Cleveland Rolling Mill

Last updated March 20, 2019

The Cleveland Rolling Mill Company was a rolling steel mill in Cleveland, Ohio. It existed as an independent entity from 1863 to 1899.

In metalworking, rolling is a metal forming process in which metal stock is passed through one or more pairs of rolls to reduce the thickness and to make the thickness uniform. The concept is similar to the rolling of dough. Rolling is classified according to the temperature of the metal rolled. If the temperature of the metal is above its recrystallization temperature, then the process is known as hot rolling. If the temperature of the metal is below its recrystallization temperature, the process is known as cold rolling. In terms of usage, hot rolling processes more tonnage than any other manufacturing process, and cold rolling processes the most tonnage out of all cold working processes. Roll stands holding pairs of rolls are grouped together into rolling mills that can quickly process metal, typically steel, into products such as structural steel, bar stock, and rails. Most steel mills have rolling mill divisions that convert the semi-finished casting products into finished products.

A steel mill or steelworks is an industrial plant for the manufacture of steel. It may be an integrated steel works carrying out all steps of steelmaking from smelting iron ore to rolled product, but may also describe plants where steel semi-finished casting products are made, from molten pig iron or from scrap.

Cleveland is a major city in the U.S. state of Ohio, and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. The city proper has a population of 385,525, making it the 51st-largest city in the United States, and the second-largest city in Ohio. Greater Cleveland is ranked as the 32nd-largest metropolitan area in the U.S., with 2,055,612 people in 2016. The city anchors the Cleveland–Akron–Canton Combined Statistical Area, which had a population of 3,515,646 in 2010 and is ranked 15th in the United States.

Origins

The company stemmed from developments initiated in 1857, when John and David I. Jones, along with Henry Chisholm, established a rolling mill at Newburgh, incorporated as Chisholm, Jones & Company, to reroll worn rails.^[1]^[2] In 1858, Andros B. Stone (brother of Amasa Stone) bought into the firm, which became the Stone, Chisholm & Jones Company, and produced iron rails. The first blast furnace in Cleveland was built by the firm in 1861. In November 1863, an investment from Stone led to the expansion and reorganization of the company, which then became the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company.^[3]

Henry Chisholm was a Scottish American businessman and steel industry executive during the Gilded Age in the United States. A resident of Cleveland, Ohio, he purchased a small, struggling iron foundry which became the Cleveland Rolling Mill, one of the largest steel firms in the nation. He is known as the "father of the Cleveland steel trade".

Amasa Stone, Jr. was an American industrialist who is best remembered for having created a regional railroad empire centered in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1860 to 1883. He gained fame in New England in the 1840s for building hundreds of bridges, most of them Howe truss bridges. After moving into railroad construction in 1848, Stone moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1850. Within four years he was a director of the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad and the Cleveland, Painesville and Ashtabula Railroad. The latter merged with the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, of which Stone was appointed director. Stone was also a director or president of numerous railroads in Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan.

A blast furnace is a type of metallurgical furnace used for smelting to produce industrial metals, generally pig iron, but also others such as lead or copper. Blast refers to the combustion air being "forced" or supplied above atmospheric pressure.

In 1868 the company installed a pair of Bessemer converters, and started using them to produce steel.^[1] During the 1970s, various types of wire products were produced at the mill.^[3] In 1881 the company built Central Furnaces plant, near the Cuyahoga River, for the production of pig iron.^[3]

The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. The key principle is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation also raises the temperature of the iron mass and keeps it molten.

Cuyahoga River river in the United States of America

The Cuyahoga River is a river in the United States, located in Northeast Ohio, that feeds into Lake Erie. The river is famous for having been so polluted that it "caught fire" in 1969. The event helped to spur the environmental movement in the US.

Strikes

In May 1882 the mill was faced with a strike from its skilled workers, mostly of British origin, in response to disregard by the company to union demands. The company recruited Polish and Czech immigrants to replace striking workers, and reopened on 5 June. The company eventually gained the sympathy of the city when the striking workers turned violent on 13 June.^[4]

A trade union, also called a labour union or labor union (US), is an association of workers in a particular trade, industry, or company created for the purpose of securing improvement in pay, benefits, working conditions or social and political status through collective bargaining and working conditions through the increased bargaining power wielded by creation of a monopoly of the workers. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with employers. The most common purpose of these associations or unions is "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment". This may include the negotiation of wages, work rules, complaint procedures, rules governing hiring, firing and promotion of workers, benefits, workplace safety and policies.

