Draft:Steelton Village

• Comment: This article requires major trimming; much of the content is purely unencyclopedic, original research fluff. I can scroll down for 3 seconds, and no longer understand what the article is talking about. The amount of content here should either be broken up into multiple articles, or refined & focused into the key points of the village in a suitably-sized encyclopedia entry.
  Wikipedia is not a collection of indiscriminate information. Utopes _{(talk / cont)} 23:24, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

• Comment: There is something here, but at present the article is very, very bloated", to the point where it is essentially five article smashed into one. I would recommend removing everything except the "History", "Neighborhoods and Settlement Patterns" and the first paragraph of "Labor Unions", and go through the article to add links. Devonian Wombat (talk) 06:02, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

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Where is this? What is it? FloridaArmy (talk) 22:05, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Steelton VIllage was an industrial district in the South Side of Columbus, Ohio, United States. Starting in the 1880s, thousands of newcomers to Columbus from Eastern and South Central Europe, Appalachia, and the Deep South arrived to build post Civil War industries in the city. The area continues to be a tangible and unique link to Columbus history, becoming known as “Steelton,” which differentiated it from the undeveloped land and farm land further south and from the mid 19th century German settlement to its north. The migrations and emigrations of its residents were greatly affected by not only urbanization and industrialization, but by political turmoil in Europe, coal mine unrest, the Great African American Migration, World War I, the Great Depression, Appalachian movements north, and post-World War II suburbanization.

Steelton’s prominence as an industrial district was dependent on the arrival of railroads to service the area—Hocking Valley Railroad later Chesapeake & Ohio was completed in the 1870s. The Toledo & Ohio Central, later the New York Central, was built at the end of the 19th century. Railroad transportation for manufacturing and business was now surpassing the earlier use of the Columbus Feeder Canal that connected Lockbourne, Ohio by way of the Scioto River to Columbus’s South Side where breweries started to develop in the 1840s. A century of American history can still be seen in Steelton, but what was Steelton?

“Steelton” was not a legal term but a geographical area and a cultural marker used to identify the multi-ethnic neighborhood whose labor force operated the industries, factories, foundries, and railroads of the South Side.

History

While its exact boundaries easily could be pinpointed by the location of the steel industries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the name “Steelton” was used to describes a wider area which included the ethnic neighborhoods, labor force, schools, settlement houses, churches, lodges, and businesses which surrounded the factories and railroads. By the time Buckeye Steel in 1899 acquired thirty-one acres and additional acreage in 1902 to build its large, modern steel plant, the land west of Parsons Avenue at the intersection of Groveport Pike (called in those days Smoky Row) was already an area becoming known as Steelton.

Industries in Steelton historically included Buckeye Steel Castings, Bonney Floyd Steel Castings, Hercules Box Company. Simplex Machine Tool Company, Brown Manufacturing (lamps and lights for carriages, later autos), Chase (pumps and truck parts), Seagrave (fire engines and firefighting apparatus), Brightman (nuts, bolts for railroads, and farm equipment), and Buckeye Stamping Company (finished product manufacturing). Industries were often interdependent on each other for production or shipping, and some operated day and night.

Many of the Industries were clustered in three areas: South High Street near the Baltimore and Toledo Railroads (where the Seagrave Corporation, now “The Fort,” located); South Parsons Avenue (where Buckeye Steel Castings was located, now demolished); and the intersection of Marion Road and Parsons Avenue (where Federal Glass Corporation was located, now partially reused).

The area also contained “Keever Starch, Columbus Woodenware, Carnegie Steel, and Columbus Iron and Steel.” The intersection of Parsons Avenue and Groveport Pike would later be listed is city directories in 1905 (and on maps as late as the 1950s) as “Smoky Row” for the industrial pollution of the steel mill and foundry furnaces, but especially for the polluting by-products of the Federal Glass company and Buckeye Steel Castings. When natural gas supplies dwindled or were too costly, “producer gas” made from coal, as opposed to cleaner natural gas, was substituted, and “producer gas” was notoriously inefficient and notoriously polluting. The soot buildup in the factories’ chimneys, cleaned weekly, required “blowing” or “blowout” which settled an oily black film over everything in the vicinity.

The boundaries which defined Steelton were in play early by the network of roads and rails already in place, and the name expanded when the industries prospered. Groveport Pike was a 19th-century early toll road into downtown Columbus from the farms southeast of the city, and a key connector for farmers to bring produce into Columbus’s Central Market as early as the 1850s. By 1895 the pike linked with Parsons Avenue in the city, and the name Parsons Avenue was formalized for the entire stretch. The Parson family mansion, at the northeast corner of Bryden Road, gave the avenue its name.

With 32 cross streets intersecting Parsons Avenue from unincorporated Marion Township/Groveport Pike on the south to East Broad Street on the north, Steelton’s future commercialization was ensured. Parsons Avenue became Steelton’s “Main Street” from Whittier Street the steel mills. Route 23, South High Street, paralleled Parsons Avenue, and the land for development between them, created an opportunity for housing developments for a new population who worked in the industries. South Terrace Addition, first noted on the Sanborn map of 1920, was advertised as an affordable land opportunity to the “Mechanic and Laboring Man” at the turn of the century. The city expanded quickly through annexations in 1870, 1886, and 1891, preparing to capture tax-paying residents and businesses. Columbus was not able to obtain a narrow strip of Marion Township by Parsons Avenue, and the new factories continued to resist annexations until the 1950s. The township and industries both benefited from low taxes. Parsons Avenue near Marion and Innis Roads remained a dirt road in 1900.

For the first seven decades of its existence, Steelton was part of both the City of Columbus and Marion Township. In 1956, the City of Columbus accepted the annexation of 982 acres in Marion Township which included many of the heavy industrial plants, such as Seagrave Corporation, America Aggregate Corporation, and also Scioto Trails School. The tract was bordered by the Scioto River on the west, the existing city corporation line on the east, and South Gate Road on the north.

The area also had several other unofficial (non governmental) names or nicknames over time. Names referred to the key products of the industries, the area’s geographic location in relation to the earlier German settlement and the downtown business district, or the majority heritage of its diverse population. Early, it was simply known as “The Poor End” and later as the “Hungarian Colony” (c. 1900); “The South End” (c. 1920s-2000s); “Little Hungary” (c. 1915-1930s); “Magyar Town” (c. 1920s-1940s); and “Hungarian Village” (starting 1970s).

Today, Steelton’s boundaries include “Hungarian Village” and other neighborhoods which have begun to self-identify—such as “Vassor Village” and “Ganther's Place,” “Southern Orchards” and “Merion Village.” Names of neighborhoods are based on the first owners of land or are from names given by developers who platted the land for development.

Hinman and Parsons Avenues in the 1970s, located midway between the industrial employment south and the street car line on Whittier Street, north, became known as “Hungarian Village.” The early branding of this term was initiated by Rev. Szabo of the Hungarian Reformed Church. He saw revitalization happening in nearby “German Village,” a working class ethnic neighborhood built during a peak period of German immigration that had suffered disinvestment during the Depression and World War II. Rev. Szabo recognized that though Hungarians had been the largest ethnic group on the South Side, the neighborhood was also made up of diverse ethnic and racial groups—and their stories were represented in the houses, schools, churches, stores, and institutions of the area. Today, the name is still retained.

In 1958, Steelton was “well defined” by the early location and evolution of Columbus’s heavy industries, bordered by the Scioto River and the quarry lands on the west to Alum Creek on the east, and north as far as Sycamore Street.

Almost three decades later, Dan Prosser, Ohio Historical Society, noted the heart of the area, Steelton, could be defined not only by the location of the heavy industries but also by a change in the streetscape where the historic neighborhoods were clearly different. There was a distinct change in the Parsons Avenue streetscape between Whittier and Woodrow Avenues. Closer to the industries, “some of the housing and manufacturing establishments characterized the stretches between the streetcar stops were still in evidence.” He noted this part of Steelton retained the pre-automobile character long after World War II and “maintained a lively nature unusual for a district of its age....the strength of the local businesses, such as Schottensteins, made Steelton a self-supporting node that survived the elimination of the trolleys and the decline of the industries that gave it initial nurturing.”

The “Steelton” name came from the landmark of an earlier industry, the National Steel Company, which experimented with turning pig iron into steel. And inadvertently, the landmark made a lasting impression on the surrounding neighborhood—giving the neighborhood a name. Large blast furnaces were needed to create steel, and the company’s initial success encouraged the building of not just one blast furnace but a second even larger one. The second blast furnace’s chimney was a jaw-dropping (for the time) 80’ tall. It produced 190,000 tons of pig iron per day. On the side of the tower, the furnace’s name was prominently spelled out—Steelton Furnace.

As if an 80’ chimney was not enough to name the area, one prominent use of the name stood out in 1905 because of its eye-catching graphic. The Steelton Lumber Company placed a large, prominent billboard at the intersection of the Toledo & Ohio Railroad and Parsons Avenue which pictured a sizable elephant moving lumber. As a visual, the area became, in contemporary usage, “branded.”

However, Steelton’s boundaries were also defined by the people who lived there and whose businesses used the “Steelton” name. Businesses saw an advantage in using the name to reference location. By the 1920s, the name “Steelton” appeared on more than just a billboard. Even the Ohio State University’s student newspaper, The Lantern, like other newspapers at the time, used the term in an advertisement for First Citizen Trust’s Steelton bank branch near the corner of Reeb and Parsons Avenue. Later, Ohio National Bank, continued the branch office name. By 1945, there was a Steelton cement store, a Steelton Furniture Store (managed by Meyer Schottenstein), a Steelton Hotel, a Steelton Motor Sales Co., a Steelton VFW Post 180, and a Steelton Theater Corporation. Most were located on or near Parsons Avenue, stretching from the Marion Road intersection near Buckeye Steel Castings. The Steelton Hotel was at 431 Marion Road, and the Steelton Theater Corporation was as far north as 281 East Whittier. Over the decades, the name “Steelton” continued to be used by small shops, automotive shops, lunch counters, groceries, taverns and on streetcars to indicate the routes to the neighborhood.

