Caption: To improve worker morale and public relations, companies across the Commonwealth sponsored their own baseball teams, sometimes employing men whose primary job was to play on the team.
Courtesy Rivers of Steel Archives
Caption: "They were five rows of houses, and the house was only one story high, and they called it Mexico. We lived in a block that was eight rooms, one story, no back porch and no front porch. We had two bedrooms, no, one bedrooms and a kitchen, two rooms. Until [I was] about eight or ten, we lived only in those two rooms. We all slept together, my dad and my mother on a bed and us four children on one, and I enjoyed the floor a lot. In the kitchen we had a coal stove and a cupboard and benches instead of chairs; maybe we had two chairs and a round table … we had no plumbing[no water in the house] we had to go outside to get it. And … up until [ I was] about seven or eight, we had no lights. We had oil lamps. [We had] wooden floor [and we] scrubbed them." Adapted from an Oral History of Anna Giacomalli
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Typical Houses Black with white windows.
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Compromise Alley, 1904. The earliest image to juxtapose children with Pittsburgh's smokestacks. "This carefully composed scene recalls Carnegie's origins as a self-educated working boy, and it embodies the new Library's mission of providing everyone with free access to books. This is the earliest of many images that juxtapose children with smokestacks, a popular theme in Pittsburgh photography for as long as the mills provided work and wealth.?
Carnegie Museum of Art, gift of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
Caption:
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: "There was always a lot of dirty clothes around there, [and I was] rubbing, scrubbing, freezing, and hanging them up. When I sit and think how hard I did work when I was younger, I get so tired and can't hardly move - just thinking about it. I had one of those big boilers [used in washing clothes]. I would save my bacon grease; then I would mix it with lye to make scrub soap. [ You needed to balance the amount of lye used] according to how much grease you have in the water; you know you use about half cup for a quart; that is what I would do. Put it in the water and let it boil, and [it] turned to soap; stuff was strong too." Lena Walton, oral history interview.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: Crowded into dilapidated housing without indoor plumbing, immigrant iron and steelworker families were often feared and kept at arms length by Old stock Pennsylvanians.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: These children are immigrants that lived in the Cambria City section of Johnstown.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: Cambria City Neighborhood. Each shop served different ethnic groups. Inside these little shops, people could buy as much or as little as they wanted. In Butcher shops such as this one, meat was cut to order.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association,http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: Signs on the windows of this Cambria City butcher shop advertise its products in Hungarian and English. Cambria City, like steel towns across the Commonwealth, was home to immigrants from many central and eastern European nations.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, www.jaha.org/
Caption: Immigrant communities in mill towns across Pennsylvania and the nation bonded together in clubs, fraternal organizations, places of worship, mutual aid societies, bands, and other ethnic organizations. Groups like the one pictured here allowed families to celebrate their Old World identities, socialize, and to pass on traditions to their American-born children.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption:
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: Most of the churches in Cambria City had their own schools. These are the graduates from St. Stephen's Slovak Catholic Church
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association
Caption: As the steel industry boomed in Pennsylvania, most steel workers crowded into shabby and unsanitary housing. The average earnings of $1.50 for a day's work did not enable employees to improve conditions for their families and kept many below the poverty line.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: Company-owned housing lined the other side of the same street.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association
Caption: Immigrant churches across Pennsylvania fulfilled a broad range of religious, social, and cultural functions for their immigrant congregations. Polish residents of Cambria City organized the St. Casimir's parish in 1901. In the early 1900s children in the parish school participated in the annual General Pulaski Day parade.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association
Caption:
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association
Caption: Butcher shop workers and shoppers pose outside of two Cambria City butcher shops. Each shop served different ethnic groups.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: Still attempting to recover from the Great Depression, Pennsylvania workers staged a series of strikes in 1941, including a walk out by soft coal miners working for the H.C. Frick Coal and Coke Corporation. After 12 strike pickets were ambushed and shot in a gully near the Edenborn Mine outside Brownsville, Governor Arthur H. James, on November 21, ordered state troopers there to restore order. Pennsylvania witnessed fewer strikes after American entry into the war and the surge in industrial production. Pennsylvania coal miners, however, would go out on strike again in 1943.
Image Donated by Corbis-Bettmann
Caption: In the early 1900s South Bethlehem became a crowded and noisy boomtown. Biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen, who lived in Bethlehem as a child, wrote that the borough was "like another place and another planet, a Wild West of its own."
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Oral history of Stella Ochociensky Medlin.
"There was no money exchanged, in fact our parents [her mother and her husbands mother] never got paid with cash. I remember someone paying my mother with a slab of bacon and a sack of flour and food stuffs from the store, and they barely could afford to have it themselves to eat, but hey had to pay their way because my mother had to live too."
Courtesy of The Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette
Caption: Patch Home, Bowood, Fayette County, Pa.
Courtesy of The Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette
Caption: Phillips Playground
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Bath House Frick Company
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Filbert Patch town, Redstone Twp., Fayette Co., Pa.
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Houses built for employees of the Brandywine Iron Works(subsequently Lukens Steel Company), Coatesville, Pennsylvania, c. 1830.
Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library
Caption: End of the 100 yard dash at the Midvale Steel and Ordinance company employee's field day, 1917.
Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library
Caption: Domestic educator in the home of a worker, Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company, c. 1915.
Courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library
Caption: In 1908, Homestead, with a population of 25,000, supported more than 50 saloons and other drinking places. This photograph, by famed reform photographer Lewis Hine, appeared in Homestead: The Households of a Milltown (1910), a case study of ninety Homestead households conducted by Margaret Byington as part of the Pittsburgh Survey, a pioneering investigation of working and health conditions.
George Eastman House
Caption: The Hill District, Pittsburgh, 1935.
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Founded in 1893, Kingsley House provided social, educational, and recreational programs for the families of immigrant laborers in Pittsburgh's Strip District. In 1900, Henry C. Frick gifted the Montooth Mansion at Bedford and Fullerton, in Pittsburgh's Hill District, to the Kingsley House Association, to which it soon moved.
Records of the Kingsley Association, 1894-1980, AIS 70:5, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh