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, of which Samuel Livingstone Mather was president until 1891, virtually STEEL - 579 built the city of Marquette and was the most energetic of all the mining concerns in that region. His son, the second Samuel Mather, in his lifetime spanned the whole development of Lake Superior iron ore and the modern steel industry, and was himself a great part of it. The first ore came through the Soo Canal when he was four years old, shipped by his father's firm. As a youth, Samuel was fascinated by the mining business. A serious injury by an explosion in the company's mine at Ishpeming, when he was eighteen years old, kept him from a college course. At the age of twenty-two he entered his father's office in Cleveland to learn the business. Ten years later, in 1883, he started an independent career. Looking for suitable associates, he found at Marquette Col. James Pickands, originally of Akron, Ohio, a practical ore and coal man and a leader of the iron country. Also a friend of Pickands named Jay C. Morse, who had been a hardware man in Painesville and had spent some years at Ishpeming in charge of the Cleveland Iron Mining interests. These three were the nucleus of a partnership which soon became the foremost group in Superior mining and eventually in Cleveland industry. Pick-ands, because of his age, was named senior partner. The firm's first office boy was a lad named Henry G. Dalton, a dozen years younger than Mather, who was soon made bookkeeper and in ten years became a member of the firm. In 1886 along came another lad, Harry Co ulby, an English immigrant who had walked from New York to Cleveland to see the inland seas, and immediately took a liking to our Lakes. Aspiring to be a sailor, he was sidetracked by fate to railroading, then to ore development on the Gogebic Range, and subsequently to a leading role in lake transportation, his particular creation being the Pittsburgh Steamship Company built up for Carnegie and taken over by the United States Steel Corporation. Pickands, Mather & Company were, and remained, primarily ore merchants, though extending their activities gradually in other directions. They began with the agency for two mines in the Marquette Range, then added a pig iron 580 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS salesman, William McLauchlan, who became a member of the firm. Soon they leased the Colby mine in the newly discovered Gogebic Range, and there introduced steam shovel mining, forecasting its extensive use in the Mesabi. Eventually they were shipping over 2,500,000 tons a year from the Gogebic mines. William P. Murray was employed to sell coal, and he, too, was soon enrolled in the growing firm, developing the coal department as Coulby did the marine department. By 1887 they were handling ore from the Menominee Range, and from that time on were acquiring mines of their own. They opened the Chandler mine on the Vermillion Range in 1888, and have taken from it more than 11,000,000 tons of ore. With the discovery of ore on the Mesabi Range they promptly turned to that greatest of ore deposits, and from the ten mines acquired there had shipped 8,000,000 tons by the year 1929. They have produced ore on all six of the Superior ranges. They shipped in recent years, before the great depression, about 14,000,000 tons of ore a year, more than any other concern except the United States Steel corporation. They have had a fleet of nearly fifty vessels on the Lakes transporting ore, coal, grain and other merchandise, with ore and coal docks at Duluth, Chicago, Cleveland, Ashtabula, Erie and Buffalo. They have acquired blast furnaces at Duluth, Chicago, Toledo and Erie, with steel works and coal mines in Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The Pickands-Mather fleet, known as the Lackawanna Steamship Company, became the second largest on the Lakes in 1913, when it acquired the Gilchrist fleet and changed its name to the Interlake Steamship Company, today the largest independent steamship line on the Great Lakes. A notable example of the way in which iron-making and coal tar chemistry have come together is found in the Interlake Iron Corporation, one of the most recent PickandsMather developments. The By-Products Coke Corporation had been organized in 1905 by Rowland Hazard, an American pioneer in the use of the Semet-Solvay process for producing ammonia and other products from coal. It built a plant on STEEL - 581 the Calumet River in South Chicago. Across the river was the Federal Furnace Company, whose principal owners were the Cleveland concerns, National Malleable Castings, Pick-ands, Mather & Company and Pickands, Brown & Company, establishing blast furnaces. The iron men were good customers for the coke and chemical men. In 1915 the two interests joined hands across the river, and the Mather group began taking a greater interest in chemicals. In 1929 came a general consolidation of all the coke and iron properties of Pickands, Mather & Company. The By-Products Coke Corporation changed its name to the Interlake Iron Corporation. There was a re-arrangement of constituent companies and capital structure. Mr. Dalton became chairman of the board of directors. The first vice president was Elton Hoyt Second, another Pickands-Mather partner, son of the noted Cleveland lawyer who had helped to build many of the Mather enterprises. The organic form of this corporation, as shown pictorially in an industrial tree printed in "World's Work," gives an illuminating glimpse of the structure and functioning of a modern iron industry. Interlake Iron Corporation is the trunk of the tree. The main roots are : By-Products Coke Corporation, growing out of the two smaller roots, Semet-Solvay Company and Solvay-Collieries ; Federal Furnace Company, from the union of Pickands-Brown and National Malleable Castings; and Mather Collieries, undesignated Iron Ore Properties, Perry Furnace Company, Zenith Furnace Company and Toledo Furnace Company. Growing from the trunk are the main branches, Pig Iron, Coke and By-Products. From the Pig Iron branch spring the smaller branches, Basic Iron, producing as its fruit structural steel, steel rails, tool steel, machine tools, watch springs, automobile steel, precision instruments and locomotives; Foundry Iron, producing agricultural implements, heating equipment, stoves, sanitary pipe and gray iron castings; Malleable Iron, producing 582 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS automobile parts, railway equipment, industrial machinery, contractors' equipment, pipe fittings and chains. The Coke branch, representing fuel, divides according to its uses into foundry, blast furnace, domestic and industrial coke. From the great By-Products branch comes Slag, the furnace residue from pig iron, for road material, railroad track ballast, building blocks, Portland cement and concrete. Then the great series of coal derivative groups separated in coke-making : Gas, as fuel for industry, house heating and cooking; Light Oils, producing T. N. T., motor fuel, lacquers, flavoring extracts, dry cleaning fluids, commercial solvents, perfumes and bakelite ; Ammonia, producing aqua ammonia, mechanical refrigeration, fertilizers, baking compounds and washing compounds; and Coal Tar, producing drugs, dyes, disinfectants, creosote, roofing, road binder and insulation. As Frederick A. Van Fleet says : "Coal-tar chemistry and iron-making have become one business, with requirements of size, equipment and capital far beyond the simpler business of making iron; and the added income sources of that business have produced vastly cheaper iron, which in turn has brought the great boon of cheaper steel." He makes also this comment on the immediate theme : "These holdings have grown ever wider and wider, until in the present day it is almost impossible to touch any important part of the great iron and steel industry of the country without finding there some Pickands-Mather interest." None of the original firm remains. Jay C. Morse left his partners in 1898 and organized the Illinois Steel Company, which became a subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation. Colonel Pickands died in 1896. He was succeeded in the firm by his son, Henry S., and the latter was succeeded in 1911 by another son, Jay M., who died in 1929. Harry Coulby, who was not far from being an original partner, passed in the same year. Samuel Mather's death in 1931 left Henry G. Dalton to continue the firm's character and work. Samuel Mather is equally famous as an industrialist and STEEL - 583 philanthropist. At the time of his death he was still active in his own firm, and, a director of the United States Steel Corporation, Cliffs Corporation, Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, Interlake Iron Corporation, Dalton Ore Company, Mather Iron Company, Interlake Steamship Company, Bankers' Trust Company of New York and Union Trust Company of Cleveland. Mr. Dalton, for some years acting head of the firm, and now its official executive, has consolidated its varied interests. He has been a power in lake transportation and a forceful advocate of waterway improvements. He was selected by President Coolidge in 1925 as counselor for the government on federal shipping, and his advice in the main was followed. As president of the Interlake Steamship Company he pioneered in building large ore carriers. He represents his organization on many important directorates. In addition to executive positions already mentioned he recently became chairman of the board of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, fourth largest steel unit in America, of which S. Livingstone Mather, elder son of Samuel Mather, is a member of the executive committee. The interests headed by William G. Mather, brother of Samuel Mather, constitute another big and important division of the Mather group. While Samuel, the elder brother, was building a new organization of his own in the general field of iron and steel, the younger continued in his father's establishment, steadily developing and expanding it. He began his career as a clerk in the Cleveland office of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company in 1879. He was active in the transition from primitive ore mining to modern mining with power machinery, in the acquisition and development of vast ore, timber and coal lands, in the building of ore railways and docks of steel and concrete, in the improvement of charcoal blast furnaces, in the scientific deforestation of timber lands with all the refuse turned to industrial purposes, leaving the land clear for agriculture, in the building of the city and port of Marquette, metropolis of Upper Michigan, in the production of most of the ore tonnage of the Marquette Range, 584 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS in the building of hydro-electric plants, in the creation and operation of a fleet of great steel freighters, in the extension and rounding out of resources and interests in Ohio and adjoining states to make a complete industrial organism suited to the new century. His company not only modernized mining methods but reduced iron exploration and discovery itself to a science. It built the first steel steamers for the iron ore trade. The first of the present arch-construction ships, named for William G. Mather, was designed and built by his company. When Samuel Livingstone Mather died in 1891, William G. Mather naturally became president of Cleveland-Cliffs, which position he has held ever since. Associated with him in the firm in latter years has been his nephew S. Livingstone Mather. Of two modern charcoal furnaces built by Cleveland-Cliffs, one remains, the Marquette, the most complete charcoal blast furnace and wood by-product plant in existence. Its fuel is obtained from the carbonization of refuse wood in a retort plant with twenty-two ten-cord retorts. The charcoal production is nearly 4,000,000 bushels a year. Connected with these furnaces are refiners with complete distillation apparatus, producing alcohol, sulphuric acid, formaldehyde, acetates, tar oils and derivitives and many other chemical products. The company is associated with paper and woodenware concerns in Michigan. It owns or leases, and operates, about thirty mines on the Marquette, Menominee and Mesabi ranges, with an annual capacity of 4,500,000 tons of ore. Its coal mines in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, with 650,000 tons capacity, operated as Mather Collieries, are now affiliated with the Interlake Iron Corporation. The company operates, and largely owns, Cliffs Chemical Company in Wisconsin and is affiliated with Republic Steel and Oglebay, Norton & Company. When Cleveland-Cliffs bought a controlling interest in the Corrigan-McKinney Steel Company in 1930, Mr. Mather also became president of that big Cleveland institution, shifting two years later to the chairmanship of its board. In recent STEEL - 585 years he has also been president of Trumbull Cliffs and Cliffs Corporation. He is a director and member of the executive committee of the Republic Steel Corporation and a director of the Otis Steel Company and numerous other companies. The Hannas.—For all-round and long-continued activity in the iron industry the Hanna family also is conspicuous. The political eminence of Marcus Alonzo Hanna in his latter years possibly diverted popular attention somewhat from the industrial significance of Senator Hanna himself and his family as a whole. The business story of this group begins with the establishment in Cleveland of a wholesale grocery house in 1857 by Dr. Leonard Hanna, with Hiram Garretson and Robert Hanna, under the firm name of Hanna, Garretson & Company. Marcus Alonzo was at this time twenty years old, and had acquired a somewhat sketchy scientific education at Western Reserve College in Hudson. He became a clerk in his father's store, and subsequently a partner. His real interest proved to be in the iron and coal business, with its collateral branch of transportation. When Daniel P. Rhodes, former Governor David Todd and James M. Ford began mining coal around Youngstown as Rhodes & Company, just after the Civil war, young Hanna became a junior partner. A few years later James Ford Rhodes and Leonard C. Hanna joined the group. In 1878 they leased and equipped a dock on "Whiskey Island," owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad, for convenience in receiving Lake Superior ore and charcoal pig iron. The firm in 1885 became M. A. Hanna & Company, composed of the two Hannas and A. C. Saunders. Meanwhile H. M. Hanna and M. A. Hanna had organized in 1872 the Cleveland Transportation Company, owning and operating a line of freighters carrying ore and coal. They started with two steamers and two schooners, and doubled their fleet in a year. It was known as the "Black Line" because all the ships were painted black. Marcus was general manager of the fleet for years. M. A. Hanna & Company had taken over from Rhodes 586 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS & Company interests in ore and coal mines, ships and blast furnaces, and were soon doing an extensive business in all four of M. A. Bradley's fundamentals. In 1890 H. M. Hanna became president of the Globe Iron Works, which had absorbed the Globe Shipbuilding Company, and thus the Hannas came to have a substantial interest in the American Shipbuilding Company. The identity of the "Black Line" disappeared in 1899. M. A. Hanna by this time had committed himself definitely to a political life, being elected to the United States Senate in 1898, and thenceforward gave less attention to business. His death occurred in 1904. His family associates continued the industrial tradition. A notable outreaching came in 1907, when Leonard C. Hanna, with Earl W. Oglebay, another Cleveland ore leader, joined a syndicate for the development of iron and coal in Tennessee and Alabama. It was a large group, with four men in control. They were John W. Gates, Grant B. Schley and the two Clevelanders. "Next to the Steel Trust," said a contemporary steel historian, "it is the most powerful iron and steel combination in the world." It controlled not only the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company but the Republic Iron and Steel Company, with over $100,000,000 capital, thirty-four blast furnaces, twenty-five steel mills and one hundred ore and coal mines. Local interest in Tennessee Coal and Iron waned when that enterprise was absorbed by the United States Steel Corporation in the autumn of 1907. H. M. Hanna was interested in the Cleveland Short Line Railway or "Belt Line" undertaken by William R. Hopkins in 1906. The Hannas have been large developers of coal lands in the Massillon field and elsewhere in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. As iron manufacturers they have specialized in pig iron. The Hanna Furnace Company owns and operates furnaces in Buffalo and Detroit. The family's principal ore, coal, shipping, iron and steel manufacturing, docks, coke and allied interests operate mainly through the M. A. Hanna Company. It handles a normal volume of 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 tons of iron ore, hard and soft coal and pig iron. STEEL - 587 The largest items are 7,000,000 tons of iron ore and 4,500,000 tons of anthracite coal. The Hanna properties now include ore lands on all the Superior ranges. The Hanna lake fleet totals more than 100,000 tons. The Pennsylvania ore docks and the Pittsburgh coal clocks are operated by this company. Recent ramification of Hanna interests includes a consolidation with the Weirton Steel Company of Weirton, West Virginia, also close relationship with the Great Lakes Steel Corporation of Detroit, now changed to the National Steel Corporation, with ample mines, furnaces and coke ovens. The Hannas individually have numerous and varied investments in Cleveland and have been active in philanthropy, especially with regard to hospitals and educational institutions. When the Steel Corporation was organized, there was much question of what would happen to the Steel Capital. Frick said : "Pittsburgh is the central place, and always will be. The steel trade will concentrate there more and more. It is my opinion that the whole organization of the United States Steel Corporation ought to be in Pittsburgh." But Frick was not a true prophet. In recent years the industry has been decentralizing more and more. Carnegie spoke often of a "movement toward the Lakes," as the place where all the raw materials could be best assembled. Conneaut, the terminus of his own railroad, looked good to him. Ashtabula, early in the century, was the busiest port on the Lakes, and then was passed by Conneaut, and subsequently by Cleveland. Carnegie had had his eye on this city in the first place, and called it "the central Zone," but lost interest because of Cleveland's failure to develop its harbor. Negligent Clevelanders today should be interested in Casson's comment twenty-five years ago : "Cleveland lacked the public spirit to improve its harbor. In 1896 its port was the most dilapidated on the Great Lakes. The entrance was narrow and dangerous. The piers were rotten. The water was shallow. Only $50,000 was spent upon it in three years. Vessels were wrecked at the mouth of the harbor. The waterfront was in the hands of obstructive railroads and numerous small holders, who blocked 588 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS the efforts of the public-spirited Chamber of Commerce. Cleveland became the headquarters of the Lake Superior ore trade and the shipping. Scores of millions of iron and steel money have helped to make Cleveland the richest city of its size. But it has never become a steel-making city." Fortunately Cleveland outlived this reproach. It has become a steel city in basic production and a city of surpassing prominence in its scope and variety of iron and steel manufactures. It has greatly improved its harbor and regained many of its long-alienated waterfront rights. Yet it is still handicapped industrially and commercially by the crookedness of the narrow old river channel, its