The boundaries of Steelton were generally agreed upon to be Whittier Street on the north (called Schiller Street pre-World War I) to the factories on the south—especially Buckeye Steel Castings on Parsons Avenue and the Seagrave Corporation (now The Fort) on South High Street—and stretched from the Scioto River and the quarries to Alum Creek. Steelton was visibly different in housing, streetscapes, businesses, ethnic make-up, and cultural institutions from the earlier German settlement of the mid-19th century. South of Buckeye Steel Castings and the Seagrave Corporation were the Hartman Farms, a 5000 acre stock farm established in 1903 by Dr. Samuel Hartman. This clearly marked the transition to rural.

Steelton’s industries became, by the late 1920s, not only a major industrial hub for the city, but an important voice in major decisions recognized by others living elsewhere in the city. Everyone knew Steelton was “down there.” When the stakeholders of the city pondered providing a fund to increase the amount of money available to smaller industries to enable them to grow, thirteen of the major Steelton executives were invited to participate in the planning of this major program.

Though the area saw industrial decline and unemployment in the last decades of the 20th century, today there is a resurgence in identifying with its history, and businesses referencing its industrial history, e.g. Steel Mill Tavern on Parsons Avenue, and the Tool Box Tavern on Frebis Avenue (both gay bars).

Seagrave Corporation

Another important node of Steelton industrial activity was along South High Street (Route 23), paralleling Parsons Avenue to its west. The massive Seagrave Corporation, producing firefighting equipment and fire engines, also had moved to the area for its connections to labor, transportation, and room to grow. Industries which had formerly been in the downtown (the original Montgomery Township) were beginning to relocate to take advantage of township incentives or the ability to expand.

However, Seagrave’s original location was in Clinton Township. along Lane Avenue, west of the Olentangy River, near the “new” Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College, and near a hamlet known as “Lanevue,” which was later renamed “Seagrave.” Frederick Seagrave, inventor of a trussed, lightweight ladder capable of reaching heights safely for picking apples in Michigan orchards in 1880, moved to Clinton Township in Lanevue to be near the Hocking Valley Railroad.

Combining ladder manufacture with a horse-drawn ladder wagon, a prototype of a firefighting apparatus was created. In 1898, H. A. Linthwaite, a noted Columbus architect, was contracted by Seagrave to draw up plans for a large brick building 50’ by 450’ for the “Seagrave Trussed Ladder” company, and the contract for the building was awarded to John Erfurt. In 1901, the Seagrave Corporation moved to its new building at 2000 South High Street.

Success was achieved by inventiveness. Once Seagrave offered $500 to invoice and sell their property at 50 cents on the dollars (in gold) to the first person who offered on Election Day, if candidate William Jennings Bryant was elected the next U.S. President of the United States. The offer was not a hoax. But Seagrave created a stir and must have been fairly certain that Bryant would be defeated. That same year, Seagrave gave demonstrations outside Fire Engine House No. 12, betting the strength of his ladder would hold by having three men sit in the middle of the ladder which spanned two chairs. The ladder did not bend. If no alarms for a fire were called in, Seagrave used the quiet time to put his fire engines on an impromptu parade around the fair grounds. Publicity brought sales.

In 1899, the City of Los Angeles ordered a trussed hook and ladder truck and other apparatus for $2,250. Others took notice from the publicity in national magazines. Within six months, the Seagrave Company was forced to double the size of is operation in order to fill the orders, not just for new sales, but even for a competitor manufacturer that could not keep up with their own orders. The competitor company ordered a $100,000 dollars of the Seagrave Trussed Ladder; it was the largest sale ever made Seagrave had ever made. In May, 1908, Seagrave staged and filmed a purposely-set fire in downtown Columbus, attracting a large crowd to watch as it was quickly extinguished. The film debuted later in August during an international convention of fire chiefs. The early film was just one way to impress the invitees. One thousand seven hundred and fifty city fire hydrants were painted red to welcome them. The fire hydrants and film were a hit, and so was the debut of the first motorized fire truck in the United States. The movie was later shown in theaters, and Columbus schools closed early one day so students could attend a special matinee of the film.

Of course, the Seagrave Corporation profited from each newspaper story of a fire—and the admirable job its product contributed to the safety measures and successes on the scene. From a dynamite blast at the Marble Cliff quarries, felt even as far south as the Seagrave factory to a fire in the Foster Block (northwest corner Mound and South Hugh Street) that involved the daring rescue of many tenants, including a woman with typhoid carried to safety on a Seagrave ladder—the merits of the firemen and the Seagrave name made headlines. Samuel Kinnear, civil engineer and city council member, later wrote in The Columbus Evening Dispatch regarding the Foster Block fire, “the merits of the Segrave company’s truss leader was admirably tested. Its lightness and strength makes its usefulness a marvel.”

On the 4th of July, 1909, architects Julian and Julian announced Seagrave’s intent to construct a two-story structure of brick and mill construction, 56’ by 106’ with a composition roof as an addition to its already large plant. Columbus City Council had obviously taken notice of the growth of Steelton when in July, 1909, it voted to expend $5000 to build a new market house at Parsons and Innis Avenue. However, city funds were running low, so the South Side businessmen’s committee “went away satisfied with the promise of council to purchase the site and provide cash for the buildings next year.” The money did not materialize.

Seagrave kept expanding its line of firefighting apparatus. Just five months later in 1909, Columbus Firehouse No. 16 debuted a new ladder which could be extended easily to 85’ in five seconds but did not require a longer wagon to carry it. Continued success necessitated more expansion. Within a year, Julian and Julian architects again were asked to draw up plans for another factory on the site. Seagrave was now making new 30 horsepower engines and making them available for the Southside YMCA classes to study them. Throughout the 1920s, the Seagrave executives included not only Julius Stone, president, but also R. Buchler of Steelton Bank, and William Trautman, President of the Foreign Grocery located on Parsons Avenue.

In 1929, another brick and steel warehouse was planned. The building would have 16,000 square feet of floor space to be used to store fire-fighting equipment and was to be built by the John Heckert Company for $35,000. The announcement came in June, 1929, just months before the stock market crashed. Seagrave, like others, was impacted by the national financial crises, and by the end of 1930, Harold Spain, Seagrave president, reported that though sales were down by 21%, the net balance of $100,937.19 was manageable. The deficit, however, continued to grow, but, by 1935, Seagrave had reduced its deficit to $525, compared to its deficit in 1933 of $665,533, purported to be the worst year of the Great Depression.

By the late 1950s, Seagrave was the largest manufacturer of fire-fighting equipment in the United States, employing 310 men and 20 women in the 1950s. It had survived labor disputes over the firing of two employees for union activities in 1937 and a 1944 major fire that destroyed Seagrave’s neighbors on South High Street—the nearby Jackson Furniture Co.; Topper Structural Steel Company’s showrooms and warehouse; the Ohio Farm Bureau’s Ohio Horticultural Services offices. In November, 1946 Seagrave had faced a deadlock with the United Auto Workers, resulting in a strike vote by Union Local 120 representing its 250 employees; however, one month later, Seagrave shut down, laying off workers because of a national coal strike and a freight embargo. Five other Columbus plants faced similar shutdowns.

Troubles followed a year later when the Seagrave Corporation and the Americans-LaFrance Foamite Corporation of Elmira, New York were indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy to monopolize the production and distribution of motor-driven fire apparatus. The indictment alleged that the two corporations accounted for approximately 60% of all sales annually, and municipalities were forced to pay exorbitant prices for this equipment. Consequently this threatened the safety of cities from the hazards of fire. Four officials, including Howard Spain, president of Seagrave, were each fined $5000 of charges to restraining trade under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The two companies were each fined $15,000.

Looking back at the tumultuous times, in 1959, Dr. Henry Hunker, in his study of Columbus’s industries, noted why Seagrave had endured. “The Seagrave Corporation is typical of the independent, specialized plant that was common in the older Columbus industrial community (and) represents local inventiveness, initiative, and capital successfully at work.” A year later, Seagrave already had plans to leave Columbus.

One explanation was Seagrave needed more room to grow with too many orders and the low ceilings of the buildings, supported by too many supporting posts, impaired the production. In addition, Seagrave had a diverse product mix of both paint and leather and were also housing two fire equipment companies—they had run out of room. In 1964, it was announced that Seagrave operations were purchased by FWD Corporation eleven months earlier. A Seagrave division would remain on site with 75 employees to help with the move to Clintonville, Wisconsin where there was already a 60,000 sq ft.manufacturing plant on 100 acres waiting. Seagrave pledged to help assist 200 employees find other employment. A federal judge, perhaps suspicious of the chain of events, ordered the company to post a $400,000 bond within one week or an injunction would prohibit the company from moving before an on-going management-labor dispute was settled by arbitration.

Three years after the move in 1967, small weekly ads appeared in the classified section of newspapers above the ads to rent a refrigerator or a stove for $2 a week. The ads read, “Flea Market, 2000 South High St. Seagrave Bldg. Every Sat. & Sun., 7 a.m.-6 p.m. ‘Antique Collector’s Haven’ Come, Sell-Trade-Buy.”

Labor and Unions

Labor demands in the form of unionization and strikes were not uncommon in the early days of Steelton. In 1902 blacksmiths began talks with major companies over their nine hour day and a minimum wage of 30 cents an hour. Though they struck at six companies in 1902, including —the Columbus Carriage and Harness Company and the Seagrave Company—both located near each other on South High, a year passed before the Blacksmiths’ Union and the Seagrave  Company’s troubles were settled, causing the American Federation of Labor to raise the embargo against the company and place it on the “fair list.” Blacksmiths Union No. 228 planned to celebrate with a “social and lawn fete on the evening of September 10 at Goodale Park: where the ladies were given the privilege of being in charge of the event.

Industries looking to locate were also attracted to Columbus because the labor force was predominately native-born, compared with other Ohio cities. This appealed to employers because rampant nativism, social radicalism, and violent clashes between ethnic groups was not common. Segregated housing by race and the “invisible” color lines of community occurred on the North Side on East Fifth Avenue and North Fourth Street by deed restrictions, attempting to keep African Americans and Italians from seeking housing near the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College (Ohio State) as the college was evolving. Much of the construction involved employment of “non-Caucasian” workers. An unspoken exception was made for the much older worker housing that had sprung up  near the railroad tracks. Northwest of downtown, some industries had already moved south or were in townships, such as where Seagrave Company had started in Clinton Township. Here industry was not yet under development or urbanization pressure.

Historically, industries in. Columbus tried to avoid strikes and unionization efforts. In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Columbus’s heavily German populated neighborhoods were traditionally more open to workers’ organizations, as had been the norm in Germany. And the conservative politics of Columbus and the concentration of decision-making among old-moneyed families also gave early industrialization a boost with the practice of contract prison labor. An arrangement with the governor permitted companies to buy prison labor. Just at the beginning of the 20^th century, as Steelton’s industries were entering into productive times, Columbus citizens also saw new Progressive ideas from business and city leaders. Columbus City Council candidates ran on declared “Socialist” platforms, and Steelton industries practiced “welfare capitalism.”

In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan made an appearance on the streets in Columbus to seek membership and influence legislators. They promoted themselves as “Christian” and anti-Catholic also making a silent film, “Toll of Justice, ” with Columbus’s out-of-work vaudeville actors and to capitalize on the popularity of “Birth of a Nation.” But with a less than lurid Christian-hero plot line; churches and Columbus Urban League protesting; in a city with a growing Catholic population; where city council candidates often ran and won on Progressive and Socialist tickets; and Columbus newspapers undercut the Ku Klux Klan by publishing political cartoons  ridiculing their robes and hoods, the Klan had little effect on labor relations and moved on to Buckeye Lake.

Columbus’s percentage of foreigner workers was smaller compared to Cleveland, Akron, and Youngstown and more concentrated on the South Side. African Americans and Eastern Europeans shared “specific kinds of experiences within the working class despite the difference that separated them. A ‘sense of kind’—among coal miners (from which many of the early residents came)—whatever their origin—flowed from exposure to hazardous underground conditions.”  Most importantly, nationwide, many of the clashes between industrial labor and management and especially in Ohio mining towns, had been fought because of the 1877 financial panic and depression. This time of economic crisis continued almost nonstop into 1886, a year which saw more labor unrest than any other previous year in American history and 83 strikes involving 16,000 workers in Ohio alone, calling “ a national-wide strike or an 8-hour day.”

Whereas in the early days of Parsons Avenue industrial development, c. 1905, employees might take pride in knowing that the new modern Federal Glass factory buildings were signaling a technological and mechanical revolution at their doorstep, or felt they were fortunate to work for the important men who drove down Parsons Avenue promptly at 8 a.m.—in a line of expensive black Packards, followed by “a great White Steamer” (a steam-powered Hupmobile)—some employees now began to feel differently in 1912. In 1913, the work force was conflicted about loyalty to employers or union organizers.

In 1913, a strike was called at Federal Glass to recognize a union. Management would not back down and hired non-union employees. The strike lasted seven months and did not result in any union gains. Federal thought it was a lesson for employees that would be long remembered—and they emphasized this by not hiring back the more than 300 workers who voted to strike.  The lesson was learned, but in the coming years, there were still attempts to unionize.  Federal Glass met the challenges of the Depression, World War II, the postwar years, and new government regulations, takeovers, and mergers of the glass industry in Ohio and nationally in the 1960s. It was the 1970s that did in Federal Glass.

In 1925, factory workers who were interviewed often responded they had no time for recreation. “Most of the men, except those on piece work, work ten and twelve hours a day and are tired...you never heard a foreigner asking for a shorter day because the longer the day, the more money he makes.”  Long hours were an issue.

Washington Gladden, pastor of First Congregational Church and Social Gospel founder, recognized the hard-working, almost driven work ethic of the immigrants in Steelton. From the pulpit, he championed higher wages and fewer required hours for men working with industrial machines. Accidents at Buckeye Steel Castings and other factories like Federal Glass and Bonney-Floyd were not common but always shocking. Like other steel and fabricating industries, Buckeye erected safety and danger signs throughout the facilities in different languages. But for Hungarian workers and others, who had never learned to read or write in their own language, this attempt at safety might have been approved by inspectors but as useless. Most of the residents of Steelton who were interviewed in 1987, had good memories of Buckeye’s management efforts. Margaret Lutsch, editor of the neighborhood newspaper, stated emphatically that Buckeye had no regard for human life. “It just ate them up and spit them out...then they sent to Cleveland for more Hungarians.”

Though industries were already providing recreational outlets, English and Bible classes, and support for settlement houses, the interviewer noted that the laborers were appreciative of opportunities but saw them as for their families. “The men are just automatic machines.” The Commonwealth Bank, Steelton branch, noted that 80% of them with accounts at their bank saved between $800 and $1000 a year.

Buckeye Steel Castings, Seagrave Corporation, Federal Glass, and other industries supported employee involvement in community building, an outgrowth of “welfare capitalism.” Starting in the 1920s and continuing through the 1950s and the 1960s, the companies capitalized on the growing popularity of amateur sports popularized by radio, sports writers, and later television. The companies supported the formation of teams in football, basketball, and softball in the Southside Industrial League.  In the 1920s, the Seagrave Independents had a popular and fierce football rivalry with the West Jefferson’s American Legion Indians.  The October, 1921 matchup in Circleville drew 800 people.  Employees of the companies formed their own teams, sometimes with oddly interesting names (i.e. Alley Cats and Cheesy Cats) and arrangements were made with interurbans, train cars, or auto caravans for players and spectators. Company teams played teams formed by other organizations in Baltimore, Kirkersville, Worthington, Thornville, Bremen, and Lancaster, but mostly with other Columbus companies. Seagrave often played other Industrial League teams such as the Columbus Packing Company, Rail-Light, White-Haines, Godman Guild, and ARMCO.  

Federal Glass was decidedly anti-union, believing that a productive non-union labor force, paid at above union wages, benefited their employees more. Federal’s wages were considered more than fair in the glass industry.  They were perhaps more liberal with their skilled employees, the glass blowers, who often earned $50 weekly, and employees said they felt they were treated like “family.” Indeed, whole families worked at Federal, encouraging other relatives to apply. If employees felt the company was like a family, in many cases, they literally were, and there were many opportunities for women. When skilled glass blowers might express frustration at having to train “the boys,” instead of management’s hiring new skilled workers, they were reminded that “the boys” were employees who had worked their way up and deserved to have the first chance at advancement. Federal had no tolerance for unionization efforts and preferred promoting the loyalty of its employees by hiring in other family members.

From their early days to World War I, they sponsored athletic teams in football, basketball, and later bowling and golf, as these sports became more popular postwar.  They finally supported Boy Scout and Explorer troops, settlement houses, and day cares, even up to their abrupt closing in 1979. Many Federal employees were former varsity basketball and football players at Ohio State.

Periodic problems between labor and management continued. Strikes in 1937 and 1946 were avoided, but in 1950 disputes between the United Auto Workers and Seagrave were more serious. A dispute over pensions caused members of the United Auto Workers, Local 120 to strike. The union wanted a funded pension plan with the employer contributing 7 cents per hour per employee to the fund, to be administrated jointly with the union, to a maximum monthly benefit of $125, including Social Security. Seagrave offered cash settlement equivalents but nothing else. Employees worked over a year without a renegotiated contract.

Immigration and Cultural Life

Virtually all of Steelton’s population was the result of industrialization, immigration, and migration—and the diversity of the people can easily be seen by the languages spoken and a brief history of the circumstances of the immigrants, especially the Hungarians who made up the majority of Steelton’s ethnic population by 1925.

Assimilation takes time; historians have generally dismissed the notion of “melting pot” or “salad bowl” as adequate metaphors to explain the American experience.  Recent historic thinking suggests a different metaphor, “the braided river valley,” suggesting parallel streams all flowing into the same valley.  This is especially true in Ohio. Different localized immigrant cultures will enter the flow at different times, keeping their distinctiveness. However, “at the same time, new arrivals learn Ohio customs and culture,”and in this way, they influence a city and a region, but they will do so at their own rate.”

Eastern and Central/Southern European immigrants’ arrivals dominated the U.S. economy because of the political unrest in major European empires, c. 1880-1917.  Previous immigrations from Germany, England, and France were slowing because their countries were now involved in the race to industrialize and were hiring.

The opposite was happening in Austria- Hungary and the Russian empires which were preoccupied with civil unrest in multi-ethnic populations. They built armies, mandating conscription of men starting at age 20 and requiring 9-15 years of military service. It was estimated soldiers conscripted from the Jewish, Slavic, and Hungarian peasant classes in small villages and farms, trapped in a semi-feudal state of land ownership, made up as much as 2/3 of the armies. Forced to pay the government to raise certain crops, they were then mandated to sell the crops back to the government at a dictated price, meaning the subsistence farming caused rising debts, inability to buy land, overpopulation, and for Jewish residents, vulnerability to religious persecution. Subject to autocratic and oppressive governments, Hungarians and others arrived—compared to previous immigrations in Columbus—unskilled and sometimes illiterate as they had been restricted in education.

