Morgan Park: Duluth, U.S. Steel, and the Forging of a Company Town (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Morgan Park: Duluth, U.S. Steel, and the Forging of a Company Town Larry Lankton (bio) Morgan Park: Duluth, U.S. Steel, and the Forging of a Company Town. By Arnold R. Alanen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Pp. xviii+338. $75/$24.95. Over his career, Arnold Alanen, emeritus professor of landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied many iron- and copper-mining towns and planned communities in the Great Lakes region. In Morgan Park he turns to a planned company town located just south of Duluth that was once owned and controlled by U.S. Steel. Alanen’s study of this industrial community is a very good one because he emphasizes the conjoined histories of its two key parts—the townsite with its houses, streets, and social institutions, and the adjacent steel mill, with its furnaces [End Page 484] and products, its good years and its bad. The people who populate the book move back and forth between the two places. Early in the twentieth century, U.S. Steel obtained 60 to 75 percent of its iron ore from Minnesota. Minnesotans, and especially those seeking to grow Duluth’s economy, recognized the giant steel firm’s dependence on Minnesota resources, and they coerced it into building, albeit reluctantly, a mill in the far north in order to avoid paying higher tonnage taxes on ore. U.S. Steel formed the Minnesota Steel Company to construct its Duluth mill, which produced its first steel in 1915 and continued in service until the 1970s. First operated by Minnesota Steel and later by U.S. Steel’s affiliate, the American Steel and Wire Company, the plant was never a favorite of its parent company, and it never grew to be as large as Duluth boosters had hoped, although it was a very important employer. (At its peak, the plant employed about 3,600 in the late 1940s, which was only about 1 percent of U.S. Steel’s employment, but nearly 8 percent of Duluth’s.) Alanen does not delve deeply into the plant’s technologies, which were never cutting-edge and by the end were antiquated, but he succinctly traces its economic fortunes through the leanest of years, during the Great Depression, and its best years, during World War II and the early 1950s. He also traces the range of products made here—such as fence posts, wire, nails, and steel mats for concrete highways—and he discusses unionization and labor issues, as well as water and air pollution issues that arose in the mill’s later years. About half the book is about the mill’s attendant community, Morgan Park, named after J. Pierpont Morgan. U.S. Steel decided to invest in a town in order to avoid the slum-like conditions found near many of its other plants and to help it secure and keep year-round employees. The Minneapolis landscape architecture firm of Morrell and Nichols laid out Morgan Park in accordance with City Beautiful principles, and the Chicago architectural firm of Dean and Dean designed Morgan Park’s housing and community buildings, which were surprisingly attractive despite being mostly built of concrete block. Alanen does a very good job of delineating the built environment at Morgan Park: the single-family and multiple-family houses and boardinghouses; the two churches, one Protestant and one Catholic; the school, clubhouse, and company retail outlets, and the hospital. He then goes on to discuss the characteristics of Morgan Park’s residents, such as their ethnicity, and analyzes the breadth of the company paternalism they lived with, and under. He closes by discussing Morgan Park’s eventual separation from the company, the sale of its homes, its incorporation into greater Duluth, and its historic preservation issues today. As is often the case with historians, Alanen writes more about the initial development and growth of Morgan Park and its steel mill than he does about their decline. But overall the book is well-written, broad in scope, [End Page 485] and particularly well-illustrated with historic photographs, site plans, and architectural drawings. Larry Lankton Dr. Lankton, professor of history at Michigan Technological University, has written extensively on...