Republic Steel Warren Works; Warren, O. My grandpa on my Mom’s side applied here in the 40’s. Part of the hiring process was to weigh you, and they told him to “go home, eat a steak and a bag of potatoes, and try again”. He was skinny like me, so he wound up doing his 30 some years out at Copperweld. They ran me off of the property, so here are some detail shots, and some houses around the mill to show the ripple effect.
They tore down almost all of the BOF side of the mill. It is so strange to me to drive down Pine Ave and be able to see the blast furnace over on Main. Gone are the days of waiting half an hour for a mile long coke train to back into the mill across Pine. The place just looks bombed out. To quote Bruce Springsteen, “My daddy came on the Ohio works when he came home from World War II, now the yards just scrap and rubble.. guess them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do”
From the Vindicator, regarding the 1937 Little Steel Strike at the Republic Mills: “On June 20, the day after two strikers were killed at Stop 5 on Poland Avenue, and on several other occasions, Republic Steel ran an ad offering a $500 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of anyone threatening families of employees of the company or destroying property of employees at its Warren or Niles plants. Even the boys in Warren complained that pickets had bought all the baseball bats, according to a story published in The Vindicator on June 15, 1937. Planes were used to drop food to management and steelworkers who stayed inside the plants. One of the planes crashed while attempting to land on Republic Steel property in Warren, an event caught on camera by Vindicator photographer Lloyd Jones.Whether the plane malfunctioned or was shot down by pickets was long debated, too; but Republic Steel offered a $1,000 reward in a Vindicator ad for information leading to the arrest of anyone shooting at their planes.”