The immigration to Steelton was the greatest movement and concentration of diversity to the city’s history prior to the 21^st century, contributing to the economic boom of the city which lasted more than a century.

But exact numbers and diversity of ethnicities are difficult to calculate  and likely higher than reported. The term “Hungarian” was often applied to Slovaks, Romanians, Austrians, and Germans (Saxons) because the two major empires—the Austrian-Hungarian Empire (Hapsburgs) and the Russian Empire (Romanovs) that controlled them—were multi-ethnic, multi-lingual political constructs with changing political boundaries.  Nationality was the empire not the language or ethnicity. For example,Transylvania was considered to be part of Hungary until  World War I; the Treaty of Versailles made Transylvania part of Romania. During this time, many Hungarians in Columbus from Transylvania, now were counted as Romanian. A map of Columbus’s ethnic groups, published in a thesis and later republished as a study by the university of Chicago, compounded this mistake.

Hungarians arrived in the United States in three waves.  The first wave was in the mid 19th century and included members of the aristocratic class, rich landowners, tied to the Hapsburg throne and hoping for a country independent of Austria. They represented the Hungarian world of arts and culture, and would bear no resemblance to the second wave of peasant Hungarians who arrived in the 1880s except for language.  (The third wave would not be until 1956 when the Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet control failed, and Hungarian refugees came to the United States.)

Though the most famous historic and internationally known Hungarian of the 19^th century,  Louis Kossuth, called the “George Washington of Hungary,” arrived in Columbus on February 4, 1852, to speak before the Ohio General Assembly, there were no Hungarians to greet him in 1852.  Instead he was cheered and led to the Neil House by a group of German butchers on horseback— who later named a street after him in “the German Colony.” Kossuth had come to America to raise funds, hoping for an independent Hungary, but returned to Europe with nothing to support the liberation efforts. However,  generations of Hungarians and descendants who settled in Steelton still remember and celebrate his efforts to this day at the Hungarian Reform Church on Woodrow Avenue and/or St. Ladislaus Catholic Church on Reeb Avenue, as do others in Hungarians communities across the U.S. almost 175 years later.

Wealthy citizens of Columbus in the mid-19th century were familiar with aristocratic Hungarian culture, the world of Louis Kossuth, and Columbus socialites sometimes hosted their own parties with masquerade costume balls inviting guests to wear finely-made Central European military and “peasant” dress, enjoy torts and delicacies, and listen to “Gypsy” (Roma) musicians who played the cimbalon. But they certainly did not recognize the second wave who came to Columbus as bearing any resemblance to “the Masters.”

Hungarians did not arrive to be farmers nor, in the beginning, to settle permanently like the Germans, Welsh, and Irish who came before them. They came to make money and return home to become landowners. There was money to be made in mining and industry in America. They came as Protestants, Roman or Orthodox Catholics, and Jews. Like others before them, they concentrated themselves because of language limitations and preference for the familiar.  Language was particularly limiting for Hungarians because it is a difficult language to learn unless taught in childhood, and, Hungarians, who arrived, mostly as men, fully intended to return home, not study English.

Between 1880 and 1920 an estimated 1,078,074 Hungarians immigrated to the United States,  Cleveland’s Hungarian population was second only to Budapest, and starting in the 1900s with the genesis of Columbus’s new iron and steel industries, many workers were under contract agreements with companies to also accept work in Columbus. Ohio had a greater number of Hungarian immigrants than Pennsylvania. According to the 1920 U.S. Census, the total number of Hungarians was estimated to be 1,524, living predominantly in Steelton. Of these, 966 were foreign born and the others were first-generation.

Immigrants to Steelton in the 1890s most often arrived as unmarried young men or men who left families in Europe with the idea of making enough money to return home to pay debts, buy land, and improve their lives in Hungary. Historically, they were often referred to as “birds of passage,” for their migratory back-and-forth journeys—bringing money home, then returning to the United States to continue work. Teenage girls might arrive too, especially if there was a relative in a nearby coal mining town.  New arrivals tended to cluster near each other, joining others who spoke the same language to find employment. Ethnic groups were also discriminated against by race—especially in this highly segregated post-Reconstruction era of racial definitions determined by federal immigration laws.  African Americans, Italians, Macedonians, Jews, and Hungarians often were seen as “the other” (non Caucasian).

By living frugally and journeying back home sometimes only once a year, European laborers could save money because steamship travel was becoming more economical. The wealthy classes in the age of steamship travel bought such costly tickets that travelers in steerage were often looked upon as not relevant to the expenses of the voyage. The average cost in 1900 was $30 for third-class steerage, and tickets could be purchased at the Foreign Grocery on Parsons Avenue.  Serbians, Macedonians, Croatians, Bosnians, Greeks, and Hungarians made up almost 90% of the “birds of passage.”

In Steelton and in Columbus, Hungarian men (1880s-1905) were not hailed as the dependents of Louis Kossuth but were portrayed in the newspapers as clannish, drunk, illiterate, and barely civilized. They were accused of being public health nuisances and disorderly conduct, insulting women, and disturbing the peace.

The problem was not just with large numbers of mostly young men with no family restraints, but also with the city of Columbus which ignored enforcement of its own housing codes, allowing 15, 25, and even 50 boarders in one dwelling in an area that still lacked even sanitary sewers or paved streets. It was not uncommon for the city’s cursory treatment of the issues to compound the problem, allowing sixteen persons to be crowded into a 4-room house in filthy conditions in 1903. Steelton workers often shared lodging sometimes 2 and 3 to a bed because they worked different shifts. Most dwellings did not have facilities or running water to wash until the later establishment of settlement houses.

Near the middle of the first decade of the 20^th century, the earlier pessimistic view of the foreigners, particularly the Hungarians, slowly improved, aided by the influx of families or brides and the establishment of familiar institutions.  Churches, synagogues, lodges, associations, halls, and organizations were founded around a common language. Hungarians, especially, were isolated by their inability to speak English. Women, in particular, were isolated, even after their children began to learn English in schools. And unlike other immigrant women, for example, Italians who often cooked together as part of their culture in Columbus, Hungarian women did not.

Languages of the emigres continued to be spoken at home, but the first-generation of children born in the United States were, by the 1920s, becoming high school age.  South High School, a  Columbus Public School, opened in 1924 in the Steelton neighborhood on Ann Street,  east of Parsons Avenue, having moved from its original location on Deshler Avenue where it opened in 1900.  Now foreign difficulties were more easily navigated, as parents attended school plays and events and children were relied on for translations. However, many married women never learned English and, therefore, never became citizens. To them, they were American because they paid their property taxes, obeyed the laws, and sent their sons to war.

They were the mistresses of their own home, and by the 1920s, the traditions of lace making, embroidery, handmade linens, leather and woodcraft were now evident in homes. It was often noted by the visiting public health nurses that  “houses were immaculate and bare board floors are scrubbed white...they (Hungarians) usually live to themselves and do not gather as the Italians...mothers are generally not employed outside the home and children are neat and clean...if diseases come, they have implicit faith in the nurse and doctor.”

In studies done about immigrant women, women’s role largely was defined by their opinions on pregnancy and childbirth, role of the church, domestic work, and marriage preferences.

In their home countries, women in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary showed both the highest birth rate and highest infant mortality rate per 1000 of 14 European countries. Even after coming to the United States, between 1890 and 1920, these numbers only shifted downward slightly.  Mothers who were born in Italy, Russia, Poland, Germany, and Hungary and who emigrated to the U.S. were statically still the most likely to die in childbirth in 1900.

Both nationally researched and substantiated by interviews with women in Steelton in 1925, immigrant women preferred to delay marriage until their mid 20s. Large families of 5 or 6 children were still common in 1925, but families with 10-12 children decreased in the 1920s. And women preferred to marry within their ethnic and language group with less consideration of differences in religious beliefs.

Young women generally did not seek domestic work because of their inability to understand English and the hard demands and confines of the work. Hungarian and Slavic young women preferred the hard work on farms because they had worked alongside men in the fields and outdoor work was healthier. Reeb School, which began as a YMCA outreach program and later became a Columbus Public School, taught domestic work for the future “American homemakers” (or for the employment of domestics) because “every woman and girl wants to know how to keep a house.” Twelve girls, aged six to eight, of different nationalities spent a day with four miniature rooms and dolls learning to arrange furniture, set tables, make beds, cook, wash dishes, and dress babies. The class was sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Starting c. 1905, in addition to settlement houses and other institutions, Christian churches were forming. The Jewish community, beginning with their arrival from Eastern Europe into Columbus, had started a decade earlier. The Jewish community, c. 1870-1900, was located north of the German community but gradually moved east and south as the commercial downtown district expanded into the residential. Here German and Eastern European Jewish communities shared crossover settlements around Parsons and Livingston Avenues. The congregation of Tifereth Israel grew largely from six Hungarian Jewish families in 1901.

The founding Hungarian families on the South Side began arriving because of the effects of the political partitioning of Poland which had begun to happen in the 18^th century as the result of wars among Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Prussia.The divisions of 1772, 1792 and 1795 among the powers created constant migrations, uncertainty, and fearfulness. Many poor and religious Jews lived in southern Poland (Galicia), and the land was ceded to Austria-Hungary. In 1797 the Austria-Hungary government required Jews to adopt German surnames (previously they did not use surnames). Names could be created, as was the case of the Wasserstrom family whose name translates to “water stream,” or from inspiration from Genesis 49 which referenced names of historical figures or animals. German words for deer (Hirsch), wolf (Wolf), bear (Beer), or lion (Judah) were popular. Religious life in Galicia had also been influenced by Orthodox Judaism, especially Hasidism, which emphasized :joy and spontaneity.”

