19th century ,
South Bethlehem, and
Northampton County , photographed by
William H. Rau in 1896 In 1857, the first iron works in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was launched as the Saucona Iron Company by Augustus Wolle. That same year, the
Panic of 1857, a national financial crisis, halted the company's further organization. Another organization subsequently started, its site moved elsewhere to
South Bethlehem, and the company's name was changed to the Bethlehem Rolling Mill and Iron Company. He returned to the U.S. as Whitworth's agent and, in 1885, was granted an extended furlough to pursue this personal interest. Jaques was aware that the U.S. Navy would soon solicit bids for the production of heavy guns and other products such as armor that would be needed to further expand the fleet, and he contacted the Bethlehem Iron Company with a proposal to serve as an intermediary between it and the Whitworth Company, so Bethlehem Iron could erect a heavy forging plant to produce ordnance. In 1885,
John F. Fritz, sometimes referred to as the father of the U.S. steel industry, accompanied Bethlehem Iron directors
Robert H. Sayre, Elisha Packer Wilbur, president of
Lehigh Valley Railroad, William Thurston, and
Joseph Wharton, founder of the
Wharton School, to meet with Jaques in
Philadelphia. In early 1886, Bethlehem Iron and the Whitworth Company executed a contract. In the spring 1886,
Congress passed a naval appropriations bill that authorized the construction of two armored second-class battleships, one protected cruiser, one first-class torpedo boat, and the complete rebuilding and modernization of two Civil War-era monitors. The two second-class battleships, the and the , both had large-caliber guns with 12-inch and 10-inch, respectively, and heavy armor plating. Bethlehem secured both the forging and armor contracts on June 28, 1887. Between 1888 and 1892, the Bethlehem Iron Company completed the first U.S. heavy-forging plant, which was designed by John Fritz with assistance from
Russell Davenport, who joined Bethlehem Iron in 1888. By fall 1890, Bethlehem Iron was delivering gun forging to the U.S. Navy and was completing facilities to provide armor plating. For the
1893 Chicago World's Fair, Bethlehem Iron Company provided the steel used in the creation of a 45.5-foot steel axle to support the world's first
Ferris wheel, a structure. The iron was manufactured in Bethlehem Iron Company's
blast furnaces converted to steel in their Open Hearth furnaces, then forged. It represented the largest single steel forging ever constructed at the time. In 1898,
Frederick Winslow Taylor joined the Bethlehem Iron Company as a management consultant charged with solving the company's expensive machine shop capacity challenge. The Bethlehem Iron Company was very successful and profitable, and the company's corporate management believed that it could be even more profitable. To accomplish this, the corporate ownership of the Bethlehem Iron Company switched to steel production, and the company's name was formally changed to Bethlehem Steel Company.
Bethlehem Steel Company In 1899, Bethlehem Steel Company was established. Bethlehem Steel Company, also then known as Bethlehem Steel Works, was incorporated to take over all liabilities of the Bethlehem Iron Company. Bethlehem Iron Company and the Bethlehem Steel Company operated as separate companies under the same ownership. Bethlehem Steel Company leased the properties, which were owned by the Bethlehem Iron Company.
20th century being assembled at Bethlehem Steel, -era photo of St. Michael's Cemetery in
Bethlehem (foreground) and the smokestacks of Bethlehem Steel (background) in 1935 by
Walker Evans in
Quincy, Massachusetts during
World War II warships, (left) and (right) in 1943 during World War II in
Buffalo, New York, in 1973 ducting In 1901,
Charles M. Schwab (no relation to the stockbroker
Charles R. Schwab), purchased Bethlehem Steel Company, and named Samuel Broadbent as its vice president. Bethlehem Steel Corporation was formed by Schwab, who had recently resigned from
U.S. Steel, and by
Joseph Wharton, who founded
Wharton School at the
University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia. Schwab became the company's first president and first chairman of its board of directors. After its formation, Bethlehem Steel Corporation purchased Bethlehem Steel Company and its remaining subsidiaries from United States Shipbuilding Company. The decision by Bethlehem to pursue the Grey Mill was announced in December 1905. Schwab had earlier tried, and failed, to convince U.S. Steel to produce the beams. The first major project built using the new Bethlehem Grey beams was Gimbel's department store in New York City. It was built using 12,000 tons of Grey beams. In the early 1900s, Samuel Broadbent led an initiative to diversify the company. The corporation diversified beyond steel, managing iron mines in
Cuba and shipyards around the U.S. In 1913, under Broadbent, Bethlehem Steel acquired
Fore River Shipbuilding Company, a
Quincy, Massachusetts-based company, and became one of the world's major shipbuilders. In 1917, it incorporated its shipbuilding division as
Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation Ltd. In 1922, Bethlehem Steel purchased the
Lackawanna Steel Company, which included
Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad and extensive
coal holdings. During
World War I and
World War II, Bethlehem Steel was a major supplier of armor plate and ordinance to the
U.S. armed forces, including armor plate and large-caliber guns used by the U.S. Navy, which proved influential to U.S. victories in both wars. Bethlehem Steel "was the most important to America's national defense of any company in the past century. We wouldn't have won World War I and World War II without it", historian Lance Metz told
The Washington Post in 2003. The company profited greatly from U.S. economic control over the region. "In a single year, 1960, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel realized a greater than 30 percent profit on their
Venezuelan iron investment, and this profit equaled all the taxes paid to the Venezuelan state in the decade since 1950" Bethlehem Steel also relied on Latin American mines for
manganese, an additive for tensile strength. During President
Eurico Dutra's presidency in
Brazil from 1946 to 1951, Bethlehem Steel received 40 million ton of manganese “for 4 percent of the income of exporting it.”
Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corporation's 15
shipyards produced a total of 1,121 ships, more than any other builder during World War II, and nearly one-fifth of the U.S. Navy's two-ocean fleet. Its shipbuilding operations employed as many as 180,000 persons, representing the lion's share of the company's total employment of 300,000 at the time. From 1916 to 1945,
Eugene Grace served as president of Bethlehem Steel, and chairman of the board from 1945 until his retirement in 1957. Grace orchestrated Bethlehem Steel's World War II wartime efforts. In 1943, Grace promised U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt that Bethlehem Steel would manufacture one ship per day, and he ultimately exceeded that commitment by 15 ships. World War II, however, drained Bethlehem Steel of much of its male workforce. With many of its male employees deployed to the war front, the company hired female employees to guard and work on the company's factory floor and in its company offices. After World War II, female workers were promptly fired in favor of male counterparts. On
Liberty Fleet Day, September 27, 1941, then U.S. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt was present at the launching of the first
Liberty ship SS Patrick Henry at Bethlehem Steel's
Bethlehem Fairfield Shipyard in
Baltimore. Also launched the same day were the Liberty SS
James McKay at
Bethlehem Sparrows Point Shipyard in
Sparrows Point, Maryland, and the emergency vessel SS
Sinclair Superflame at the
Fore River Shipyard in
Quincy, Massachusetts.
Late 20th century In 1946, Bethlehem Steel signed a contract with mining company
LKAB, committing the company to contribute to the post-World War II recovery of the iron ore industry in
Norrbotten County in northern
Sweden. Following the end of World War II, Bethlehem Steel's plant continued to supply a wide variety of structural shapes for construction trades.
Galvanized sheet steel under the name BETHCON was widely produced for use as
duct work or spiral conduit. The company also produced forged products for defense, power generation, and steel-producing companies. From 1949 to 1952, Bethlehem Steel had a contract with the
U.S. federal government to roll
uranium fuel rods for
nuclear reactors in Bethlehem Steel's
Lackawanna, New York plant. Workers were not aware of the dangers of the hazardous substance and were not given protective equipment. Some workers later sought compensation under a radiation exposure law, which was enacted in 2000 and required the
U.S. Labor Department to compensate workers up to $150,000 if they developed cancer later in life, provided their work history involved enough radiation exposure to significantly increase their cancer risk. Bethlehem Steel workers, however, have not been awarded this compensation because radiation doses involved in processing fresh uranium fuel is low and produces a small risk relative to baseline risks. The larger danger in processing uranium is chemical poisoning from the heavy metal, which does not produce cancer. The steel industry in the U.S. prospered during and after World War II, while the steel industries in
Germany and
Japan were in ruins, devastated by allied bombardments. Bethlehem Steel's success reached its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The company began manufacturing 23 million tons of steel annually. In 1958, the company's president, Arthur B. Homer, was the nation's highest-paid business executive, and the firm built the first phase of what became its largest plant, Burns Harbor, between 1962 and 1964 in
Burns Harbor, Indiana. In 1967, the company lost its bid to provide steel for the original
World Trade Center. The contracts, a single one of which was for 50,000 tons of steel, went to competitors in Seattle, St. Louis, New York, and Illinois. U.S. global leadership in steel manufacturing lasted about two decades, during which U.S. steel industry operated with little foreign competition. Eventually, however, foreign firms were rebuilt with modern techniques, including
continuous casting, while profitable U.S. companies resisted modernization. Bethlehem Steel experimented with continuous casting but never fully adopted the practice. As the age of Bethlehem Steel workers was increasing, however, the ratio of retirees to workers was rising, meaning that the value created by each worker had to cover a greater portion of pension costs than before. Former top manager Eugene Grace failed to adequately invest in the company's pension plans during the 1950s. At its peak, the company's pension contributions that should have been made were not. As a result, the company encountered difficulty when it faced rising pension costs associated with its retiring workers, which were amplified by the company's diminishing profits and increased global competition. By the 1970s, imported foreign steel was proving cheaper than domestically produced steel, and Bethlehem Steel faced growing competition from mini-mills and smaller-scale operations that could sell steel at lower prices. Flooding from 1972 Hurricane Agnes resulted in the closure of the Cornwall iron mine in 1973. Grace Mine, a Bethlehem owned underground iron mine in Berks County, PA, shut down in 1977. In 1982, Bethlehem Steel reported an unexpected loss of US$1.5 billion, and responded by promptly shutting down much of its operations. The company returned to profitability briefly six years later, in 1988, but restructuring and shutdowns continued through the 1990s. The firm would build a plant in Blythville, Arkansas. Lighter construction styles, featuring lower-height construction styles, such as low-rise buildings, did not require the heavy structural grades of steel that were being produced at the