original harbor, which interferes with the passage of modern freight ships, and by failure to modernize the waterfront and artificial harbor on Lake Erie. Cleveland as a port has stood still while Cleveland as an industrial community has gone ahead. Foresighted citizens have agreed that this situation cannot continue. The port should be ahead of community requirements. In 1931 an advisory port commission headed by Newton D. Baker was appointed to study the problem and submit a plan. Dr. R. S. MacElwee, a national authority on harbors, warned the city in 1932 that unless immediate steps were taken for a new port development, other cities already at work would soon be far ahead, and Cleveland might never regain its lost ground as a leading lake port. But "until you have a proper port authority to see your development through," he added, "little can be done." Toledo, with less natural advantage than Cleveland, has been far more enterprising latterly in this respect. Long a railroad center. it determined to make itself a shipping and manufacturing center. Vast expenditures have been made for dredging, docks and iron and steel works. It is a disquieting sign that the Van Sweringens have established their main railroad freight terminal there for coal shipping. Sandusky, already ranking next to Toledo and outranking Cleveland as a coal-shipping port, has lately broached an ambitious program of harbor development. It proposes to develop the east side of Sandusky Bay, between the city and STEEL - 589 Cedar Point, into an ideal harbor for the use of lake and ocean shipping, with ample warehouses and a great area for manufacturing establishments. Lorain, the hustling little steel city chosen by former Mayor Tom L. Johnson when he built the plant to make his famous girder rail for street railways, has thrived with the industry in general. The Johnson plant was bought by the Federal Steel Company, and passed with it into the United States Steel Corporation. Lorain today is a suburb of expanding Cleveland, so close that it may be regarded as a part of one big industrial community. The same consideration applies to Elyria, with its iron and steel works, and to the neighboring harbor of Fairport on the east, an important receiving port for ore. Detroit, though having a good start with Captain Ward's pioneering in Bessemer production, has failed curiously .thus far to utilize to the full its strategic position in steel manufacture. In the early part of this century it was making no steel at all, though making much charcoal pig iron. Michigan men had discovered the Superior ore, but the procession of ships clown the Detroit River left no ore there. The motor industry, with its big demand for bulk and pressed steel, has brought furnaces and mills. Yet Detroit still lags far behind Cleveland in this respect. The new National Steel Company is counted on to give Detroit "a real start in the steel business." Cincinnati, a competitor in the early days, is credited with having made the first good crucible steel in America. It was near by, across the Ohio, that William Kelly developed his pneumatic process and built his first crude steel converters. The city lost her industrial opportunity. Cincinnati, however, was long an important pig iron market and does considerable manufacturing of iron and steel products. Our "American Ruhr," the smoky network of furnaces, mills and factories that reaches for three hundred miles from Pittsburgh to Detroit, with Cleveland midway, far surpasses the famous German district in production and wealth. Pittsburgh, with its ring of steel towns, is still the unquestioned 590 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS capital of this steel realm, but grows less dominant. Youngstown, including Warren, is second in steel ingot capacity. Chicago with its immediate steel suburbs is third, with metropolitan Cleveland, including Lorain, a close fourth. Gary, the famous steel city built by the United States Steel Corporation at the southern end of Lake Michigan, comes next. Buffalo, including Lackawanna, is in sixth place. In pig iron production Pittsburgh stands first, with Youngstown and Chicago about even, and Cleveland close behind. Cleveland now surpasses all of the steel centers except Chicago in the volume of products manufactured from her pig iron and ingots. Regroupings.