Seeking stability and better economic conditions, Galician Jews crossed the Carpathian Mountains into Hungary, where they lived in small villages with Roman or Eastern Orthodox neighbors and over four generations became Hungarian speakers. However, instability and wars left Jewish communities, who were not allowed to own land in any of the three empires, at risk of persecution, scapegoating, and pograms. Emigration was a preferred path for many.

Some Hungarian Jews settled in Circleville and later migrated to Columbus for greater employment  opportunities and initially attended Agudas Achim in Columbus, made up mostly of Russian and Polish Jews,  However, a break within the synagogue over “language” occurred in 1901, when during a Yom Kippur service, a group of Hungarian Jews outside the synagogue were chastised for disrupting the service inside with their loud talk in Hungarian. Subsequently, they formed the first Hungarian Hebrew Church.

Families included the Wasserstroms, Bayerns, Polsters, Schlesingers, and Sterns. In 1912, the congregation purchased their first building on Parsons, a remodeled house with a next door barbershop. However with very limited space, special services were often held at the I.O.O.F lodge or at Agudas Achim synagogue to accommodate their growing numbers.

A second wave of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe came in large numbers to Columbus (1881-1915), and by 1927, Tifereth Israel was built on East Broad Street, to be the spiritual, cultural, and social welfare facility for the “Jews of the East End.” Between 1905 and 1920, an estimated Jewish population in Columbus grew from 1500 to 9000.  And while the first spiritual home for the Hungarian Jews was on Parsons Avenue outside the immediate neighborhood of Steelton, Jewish businesses and residents were part of the Steelton community. Protestant and Catholic families remembered lighting stoves of their Jewish neighbors before the Sabbath began.

For Protestant Hungarians, an opportunity to move worship from small gatherings in homes to a dedicated structure began in February 1906 when the city’s Presbyterians conducted a service for Hungarians at the Central Presbyterian Church downtown. Three months later, Hungarians agreed to help build a church at Washington and Wood (now Woodrow) Avenues with Presbyterian support. At the inaugural event, Rev. Kardos, a Hungarian born émigré who spoke English, gave a talk on the history of the Protestant Reformation in Hungary, and sixteen Hungarian men “sang psalms and ‘America’ translated into Hungarian”for the occasion.

Two years later, Rev. Kardos, now pastor of the Hungarian Presbyterian Church, and the Hungarian émigré Bela Pukey, a steamship agent for foreign emigrants who operated a Hungarian bank on Parsons, assisted in setting up a school to teach English on Saturday evenings in the basement of the church. However, financial disputes arose between the Hungarian congregation and the Presbyterians. The Presbyterian Synod paid clergy and contributed to the purchase of the lots; Hungarians had built the church, raised money for the bell, stained glass windows, iron, fencing. They wanted control of the church. They asked to purchase the church, and a $4000 price in 1914 was placed.on the property by the Presbyterian Synod. Money was raised, but now the price was $5000. The congregation refused to pay, purchased another building, withdrew from the Presbyterian Synod, joined the Reformed Churches of the United States. But the Presbyterians, could not raise a new congregation in the heavily settled Hungarian neighborhoods and asked the original congregation to come back to the site in 1923–with no money exchanged. Hungarian culture had little forgiveness for broken trust with either bankers or religious leaders. The Hungarian Reformed Church contributes to this day.

St. Ladislaus, the Roman Catholic Church, only blocks away from the Hungarian Reformed Church on Reeb Avenue, was organized in 1908, originally for Hungarians by Bishop Hartley. However, it was soon needed to accommodate the spiritual needs of other nationalities coming to the area.  Nearly 500 adults enrolled in the new parish. The parish with the frame building steeple, bell, and congregation were formed in only eight months.  The name “Ladislaus” was specifically chosen because he was a son of a 12^th century Hungarian king who had brought Dalmatia and Croatia into the Hungarian kingdom, driving out the Poles, Russians, and Tartars. His relics reportedly resulted in miracles, giving him canonization, and the name and the history were known to both the Croatians and Hungarians who lived in the neighborhood.

Sermons were delivered in both Hungarian and English (as were the services in the Hungarian  Reform Church).  In 1917, a parochial school was formed at St. Ladislaus with 72 children and within eight years, 160 children, or 2/3 of the Catholic children in the parish attended. Five Ursuline Sisters taught exclusively in English.

Across the street was Reeb School, originally started by the YMCA. It offered night classes for adults who wished to learn English.  Within three years of its establishment, it became part of the Columbus Schools system, and into the 1920s, fifty percent of its enrollment were Hungarian children. Hungarian business leaders, like Alexander and John Gaal who owned he Foreign Grocery, strongly advocated for passing proposed school levies and were vocal that children needed to attend school to understand democracy and become citizens.  Nearby at 253 Reeb Avenue, the South Side Day Nursery was founded and built through the philanthropy of Mrs. W. A. Miller in. 1926, later becoming the South Side Learning and Development Center. It was closed in 2015 and remains vacant.

Complicating the inability to form social groups outside of their language group, Hungarians at first perceived American religious institutions differently than native-born Americans. In Hungary, religion was essentially an extension of the government to provide funding for charity. Hungarians, especially men, did not always understand why their pay was needed for the salary of a priest or minister, to build or maintain the physical property of a church, support the staff who prepared children for first communion, or pay for the needs of the less fortunate.

Women, however, generally wished to attend church and be assured religious education was being provided. It was not uncommon for women to attend one church and send children to a different church if Sunday School was provided. And it was not uncommon if men stayed home or for Hungarians to attend a number of churches for their outreach efforts and give less attention to theological differences.  Marriage between Protestants and Catholics did not raise concerns, but marrying outside of one’s ethnic group did.

From the 1920s to the 1940s Parsons Avenue and its ethnic groups were coming into full blossom and were remembered by many older interviewees in 1987 who remarked on the Parsons Avenue street fairs, St. Ladislaus Catholic Church, the South Side Settlement House, the Hungarian Reform Church, and Croatian Hall (opened in 1940)—all within blocks of each other. The two Hungarian churches often took turns providing space for programs featuring traditional dancers in folk dress, pastries popular in Budapest cafes, cabbage rolls, goulash, breaded pork schnitzels, musicians, and plays by the Hungarian Dramatic Club (performed in two languages). Efforts to make events successful and well attended were contributed by religious and labor groups working together—the Hungarian Women’s Chapter of Columbia, Hungarian Workman’s Lodge, the Merchants Association, and the four Hungarians-only (and one which admitted Croatians) mutual aid and benefit societies that provided help in case of industrial accidents and deaths.

The Hungarian Drama Club existed from the 1920s into the 1950s. One typical performance was “The Sheepskin,” an operetta presented on Easter Sunday evening, 1942, and was the story of a father wanting his daughter to marry a “Kutyabor,” the Hungarian counterpart of an American college man of promise who has a “sheepskin degree.” Of course, she disobeys her father and runs off with a man of her choosing.  The costumes were of original handmade Hungarian linen, and music was by the city’s only Gypsy orchestra.  Those who performed in it included names familiar to the neighborhood then (and in 2022), the Varga and Nagy families. Dramatic presentations, musical and choir performances, wedding receptions and fund raising events moved b ack and forth between the two Hungarian churches, as they do to this day, because both had been built with community kitchens and assembly space. The Croatian Hall was the frequent site for many ethnic wedding receptions because of its size and availability to rent for all. The Croatian Lodge—still in existence though the hall was later acquired by the Schottenstiens for their parking lot—was (and still is) part of a larger Croatian Benefit Association as the St. Anthony Lodge, centered in Pittsburgh. Zivili, the only national Croatian folk dance group in the United States was formed from the Croatian descendents of Steelton.

All immigrant groups depended on mutual aid and benefit societies in case of illness, accident, or death of the primary breadwinner, especially in industrial accidents. Paying small amounts of money into them monthly—often in coins across the kitchen table to an agent who came into the house—provided insurance for catastrophic deaths or accidents. But they also provided social activities such as picnics and banquets, a practice which lasted into the 1950s. The William Penn Foundation in Pennsylvania was an outgrowth of such a society and is active in Hungarian communities to provide Hungarian language classes or scholarships to Hungarian youth to this day.

Yarhovay Sick Benefit Society, the oldest national organization (1886) named for a prominent Hungarian who befriended the poor had over 25,000 members in the U.S  in the 1920a. Open to all with no regard for religious affiliation, it paid $7.00 a week in case of illness and $1000 at death. Reformatus  Betegsegelyze, a local aid society, organized in 1905 had 200 members in Columbus in the 1920s, and was open to all Hungarians of any religious belief. It paid $9.00 a week for illness and $300 at death.  Mundas Betegsegelyze was organized in 1915, an outgrowth of the Presbyterian Church.  Originally formed as a cultural association but later reorganized with a workingman’s society with more socialist leaning, it also had a 400 book lending library. It paid $12.00 a week for illness and $300 at death. The Reformed Federation, a national organization, paid $10.00 a week for sickness and $1000 at death. The fifth aid society was a more recent association in the 1920s, the Golden Heart, paying $10.00 a week in illness and $500 at death.

Special cultural events or picnics were held in the Heimindale Grove off Groveport Road and were highly anticipated annual events where food was provided by Buckeye Steel Castings or special treats were given to children by the Steelton Merchants Association.  If a free picnic was not to everyone’s interest, there was also Ivanoff Hall on Parsons, between Reeb and Barthman Avenues, which had a dance hall upstairs and a bowling alley downstairs.

In addition to activities, outings, classes, sports teams or youth summer camps at nearby St. Rita’s (girls) or St. Joseph’s (boys) provided by the Catholic Diocese, Steelton had two of the six settlement houses in the city supported by funds from Columbus’s Community Fund—South Side Settlement House and St. Stephen’s.  In 1938, 2000 volunteers began to solicit pledges citywide for a goal of $656,000 to support their 56 agencies in the coming year.  Their goal was achieved in ten days.

At South Side Settlement, crafts, arts, sewing, and games were popular. Traditional lace-making and embroidery were highly valued skills and in demand for religious vestments and altar cloths. And in 1938, people living in houses without plumbing took a total (city-wide) of 67,805 showers at settlement houses.  In 1938, the Steelton response to the rise of fascism in Europe was decidedly purposeful.  They created a Citizenship Club, a lecture series, and promotions to aid the foreign born. Classes of over 100 people enrolled at the South Side Settlement House annually from 1938 through the 1940s.  People from 30 different nationalities attended.  All who enrolled did pass their naturalization exams and were celebrated at a banquet in their honor.

Hungarian restaurants became popular in the 1930s and 1940s, popping up elsewhere in city, aided by Hollywood movies where they were often the romantic backdrop of the love-sick protagonists. The Blue Danube Restaurant on North High Street started as a white-table cloth Hungarian restaurant where dining was accompanied by rhapsodies played on a baby grand piano, and small downtown eateries advertised themselves as Bohemian spaces. In the 1960s, the Lazarus Department store hosted a week-long celebration and classes on traditional Hungarian needle work taught by Hungarian women of the Steelton area.

Business and Street Life

World War I signaled a change in Steelton’s life. Employment was high but residents’ minds were elsewhere. Europe’s political instability pointed to a coming cataclysmic event that would affect the balance of diplomatic and military alliances, especially after the disastrous defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905. Competing political ideologies in Europe exacerbated fears. Ethnic groups were often manipulated to turn on each other by the ruling government in Europe and potentially, it was feared, this could happen in America.

In Steelton ethnic grudges were seen only occasionally as on Labor Day when Hungarians and Serbs chose to not march in the same parade. During World War I, there was only one reported potential confrontation between the two groups on the Parsons Avenue viaduct that ran next to Buckeye Steel Castings. It was initiated by New York Serbians who wished to rally fellow Serbians for an independent country, but their presence was opposed by Hungarians who feared radicalization.. At the moment of impending violence, Colonel Carter of the Columbus police force intervened, citing the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment giving the right of free speech in America. Both sides dispersed.

World War I was a dramatic watershed that changed “Steelton” and the heavily all male immigrant population that dominated much of the workforce. For the lucky families who anticipated the coming war early, steamship tickets were sent back home to reunite families in Steelton. First-generation and even second-generation babies already were being born as “American.” They were not the only new Americans.  As immigrants became naturalized citizens, employers no longer classified them by their native ethnicity but counted them as “Americans” on company rolls.

When letters arrived at the Foreign Grocery on Parsons Avenue, they did so because it was a de facto post office, a place where (unofficially) the U.S. Post Office forwarded letters or packages if they came into the city with an incomplete or missing address and a foreign-sounding name. There was never a recorded case of such mail not finding its intended destination. William (Billy) was Trautman, one of the owners of the Foreign Grocery, later said, these were years when many customers left the store, clutching a letter and weeping.  News arrived that told of entire villages disappearing, the death of young men in battle, relatives as homeless refugees. And everyone knew that the world of “birds of passage,” bringing money home to buy land, and hopes of families reuniting were now frozen and perhaps would be impossible.

The Foreign Grocery played a major role in the transition of European immigrants into American citizens, keeping and passing rituals and traditions to next generations, especially in cuisine and oral history.  It was a unique and well-remembered institution in Steelton.  Trautman, was an accomplished and profitable business man, who began a career as an electroplater with the M.C. Lilley Company in Columbus, the largest maker of regalia, banners, uniforms, swords, medals, and ephemeral for veterans of the Civil War and fraternities and lodges.  It was known worldwide and operated for over 100 years. He arrived as a child with his father and mother, Bavarian and Alsatian respectively, and settled in “the German colony” (German Village today) north of Steelton.

Trautman left Lilley after some years to open a grocery on Livingston Avenue, later conceiving of a special wholesale and retail business that targeted the large Hungarian population of Steelton and families of other workmen as his customers. In 1912, he opened the Foreign Grocery with Alexander Gaal and John Gaal, Alexander’s nephew. Alexander Gaal was a “native Hungarian and of liberal education and who had command of 8 languages spoken in Southwestern (Central) Europe.”  Trautman himself was a notorious talker and story teller; and even salesmen avoided him if they wanted to stay on time in their sales route. Both Trautman and the Gaals treated customers as extended family. Trautman was a member of the Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Elks, and a board member of a bank. By knowing his customers well and working as a peer with industrial leaders and social agencies, he could provide leverage and guidance for the community at the city level, understand labor and management issues from both sides, and mentor the democratic process as an individual dealing with other stakeholders, as could the Gaal family who became civic leaders and strong advocates for school bond levies and educational opportunities for both workers and school-age children.

Though the Foreign Grocery moved in 1928 and again in 1957, the store remained on Parsons Avenue. The store stocked special foods for all the ethnic groups and was also an emporium for shoes, clothing, auto accessories, dry goods, hardware, and steamship tickets (as agent of Cunard lines). Credit was give to regular customers, and even small loans on occasion.  Goods could be delivered to homes.  Employees had to speak at least three languages and some managed seven.  The store started with 20 employees, and in 1922, the value of the business done at the store was estimated to be $400,000. As the store grew, more than 35 employees ran the store, and in order to keep long hours and a large clientele, the store had a cook and a kitchen to serve employees meals. All who entered the store as customers, well-remembered in 1987 in oral histories, said the aromas alone increased sales.

The historian, Charles Galbreath, who knew the Trautman family well, said in 1925, “It was a clearing house of ‘Americanization,’ here the process of adopting foreign customs and standards to the American system goes on.”  In other words, Steelton was not the proverbial “melting pot,” nor the “salad bowl” metaphor for Americanization, but an example of “the braided river theory,” which saw that cultures flow together at their own speed. (See Kathrine Cozen, section on immigration and settlement)

In the 1920s, autos were becoming more affordable and navigated Parsons Avenue along with horse-drawn vehicles and streetcars. Auto-related retail—especially tires, batteries, radiators—began to appear at intersections or even could appear beside residential houses.  Parsons Avenue bustled with urban life, but farmland and quiet respites were less than a two mile drive with an auto, albeit one that needed gas, batteries, radiators, and tires fairly frequently.

The Tosheff Building on Parsons Avenue represented “the street’s transition from a rural to an urban character,” replacing a few frame houses, a brick building, and empty lots with a structure which contained—when completed in 1923– Tosheff’s Hotel and Restaurant and a number of other businesses. There were literally dozens of eateries on Parsons Avenue. Many started the 1890s to serve the nearly all-male population who lived in rooming houses or shared densely-packed flats without access to cooking facilities.  George Tosheff, a Macedonian immigrant who spoken Bulgarian, envisioned mixed retail with a hotel on the second floor. Other tenants in the building included groceries, men’s furnishings, and in later years, used furniture and appliances. The restaurant was the site of many meetings of the community stakeholders and committees who were the leaders of the civic improvements and educational outreach.            

Parsons Avenue merchants, led by the Gaals and Trautman planned and staged huge street fairs which drew up to 5000 people.  Floats, parades beauty contests, old age contests, a parade of machines (from the era of King Tut to the present), the Old Guard Drum Band, marathon races, and contests for best company and industry sponsored floats were held.  In 1923, there were 231 floats with top prizes going to the Hamilton Milk Company (company later purchased by Borden Company); Moores & Ross Milk Company (today Abbott Lab); and Commonwealth Bank.  Honorable mention went to Buckeye Steel Castings and Fred Schmidt (Schmidts Sausage Haus).

A snapshot of the Parsons business corridor, c. 1936, showed both residential and commercial buildings and a hybrid of both. As major streets were zoned commercial in the 1920s, Columbus owners could build out the front of a residence to create a store, tavern, tax office, grocery, barber or beauty shop or other permitted uses and keep the family residence in the rear. Professional offices for doctors, dentists, lawyers, insurance agents, as well as, eateries, grew in numbers. In 1936 within five blocks on either side of the Nagy Shoe Repair Shop at 1725 Parsons, the street had 31 residences, the Foreign Grocery, a delicatessen, 2 used auto lots, the Italian Spaghetti House, a municipal fire station, Shell gas station, used clothing and used furniture stores, a locksmith, a blacksmith, 2 barbers, and another shoe repair which included the office of the Little Hungarian News, a community/business ads paper, printed by The Steelton Publishing Company with ads in both Hungarian and English.

Despite competition from global markets, recessions, and job losses, even in 1967, Parsons Avenue, the “main street” of Steelton, was known for its local businesses, bargain shopping, store front churches, ethnic gathering places, taverns, bowling lanes, and lively neighborhood spirit. All helped by the many athletic teams sponsored by industries, businesses, and churches for football, basketball, or softball games thru the Industrial League—and through the sports offered at South High School.

Within walking distance, on or near Parsons, a person could be baptized, married, buy a sofa, have a TV repaired, take creative writing at South Side Settlement House, socialize (from a “beer and a bump” and a bowling alley to a sit-down white table cloth dinner), learn to box at the YMCA, take a date for a drive-in burger, have work shoes or dress shoes refurbished, indulge in a “perm” at Modernette Beauty Salon or Mitzi-Lynn Beauty Shop, or plan a funeral and purchase a coffin.  The neighborhood’s financial concerns were addressed by branch banks, two savings & loans, and a pawnshop—and some stores extended credit.

