Wealth, Waste, and Alienation: Growth and Decline in the Connellsville Coke Industry (History)

The southwestern Pennsylvania town of Connellsville lay in the middle of a massive reserve of high quality coal. Connellsville coal was so soft and easily worked that one man and a boy could cut and load ten tons of it in ten hours. This region became a major source of coke, a vital material in industrial processes, above all in steel manufacture, producing forty-seven percent of Americas supply in 1913. But by the 1920s, what had seemed to be a gold mine was turning into a devastating economic, environmental and social loss. In __Wealth, Waste and Alienation__, Kenneth Warren draws from primary source material, including the minutes and letters of the Carnegie Steel Company, the United States Steel Corporation, and the archives of Henry Clay Frick, to explain the birth, phenomenal growth, decline and death of the Connellsville coke industry. Its rich natural resources produced wealth for individuals, companies, and some communities, but as Warren shows, there was also social alienation, waste, and devastation of the natural environment. The complicated structure of enterprise, capital, and labor which made this region flourish unwound almost as quickly as it arose, creating repercussions that are still reverberating in what’s left of Connellsville today, a kind of postindustrial rural shell of its former productive glory. Drawing on economic, technological, labor, and environmental history, Kenneth Warren explains the birth, phenomenal growth, decline and death of the Connellsville coke industry—the region that made Pittsburgh steel world famous. The foundations of the industry The maturing industry Organization in the coke trade New coke districts New technology The physical and social implications of beehive coke manufacture Peak and decline.