In June 1885 a larger and more violent strike occurred, this time led by Polish and Czech workers in response to wage cuts. The violent tactics used by the strikers made the union unable to sustain support by the English-speaking skilled workers, who eventually returned to work in September. To prevent further riots by the unskilled workers, Mayor George Gardner ordered the company's president (William Chisholm, the oldest son of Henry Chisholm) to revert the wage cuts, which ended the strike, although many of the striking workers were denied their jobs back.^[4]

Growth and merger

The company reached its peak in the late 1890s, at which point it had become a major integrated producer of pig iron, Bessemer steel, and steel products, employing a workforce of over 8,000 people.^[1] In 1899 the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company was absorbed into the American Steel and Wire Company of New Jersey, which was in turn merged into J. P. Morgan's U.S. Steel conglomerate two years later.^[1]^[3]

Pig iron is an intermediate product of the iron industry, also known as crude iron, which is first obtained from a smelting furnace in the form of oblong blocks. Pig iron has a very high carbon content, typically 3.8–4.7%, along with silica and other constituents of dross, which makes it very brittle and not useful directly as a material except for limited applications. Pig iron is made by smelting iron ore into a transportable ingot of impure high carbon-content iron in a blast furnace as an ingredient for further processing steps. The traditional shape of the molds used for pig iron ingots was a branching structure formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or runner, resembling a litter of piglets being suckled by a sow. When the metal had cooled and hardened, the smaller ingots were simply broken from the runner, hence the name pig iron. As pig iron is intended for remelting, the uneven size of the ingots and the inclusion of small amounts of sand caused only insignificant problems considering the ease of casting and handling them.

The workforce or labour force is the labour pool in employment. It is generally used to describe those working for a single company or industry, but can also apply to a geographic region like a city, state, or country. Within a company, its value can be labelled as its "Workforce in Place". The workforce of a country includes both the employed and the unemployed. The labour force participation rate, LFPR, is the ratio between the labour force and the overall size of their cohort. The term generally excludes the employers or management, and can imply those involved in manual labour. It may also mean all those who are available for work.

J. P. Morgan American financier, banker, philanthropist and art collector

John Pierpont Morgan Sr. was an American financier and banker who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation in the United States of America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Steelmaking is the process for producing steel from iron ore and scrap. In steelmaking, impurities such as nitrogen, silicon, phosphorus, sulfur and excess carbon are removed from the raw iron, and alloying elements such as manganese, nickel, chromium and vanadium are added to produce different grades of steel. Limiting dissolved gases such as nitrogen and oxygen, and entrained impurities in the steel is also important to ensure the quality of the products cast from the liquid steel.

The Homestead strike, also known as the Homestead Steel strike, Pinkerton rebellion, or Homestead massacre, was an industrial lockout and strike which began on July 1, 1892, culminating in a battle between strikers and private security agents on July 6, 1892. The battle was one of the most violent disputes in U.S. labor history, third behind the Ludlow Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain. The dispute occurred at the Homestead Steel Works in the Pittsburgh area town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, between the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and the Carnegie Steel Company. The final result was a major defeat for the union of strikers and a setback for their efforts to unionize steelworkers.

An ironworks or iron works is a building or site where iron is smelted and where heavy iron and steel products are made. The term is both singular and plural, i.e. the singular of ironworks is ironworks.

Carnegie Steel Company was a steel-producing company primarily created by Andrew Carnegie and several close associates, to manage businesses at steel mills in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area in the late 19th century. The company formed in 1892 and was subsequently sold in 1901 in one of the largest ever business transactions of the early 20th century, to become the major component of the United States Steel Corporation. The subsequent sale made Carnegie one of the richest men in history.

Puddling was one step in one of the most important processes of making the first appreciable volumes of high-grade bar iron during the Industrial Revolution. In the original puddling technique, molten iron in a reverberatory furnace was stirred with rods, which were consumed in the process. It was one of the first processes for making bar iron without charcoal in Europe, although much earlier coal-based processes had existed in China. Eventually, the furnace would be used to make small quantities of specialty steels.

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References

1 2 3 4 "Iron and Steel Industry". Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
↑ "Chisholm, Henry". Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
1 2 3 4 "U.S. Steel Corp." Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.
1 2 "Cleveland Rolling Mill Strikes". Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

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[IASI-1] 1 2 3 4 "Iron and Steel Industry". Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

[Chisholm-2] "Chisholm, Henry". Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

[USSC-3] 1 2 3 4 "U.S. Steel Corp." Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.

[CRMS-4] 1 2 "Cleveland Rolling Mill Strikes". Encyclopedia of Cleveland History.