Bargains were everywhere, especially at Schottensteins where Bexley matrons and drag queens came to shop for fine evening gowns, fur coats, and designer purses and shoes into the 1970s. Originally, several small stores cobbled together with a unifying façade, Schotteinsteins’s  interior had floors of different heights, covered with clean but worn carpets to even out the dangers of tripping, as the store was always packed. One Christmas, the crowded throngs of shoppers barely noticed the mannequins in the front windows had mismatched black and white arms and hands. Schottensteins was such a major attraction other businesses in the area also closed on Saturdays, to observe the Sabbath, and reopened on Sunday.

Food was plentiful—from fresh produce at Abe’s market to lunch counters, grills, taverns, drive-ins, fine diners, and sweet shops,.  In 1951, one could choose from Moon Glow Grill, Larry’s Bar, Sportsmen Club Bar, Chuck & Lee’s Bar, Coney Island, Charlie’s Grill, Tosheff’s Hotel, Royal Café Restaurant, Melting Pot Confectionery, Flamingo Inn Restaurant, Old Tavern, HobNob Restaurant, or Busy Bee—and later around the corner at Innis Avenue was Chuck’s Smorgesteria and Cowboy Bar with blazing neon front and a cowboy mannequin sitting on a rail fence.

Music was everywhere. Piano lessons were offered in homes.  With twenty-one faith communities located in Steelton in the 1950s-1960s, sacred music and/or gospel emanated from St. Ladislaus Catholic Church, St. Clair AME Church, Church of God, South High Baptist, Hosack Baptist, Sunshine Mission, Church of God of the Mountain Assembly, Holiness Church, the Hungarian Reformed or other denominations of Assembly of God, Nazarene, Lutheran, Methodist, and Evangelical.  Music of all kinds (popular culture to ethnic folk) also was a staple at the many wedding receptions at the Croatian Hall, the Saxon and Ivanoff Halls, and church basements where complete kitchens could also provide cabbage rolls, goulash, kifli and poppy seed rolls in abundance for lodge dinners and special occasions. Traditional Eastern European music with authentic instrumentation often appeared in churches and halls by special invitation to groups in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Youngstown.

Columbus’s Steelton neighborhood has a long history of music—country, “stompin’,” blue grass gospel, pop vocal, rock n’ roll, fiddle, jazz, “jump” music, rhythm n’ blues, and “hillbilly.” With a shift in musical taste away from big band music, popular in the 1920s-1940s, nearly any club or restaurant could become a musical venue. Like Mt. Vernon Avenue, High, Main and Broad Streets, Parsons Avenue establishments “became vibrant musical showcases, featuring both national and local acts.”

As early as the 1950s, the racial divide prevalent in segregated neighborhood began to change in audiences and even some venues when “while and black musicians had begun finding one another...’salt and pepper’ groups began to spring up....Many white musicians playing at Gordon’s jam sessions on Barthman Avenue.” Archie “Stomp Gordon,” a musical child prodigy and later local celebrity, played to diverse audiences, appeared on the Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town, and toured with Billie Holiday. He considered his playing for white audiences his personal act of civil rights.

Country music and bluegrass were very popular in Columbus as evidenced by the two decade popularity of Ron Barlow who hosted the North American Country Cavalcade on WMNI live from the Southern Theater. This spurred an explosion of music in the Steelton neighborhoods,

Bluegrass Palace at Woodrow and Parsons Avenues had bluegrass on Friday and Saturday nights.  The house band in the late 1970s was remembered to be the Bluegrass Mountain Boys with Shorty Radcliffe on mandolin and Bill Estep, who sang like Bill Monroe, on guitar. Bill Burroughs played bass. Willie was Willie (Caudill) and the Outcast also played there, later becoming Willie and the High Stakes, and was joined by Charlie Taggert and then Cecil Blevins on drums.

Rick Keaton played at the Southgate Lounge on South High Street and the Parsons Avenue Eagles Club and the Trackman Club further south near Scioto Downs. Young local bands like The Rider Band, The Backstreet Band, the Myth Band, The B’s & I's, and The Blues System started playing at Teen Night spots and some still do.

The Early Bird Music, which started as a radio repair shop, and whose faded sign and bird logo could still be seen on Parsons Avenue in the 1970s, was a mecca for musicians and fans.

The working-class women of the neighborhood were celebrated in a 1978 hit, “Franklin County Woman” by Rainbow Canyon that featured Robert “Cowboy” Hummel, Dean Imboden, Garry May, Neil Walker, Kim Keller, and Dwight Groce on drums. It may be the most original musical tribute to the neighborhood ever done. References to the Steelton’s Schottensteins, Parsons Avenue, and a red-headed woman who works for the county at Mound and High and makes her boyfriend feel like “like the president of Buckeye Steel” when she is with him, could only be written about Steelton. The band disbanded in 1995, with an occasional reunion.

Welfare Capitalism and civic involvement

The change in the public’s outrage about the behavior of some immigrants had began to soften, as early as 1905-1906. Newspaper accounts reported on the arrival of wives and marriageable girls and fiancés to Columbus. One headline read,” Three Happy Brides Come All the Way from Hungary to Marry the Men of Their Choice.” The men were able to purchase passage for them, and the triple wedding took place before the Clerk of Courts in the Franklin County Courthouse on the Thursday they arrived. The newspaper noted “none of them were able to speak English, only one being able to utter enough to make the clerk understand what they wanted.” The tone of the article was very different from earlier headlines which sometimes referred to the Hungarians as “the Huns.”

Domesticity was one factor for changes in Steelton. Secondly, the residents of Steelton began to find their civic voice.

A turning point came for the community in the continuing fight for sanitary sewers—a perennial problem in many parts of the city but especially in recently-annexed industrial sites. A South Columbus Improvement Association was formed to override Mayor Jeffrey’s veto of a city council ordinance in favor of the sewers. The mayor overturned the ordinance based on budgetary reasons, citing $18,000 was too much money to spend when it was needed elsewhere. Hungarians, Croatians, Serbs, and others countered and demanded sewers, using demographics they read In the newspapers—38 people living in an eight room house on Reeb Avenue.

Thirdly, Welfare Capitalism, the progressive ideas espoused by the major industries were being put into practice. S. P. Bush, president of Buckeye Steel Castings, was a practitioner of Welfare Capitalism, the progressive idea that decent working and living conditions for employees and their families helped increase the productivity and success of a company. He fostered a workforce community by creating decent conditions for families, education and recreation, a wage in his words that would “permit existence and some reasonable advance in civilization.”

It was not lost on Bush, nor on other progressive Columbus business leaders, that happy workers did not seek unions and strikes. Issues could be solved before they appeared. Neither was it lost on the foreign-born employees and native-born employees that the newly-recruited Alabama workers living on Reeb or Hosack in Buckeye-provided housing, worshipping in a Baptist church often supported by Buckeye, or being provided Bible classes at Buckeye, owed much to the company and would be very reluctant to strike. For all employees, however, Buckeye supported their church events and donated to their causes, encouraged sports teams sponsored by Buckeye and others in the Industrial League where large and small company teams competed and equipment and uniforms were provided. Buckeye promoted the small businesses in Steelton and the Parsons Avenue parades, gave to the settlement houses and youth groups, and encouraged saving accounts.

In 1916, the South Side Welfare Association—comprised of a small number of school teachers, ministers, and businessmen—met to formulate a plan to improve education in the neighborhood. Their first priority was a reading room, but with no funds, they appealed to the industries. S. P. Bush, president of Buckeye Steel, attended the first meeting and was later joined by R. H. Sweeter of the American Rolling Mills Company, who suggested the involvement of the YMCA.

Following a survey of households and community needs—from Jenkins to Hosack Avenues—the support for a “four-fold” YMCA program was spearheaded by Columbia McKinnon Chain Co., Keever Starch Co., Bonney-Floyd Co., and Winslow Glass Co.. The four-fold program involved “educational work; motion pictures in the shops, schools, churches, and settlement houses; promotion work; and night schools and correspondence schools.” American Rolling Mill, Columbus McKinnon Chain, and Winslow Glass were joined by Federal Glass, Seagrave, Hercules Paper Box, the Thurman Avenue branch of Godman Shoe Company, the Columbus Packing Company, Day-Wood Heel, New Steelton Lumber Company, South Side Lumber Company, Carroll Chain Company, Carnegie Steel, and the Chase Foundry and Manufacturing Company. In order to coordinate efforts, two committees were formed—the Intershop Service Committee and the Community Service Committee, both meeting twice a month.

In 1924, it was estimated the programs had, in one year, touched more than 10,000 people. The notable events of 1924 included three significant accomplishments: (1) The South Side Triangle, a monthly newspaper produced by the South Side YMCA was expanded in size and content and distributed throughout the entire Steelton community; (2) S.C. Jones, a graduate of Yale in civil engineering, who had worked with the Liberian government and instructed at Wilberforce University, joined the YMCA staff; and (3) an inter-church athletic league was formed, expanding into junior and senior leagues and adding volleyball, bowling, track, darts, and horseshoe teams.

Industries provided English classes, and encouraged citizenship, and supported naturalization and civic engagement. At South High School, both Seagrave Corporation and Buckeye Steel began offering night vocational classes in the 1920s, taking advantage of new state mandates and funding. Courses in blueprint reading, mechanical drawing, and shop mathematics were taught by foremen of the two companies in two-four hour blocks on Monday and Wednesday evenings and were heavily attended by employees and students.

Three Ohio State University historians, all very familiar with Buckeye and S.P. Bush, noted the importance of Welfare Capitalism for a diverse, working-class neighborhood. They cited labor historian, Gerald Zahavi’s research on the impact a broad array of programs that discouraged unionization and inspired loyalty in the hard times of depressions and despite cutbacks. Success was, however, “ a genuine two-way street between management and labor...the important story of industrial relations in the U.S.”

Oral histories conducted in 1987 for the Southside Neighborhood Design Center reflected similar sentiments from older residents. They felt Buckeye was a fair and caring industry, nurturing and modeling civic engagement in the community even though they themselves were not employed by Buckeye.