—Post-prosperity years, as usual, have been full of mergers and rumors of mergers. There has been a ferment among the independent steel companies, with the possibility of a radical alteration in the national structure of the industry. Some consolidations already effected have been mentioned. Chief among them is the new Republic Steel Corporation, formed in 1930 by adding to the Republic Iron and Steel Company of Youngstown the Central Alloy Steel Corporation, the Donner Steel Company of Buffalo and the Bourne-Fuller Company of Cleveland. This created a corporation rated at the time as worth $335,000,000, in value and productive capacity the third in the country, surpassed among the independents only by Bethlehem Steel. Subject Index at End of Volume II. It is now shown with the index. The Cleveland of Our's   By WILFRED HENRY ALBURN AND MIRIAM RUSSELL ALBURN   Consultants and Advisers   DR. CHARLES FRANKLIN THWING MR. ELBERT HALL BAKER   Volume II   Illustrated   Chicago—Cleveland—Indianapolis THE S. J. CLARKE PUBLISHING COMPANY 1933   PART THREE   THE CITY'S WEALTH and POWER   Chapter I. Oil Chapter II. Electricity Chapter III. Motors Chapter IV. War—How Cleveland Waged It Chapter V. General Industry Chapter VI. Merchandising Chapter VII. Banks and Bankers Chapter VIII. The Terminal   This Cleveland of Ours   PART THREE   THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER   CHAPTER I   OIL   No part of Cleveland's economic story is more vital than its development of the petroleum industry for itself and the world. In this new field a group of Clevelanders, led by Cleveland's most famous citizen, built a business empire reaching into every corner of the earth and established the methods of modern Big Business. Changing circumstances have deprived the city of its pre-eminence in the ever-widening realm of oil. The theme is not wholly a cause for pride. Yet the tale demands to be told in any survey of the forces that have made the city what it is, and as an example of virile originality seizing a big opportunity.   The opportunity may be said to have been born, like Cleveland herself, in Connecticut. It was in the year 1857, when the important canals had been built and the railroad era was well begun and men were just learning how to make cheap steel, that George H. Bissell, a New Haven business man, started to take an interest in petroleum. He had 100 acres of land near Titusville, Pennsylvania. He knew there was oil there, because it seeped up out of the ground, and had organized the Seneca Oil Company to exploit it. He knew that the stuff was valuable, because "rock oil" was being sold all over the country in bottles, as medicine. And   - 593 -   594 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS     Professor Silliman of Yale University suggested that it had other values. In a report made to Bissell in 1854 he said :   "Your company have in their possession a raw material from which, by a very simple and not expensive process, they may manufacture very valuable products. My experiments prove that nearly the whole of the raw product may be manufactured without waste, and this solely by a well directed process which in practice is one of the most simple of all chemical processes." But how to procure the oil in commercial quantities? Nature had locked it up.   Now it happened that one man in America, or in the world, was actually getting oil out of the ground at that moment artificially and efficiently. This was Samuel M. Kier, whose real business was salt, but who made the best of it when one of his salt wells at Tarentum, Pennsylvania, 400 feet deep, insisted on producing oil. It was a way that salt wells had. In Ohio, western Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia, in places where the salt supply came from drilling, drillers had given up in disgust when a flow of oil spoiled their brine. But Kier calmly proceeded to put up his unsought by-product in eight-ounce bottles and sell it throughout the country as "Kier's Petroleum or Rock Oil," a healing liniment, which was also good for cholera morbus, liver complaint, bronchitis and consumption—dose, three teaspoonfuls three times a day.   It happened also that Kier, who had a flair for the picturesque, advertised his medicine with a picture of the derricks used in boring and pumping his brine wells. Bissell, looking at one of those advertisements in a store window, had an illumination. All the petroleum yet produced in the world had produced itself. But if men could set up a derrick and bore for salt brine, they could set up a derrick and bore purposely for oil !   So we come to the famous enterprise known as "Drake's Folly." The man chosen by Bissell for this job was a railroad conductor named Col. Edwin Laurencine Drake. Coming to Titusville to develop the oil property, he began looking for a driller. It took him nearly a year to find a competent   THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 595   man who would undertake so absurd a venture. The man was William A. Smith, who had drilled many successful brine wells. He picked a spot near an old oil spring, set up his crude outfit and proceeded to drill. With his little steam engine he and his crew could bore through the rock at the rate of three feet a day. They drilled for more than three weeks steadily, regardless of the ridicule heaped upon them. On August 27, 1859, when Smith and his son Sam drew the iron bit from the hole to measure the depth, then slightly over 70 feet, a deep-green, ill-smelling fluid gurgled up near the top. With a tin pitcher-pump they drew several barrels of oil. In the evening Smith took a sample and rode his mule over to Titusville to spread the news. Their pioneer well yielded regularly twenty barrels a day.   