Bethlehem plant. In 1991, Bethlehem Steel Corporation discontinued
coal mining, which the company had been conducting under the name BethEnergy. In 1992, the
Johnstown plants of the Bethlehem Steel, which were founded in 1852 by the
Cambria Iron Company of Johnstown and were purchased by Bethlehem Steel in 1923, were forced into closure. In 1993, the company also exited the
railroad car business. By the end of 1995, Bethlehem Steel ceased manufacturing steel at its main Bethlehem plant, bringing an end to 140 years of such production in Bethlehem, and the company ceased operations in Bethlehem. Two years later, in 1997, Bethlehem Steel Corporation ceased shipbuilding activities in an attempt to preserve its steel manufacturing operations. In 1998, after denying pension benefits, a lawsuit was filed in the
Third Circuit Court of Appeals in
Philadelphia. The case, Lawrence Hollyfield, Fiduciary to the Estate of Collins Hollyfield v. Pension Plan of Bethlehem Steel Corporation and Subsidiary Companies, was settled in favor of Hollyfield three years later, in 2001. The settlement led to a class action lawsuit filed by Bethlehem Steel's workers union, which led to
PBGC assuming all Bethlehem Steel pension obligations, representing the largest pension such liability assumption in U.S. history.
21st century operations, bankruptcy, and liquidation . In 2007, much of the former headquarters was acquired by Sands Bethworks, a casino later sold and renamed
Wind Creek Bethlehem. In 2001, Bethlehem Steel filed for
bankruptcy, becoming the 25th American steelmaking company in the span of four years between 1998 and 2001 to file for bankruptcy protection. In 2003, the company was dissolved and
liquidated with its remaining assets, including six plants, acquired by the
International Steel Group. International Steel Group, in turn, was acquired by
Mittal Steel in 2005, which then merged with
Arcelor to become
ArcelorMittal in 2006. Despite closing its local operations, Bethlehem Steel tried to reduce the significant economic and social impact on
Bethlehem and the
Lehigh Valley area, announcing plans to revitalize the south side of Bethlehem where its headquarters and primary plant had existed since the mid-19th century. The company hired consultants to develop conceptual plans on the reuse of the massive property, and a consensus emerged to rename the site
Bethlehem Works and to use the land for cultural, recreational, educational, entertainment, and retail development. The
National Museum of Industrial History, in association with the
Smithsonian Institution and the Bethlehem Commerce Center, consisting of of prime industrial property in Bethlehem would be erected on the site along with a
casino and a large retail and entertainment complex. In 2007, the Bethlehem Steel property was sold to
Sands BethWorks, which planned to build a casino where the plant once stood. Construction began in fall 2007, and the casino was completed in 2009. Due to a global steel shortage at the time, the casino had difficulty finding the 16,000 tons of structural steel needed for construction of the $600 million casino complex. The site of the company's original plant in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania is home to SteelStacks, an arts and entertainment district. The plant's rusted five blast furnaces were left standing and serve as a backdrop for the new campus. SteelStacks currently features the ArtsQuest Center, a contemporary performing arts center, the
Wind Creek Bethlehem casino resort, formerly Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem, a gambling emporium, and new studios for
WLVT-TV, the Lehigh Valley's
PBS affiliate. The area includes three outdoor music venues: Levitt Pavilion is a free music venue featuring lawn seating for up to 2,500 people, Air Products Town Square at Steelstacks, and PNC Plaza, which hosts outdoor concerts. Levitt Pavilion and the casino resort are connected via the
Hoover-Mason Trestle linear park. At the former Cambria Iron Company plant in
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the blacksmith shop, carpentry and pattern shop, and rolling mill administration buildings are now part of the Center for Metal Arts. On November 9, 2016, a warehouse being used as a recycling facility that was part of the Bethlehem Steel complex in
Lackawanna, New York caught fire and burned down. On May 19, 2019,
Martin Tower, Bethlehem Steel's former corporate headquarters building in West Bethlehem, was demolished. Bethlehem Steel's corporate records are housed at the
Hagley Museum and Library in
Wilmington, Delaware, the
National Canal Museum in Easton, PA, and the
National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, PA. == Shipyards ==