Neighborhoods and Settlement Patterns

By 1918, a multi-ethnic community revealed smaller ethnic concentrations fostered perhaps by the location of a religious institution, proximity to others who spoke the same language, or other family members who lived nearby.

A 1920 study described Steelton as a neighborhood was primarily “a workingman’s district, still by no means represented a uniform standard of living...proximity to work doubtless accounted for the residences here...fully fifty-one percent of the adult male works in a sampled group walked to and from work.” Proximity to work also accounted for increased home ownership. Home ownership was achieved not only by careful savings. Most households took in boarders before World War I; after World War I, this continued, but was often limited to relatives or extended families until one mortgage could be paid, and then another was acquired (often next door) for another family member. Most had savings accounts in banks—especially the Steelton branch closest to the industrial sites.

Using one street as an example of ethnic concentrations, the 1918 city directory listed 43 structures on Woodrow Avenue from South Seventh Street to Parsons Avenue. There were two churches, Church of Christ and the Reformed Hungarian Church, one vacancy, 40 residences occupied by 28 families headed by males with Hungarian surnames. Their occupations included 20 laborers, 1 driver, 3 carpenters, 2 foremen, a molder, a steel worker, and a bricklayer. This remained the pattern in 1925 when a settlement house worker remembered the area as “a motley district where every street represented a different racial or national aggregation...in this section (Reeb to Hinman Avenues) there are nineteen nationalities with Hungarians in the largest number.”

The west side of Parsons Avenue within the city limits contained many residential streets. Baist maps on Woodrow Avenue, between Parsons and South High , show 200 building lots platted in 1899 and approximately 50% had a dwelling on each lot. In 1910, about 80% of the more than 870 platted building lots around Woodrow Avenue contained a dwelling. By 1920, 900 building lots were almost filled to 100%.

The rapid growth in housing was the result of two factors—developer speculation based on the perceived need for worker housing because of the factory expansions and the extension of the streetcar lines to the city’s southern limits on both South High and Parsons Avenue.

In 1973, the Columbus Department of Development noted that Steelton was made up of working-class houses typically built between 1890 and 1920 in a “Midwestern American tradition of wooden frames on narrow lots....the style of the housing was somewhat the result of a combination of the earlier Queen Anne styles with that of the turn of the century Colonial Revival.”

An early businessman of the Hungarian Jewish community, whose family became retail entrepreneurs and property owners, noted in his family’s history that the houses were typical of homes of blue-collar workers of the day, on narrow lots, with well groomed yards, and “the typical house was two-story with a wide front porch, topped by a portico roof....front room downstairs and a side stairway leading up to three bedrooms.”

The Columbus Neighborhood Design Center noted noted “housing closest to the steel mills” was laid out like the company town that it was, with unimproved streets and unlimited pollution” from both the mills and a glue factory on Hosack. However, the commercial businesses of Parsons Avenue formed a vibrant area even into the 1950s, and streets north of Barthman Avenue were “developed as a working class suburbia.”

Even into the late 1970s, as factories were closing and just six months after Federal Glass left 1500 unemployed, Hungarian-Americans lived predominately on Reeb, Innis, Hinman, and Woodrow Avenues. Many Croatians and Czechs (Bohemians) lived on Hinman and the first block of Barthman Avenues. Italians also lived on Innis and Barthman Avenues and on Fifth and Sixth Streets that crossed Barthman. Lithuanians and Serbs also lived on Hosack, Hinman and Morrill Avenues, and African Americans lived on Reeb and Hosack Avenues closest to the steel mills.

Migration and Coal Mining

In addition to immigration, Steelton was a destination for migrants. Most arrived traveling north into Columbus from both Appalachia and from the Deep South, beginning in Steelton’s very early years as industries were being established.

African Americans near Roanoke, Virginia, worked in salt mining or tobacco fields both before and after the Civil War, but with the arrival of Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, many moved eastward into the Kanawha-New River area of West Virginia, joined by others from Pennsylvania where all hoped to find employment in railroads and later mining. Even a young Booker T. Washington, later president of Tuskegee University, worked with his father-in-law in salt and later coal mines. Coal mine companies preferred hiring work crews of a “judicious mixture” of race and ethnicity—whites, blacks, and immigrants—whom they felt could be played against each other to the company’s advantage. It was in this region and time that Richard L. Davis began his career as an early African American labor organizer for the Knights of Labor. He would later come into Ohio during the Hocking Valley mining conflicts that affected Columbus.

Though coal was mined only privately and in small amounts in the early 19th century, it became a more valuable and useful commodity when a means by which to move it came; coal was needed for industrial development in Columbus. The Columbus & Hocking Valley Railroad on August 16, 1869 sent the first cars of coal from Nelsonville, called the Little City of the Black Diamonds, sixty miles north to Columbus. Regular routes connected Athens, Ohio and Columbus less than a year later, and by the early 1870s, the Columbus & Hocking Valley Railroad supplied the city with 20% of its coal. These could be good times of employment and hope. But what brought workers from the mines into Columbus were the bad times. New arrivals to the South Side and Steelton were the result of Eastern European upheavals, but also the result of mining strikes, lockdowns, labor stalemates, violence, and meager wages in nearby Southern Ohio coal mining towns, c. 1890-1900s.

Mine owners frequently pitted ethnic groups against the native-born workers. In 1884, when the coal market was severely depressed, two Hocking Valley companies cut workers’ pay to 70 cents per ton and allowed work only 4-10 days a month. Then having formed a syndicate and agreed upon actions, they reduced pay to 60 cents to which 3000 miners responded by striking on June 23, 1884. On July 14, 250 Italians were brought in at $1.40 a day and later an additional 250 Italians, Hungarians, and African Americans were brought in, protected day and night by armed guards and, late,r Ohio militia. Fortifications were built. The strike lasted 10 months. Its devastation was well publicized by correspondents from the national press, like Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and Harper’s Weekly. One reporter said the women were even more determined than the men, quoting “one woman with scarcely clothing to cover her, said, ‘I will go out on the bank of the creek and die with my baby in my arms before I will allow my husband to work for 50 cents a ton.’” Violence and instability occurred 60 miles from Columbus as the new industries in Steelton were appearing.

Hungarians were sometimes referred to in newspapers as “our Chinese,” to be used by the governor or mine owners as strike breakers. Hungarians were not favored by the leadership of labor organizations. The head of the Knights of Labor in 1884 said they “were fast becoming as obnoxious in the East as the Chinese in habits,” referring to their living as a many as 10 in a single room.

The numerous mining strikes and threats of lockouts in Nelsonville, Ohio in the 1890s caused disruptions and fears. According to local newspaper accounts, mine owners threatened to bring in African American and Chinese strike breakers, but settled on newly-arrived Swedes and Hungarians brought in from Youngstown and Cleveland. Coal mining strikes in nearby Western Pennsylvania, c. 1890s, also contributed to miners seeking employment in the emerging industries of Steelton. The minister of the First Congregational Church on Broad Street and advocate of social justice, Rev. Washington Gladden expressed doubts immigrants should be given citizenship and the right to vote.

The mining towns of Congo and Corning were less than 50 miles from Columbus, directly connected by railroads since the 1880s. Congo was built by the Congo Mining Company (1883), a subsidiary of Columbus’s Sunday Creek Coal Company and ties to Columbus’s Jeffrey Mining and Manufacturing on the North Side.

Congo was “one of the most racially and ethnically diverse workforces to be found anywhere. Irish, Hungarian, and Slavic miners worked side by side with African Americans.” The company town had two housing areas—Hungarian Hill (White Hill) and Alabama Hill (Black Hill). The KKK in the 1920s attempted to gain a foothold in the area, focusing on their hatred of Catholics and African Americans, but eventually when mine ownership in Congo went into receivership and a major fire occurred, the prospects for work finished by the Great Depression. Congo and Corning residents, worn out from lockdowns, strikes, or disasters migrated north.

South High Street, Route 23, was the means by which many migrants arrived. Historically referred to often as “The 3 R’s—Readin, Writing and Route 23,” South High Street was a major migration route for both the Great African American Migration from the Jim Crow South in early 20th century and for Appalachian migrations later in the 1940s and 1960s. Route 23 promised the opportunity for education and a better life. Columbus is less than 90 miles from the Kentucky border. To the south of Columbus, Route 23 continues through Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Later Appalachian migrants, black and white, often settled east in the slum of “Tin Town” (so named for the large junkyard of vehicles and appliances near Parsons and Livingston Avenues or further south in smaller settlements like Stambaugh-Elwood or “Oklahoma.”

Buckeye Steel Castings actively recruited African American workers from Alabama, as did other Columbus industries such as Marble Cliff quarries. The quarries, however, were seasonal summer employment for the Alabama workers who came because the pay was good and the summers were not as hot. Their work, however, was the most dangerous and involved the quarry demolitions. No housing was provided for them; they lived in boxcars. Buckeye, however, encouraged permanent residency and provided some housing. In World War I, Federal Glass actively hired African American women in their production of glass tableware when many men were enlisting.

Between 1910 and 1940, of twelve Midwestern cities studied, Columbus’s African American population increased by more than 66% (St. Louis and Cincinnati doubled) during the Great African American Migration. Night riders, lynchings, poll taxes, and tenant farming pushed African Americans out of the South, and letters from relatives and friends urging them North pulled them to Columbus.

Here was the promise of a “modicum of funds” because “the steel mills were running day and night.” Most came as small groups or individuals from Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. At the same time, white Appalachians came, escaping the violence of West Virginia mining strikes and lockouts and willing to accept menial jobs. Their stories remain largely unrecorded.

External links

• "Meet Steelton Village". Meet Steelton Village. Retrieved 2023-08-22.

Category:Neighborhoods in Columbus, Ohio