Here was wealth for anyone interested in the medicine business. And even then, other uses were not unknown. Scientists in many countries had been seeking a substitute for sperm or whale oil. In Scotland oil had been distilled from shale by James H. Young and found good for illuminating purposes. An American, Dr. Abram Gessner, had distilled similar lamp oil from coal. The term "coal oil" seems to have been applied at that time to any illuminating oil. There were, moreover, at the very time that Drake's well was "brought in," various small companies in the United States producing "rock oil" from shale and coal. But the drilling for pool petroleum was absolutely new; and as the news spread, people thrilled and responded as to a gold discovery.   William Barnsdall, an English tanner at Titusville, immediately started another well in the same neighborhood, drilling by hand with a "spring pole." It took three months, cost $3,000, and produced twenty-five barrels of oil a day which sold at $18 a barrel.   On the same day that Drake's success was announced, a lumberman named Jonathan Watson, who had leased his own land to Bissell's company, saddled his horse and rode through Oil Creek Valley leasing farms right and left. Then he, too, started drilling. Soon he had a well running sixty gallons a minute at sixty cents a gallon.   596 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS   The rush was on. As Ida Tarbell wrote long afterward : "On every rocky farm, in every settlement of the region, was some man whose ear was attuned to Fortune's call, and who had the daring and the energy to risk everything he possessed in an oil lease. It was well that he acted at once; for as the news of the discovery of oil reached the open, the farms and towns of Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania poured out a stream of ambitious and vigorous youths, eager to seize what might be there for them, while from the East came men with money and business experience, who formed great stock companies, took up lands in parcels of thousands of acres, and put down wells along every run and creek, as well as over the steep hills. In answer to their drills, oil poured forth in floods. In many places pumping was out of the question; the wells flowed 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 barrels a day—such quantities of it that at the close of 1861, oil which in January of 1860 was $20 a barrel had fallen to ten cents."   It was the same story that has been repeated over and over in this reckless industry—ruinous over production. First feast then famine financially, but always a flood of oil, since the day when Drake punctured that saturated sandstone at Titusville and tapped the prisoned fuel as one sticks a straw into a bottle of pop.   Everywhere in the oil field wells were sunk, sometimes at the hint of an "oil witch" or a peach twig, sometimes to offset producing wells or share competitors' bounty, often by blind chance. And in a surprising number of cases they were successful.   As the oil poured forth it called for barrels and storage. There were not enough barrels in the oil country, and not enough could be made. Earthen reservoirs were resorted to, lined with logs and cement. A practical school teacher on vacation started building wooden tanks.   Then the stored flood clamored for transportation. It was hard to get the crude oil to market, but harder yet to get refining equipment into the oil field. The nearest market was Pittsburgh. The barreled output was hauled in wagons over roads which were bad at first, and which broke down so   THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 597   rapidly under the heavy traffic that the teamsters would level the fences and drive through the fields.   Those teamsters were aristocrats, like their predecessors who had hauled general freight from Pittsburgh to Cleveland before the railroads. Many a big oil man got his start thus, with reins and whip and the assurance that came with them. In endless lines, hundreds of wagons to a train, they toiled over the steep Pennsylvania hills in choking clouds of dust, blacksnake whips cracking and profanity volleying.   Other cargoes were brought to the banks of Oil Creek for floating down stream on floods released from storage dams, going mostly into the Allegheny River and 130 miles to the junction of the Monongahela. Pittsburgh was becoming an oil metropolis. The river was often green with petroleum from leaky barrels or wrecked rafts and barges.   A once beautiful region was now changed to filthy clutter and nasty smell, in which men toiled happily and made fortunes. Coal Oil Johnny Steele won and spent his million and a half in two years. Towns sprung up like rough mining camps, filled with their leasers and prospectors, their teamsters and merchants, their gamblers and whisky and women. One of the mushroom towns was Petroleum Center, reputed as the hell-hole of the Oil Region. It was also, briefly, the heart of that region. And it had a church.   Thither came a quiet young business man from Cleveland named Rockefeller, just come of age, to see and appraise for himself what all this oil excitement amounted to, ignoring the Saturday night carousing and worshipping on Sunday at the church. He decided that oil was worth going into, and that refining was better than production or shipping. Here was the most important decision arrived at since Bissell had determined to drill his well. Oil was one big economic fact. Rockefeller was another.   John Davison Rockefeller was the son of Dr. William A. Rockefeller, prosperous dispenser of a celebrated cancer remedy which has been described as a "harmless preparation which probably did some good by suggestion." The vital personality of the roaming doctor may have been a helpful   598 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS   medicine in itself. He was known as a hail fellow well met, who made money easily, who loved horses and clothes and shooting and travel and company, who spent little time at home but took good care of his family, and who taught his children to be shrewd in business by being shrewd in his dealings with them. The family lived in the country south of Cleveland. John, born in 1839, spent most of his boyhood in a farmhouse at Strongsville, the rest on another farm in Parma.   He did not care for farm life. He has told of working once at hoeing potatoes for ten days and getting $3.50 for it, and saving every cent, but reflecting that if he had saved $50 and had it out at seven per cent interest, the annual return would bring him as much as he earned in those ten days of hard labor. "So I determined," he said, "to make money work for me."   Young John went to Central High School in Cleveland, where he was known as not brilliant, but thorough. Then he had a few months in a commercial school. He wanted to remain in the city. He was now sixteen years old, religious, sober, dignified, attending church regularly and keeping the church accounts. He got a job as clerk and bookkeeper with Hewitt and Tuttle, commission men dealing in grain, produce and coal and shipping by rail, canal and lake. In the warehouse, in the counting room and on the docks John learned much quickly. Living at a dollar-a-week boarding house and having no bad habits or expensive tastes, he saved money.   Three years later, when not quite nineteen, he went into the commission business for himself as junior partner of a new firm, Clark, Gardner and Company. Maurice B. Clark was an energetic young Englishman twelve years older than Rockefeller, a wood chopper and teamster who had saved his money and gone to night school. The other member of the firm was George W. Gardner, known to later Clevelanders as mayor and yachtsman. Rockefeller took care of the books and finances. He borrowed his first money from Truman P. Handy, $2,000. He developed quickly into what Clark called   THE CITY'S WEALTH AND POWER - 599   "the greatest borrower you ever saw." He borrowed money to make money, and when he went after a loan he got it. His firm was soon furnishing profitable supplies for the Union Army. Gardner came to be regarded by his partners as frivolous and wasteful, and was openly rebuked by Rockefeller when he invited the latter to go sailing with him over a week-end to Put-in-Bay. In 1862 Gardner left the firm.   It was about this time that Rockefeller returned from his trip to the Oil Region. He and Clark joined an Englishman, Samuel Andrews, who had settled in Cleveland and had developed a sulphuric process for refining petroleum by which he got more and better coal oil than usual from the crude. At first it was merely financial backing for Andrews in the form of a $4,000 investment. As the refiner proved his manufacturing ability, Rockefeller invested more heavily. In 1865, having made nearly $100,000 from oil in three years, and the army needing no more supplies, he took all his money out of the commission business and staked it on oil, establishing the firm of Rockefeller and Andrews, the latter member to operate the plant and the former to buy and sell and handle the financing.   Other Clevelanders had seen the same opportunity. By this time there were about thirty flimsy and smelly shacks known as refineries along the Cuyahoga River, the lake shore and Walworth and Kingsbury runs, with a combined capital of $1,500,000 and a daily capacity of 2,000 barrels. A year later there were fifty plants here, receiving as much oil as Pittsburgh. In 1869 Cleveland surpassed all other refining centers in investment and production. "Each year," boasted the local Board of Trade, "has seen greater consolidation of capital, greater energy and success in prosecuting the business and, notwithstanding some disastrous fires, a stronger determination to establish an immovable reputation for the quantity and quality of this most important product." The total investment had grown to $4,000,000 and the value of production to $15,000,000.   "Fortune," says Miss Tarbell in a lyric mood, "was running fleet-footed across the country, and at her garment men