By the 1980s, World War I was fast fading from living memory. But several elderly doughboys, then living at Allentown’s Phoebe Home, were still willing to share their experiences of the war that was to make the world safe for democracy, a war that would end all wars. Tragically it did neither. One among their ranks had a particularly dramatic tale to tell. He recalled crawling under the coiled rolls of barbed wire surrounding German trenches and suddenly looking up to see a small tag. As he recalled, it was stamped with the words- in English- “Barb Wire Works Allentown Pa.” As an Allentown native he recalled feeling a mixture of anger and resentment at the time but many years later wondered at the irony of it all.
This did not mean that the company was trading with the enemy. Allentown Barb Wire, by then a subsidiary of U.S Steel known as the American Steel and Wire Company, had been around since the 1880s and sold an awful lot of barbed wire to both sides in World War I before the U.S. entered the conflict in 1917. But it does tell of the importance of the international impact of the plant that was known locally as simply “the wire mill.”
At its height from 1900 to 1920, the 13-acre facility employed 1,200 men working 12-hour shifts and had its own police and fire departments as well as a small hospital. Telegraph keys clicked around the clock to a staff taking orders, and steam locomotives puffed in and out in a constant stream. A small community focused on Wire Street, many of them immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire, that made up part of the mill’s work force. Allentown residents kept time by its whistle.
According to some sources the wire mill came to Allentown as the result of a buggy ride. First known as the Iowa Barb Wire Company, it was founded in 1879 in Johnstown, Cambria County. It was a branch of the Iowa Barb Wire Fence Company of Marshalltown, Iowa. In 1881 it became its own company. The president was Charles Douglass. His brother George was secretary-treasurer. Apparently wanting to be closer to the East coast market, the Douglass brothers moved the company to Easton in 1884. But within two years they realized they had made a mistake. While a beautiful location it was confined by hills and the Delaware River. They needed room to expand. Easton just did not offer that.
By 1886 George Douglass was on the lookout for something nearby. That summer he took a trip to Allentown. Some sources suggest it was just an afternoon jaunt. But if so, it was one that took him to the office of Edward H. Reninger, secretary to the Allentown Board of Trade, ancestor of the Allentown Chamber of Commerce. Allentown had been recovering from the Panic of 1873 that had KO’d the city’s iron industry. The arrival of a silk mill in 1881 from Paterson, N.J. had begun a process of development that was taking the city away from relying on only one major industry.
Hearing Douglass outline his woes, Reninger began to forcefully point out the virtues of Allentown. Some sources claim that Reninger gave Douglass a buggy ride out to the Little Lehigh to show him a prime piece of 13 acres of real estate. Others claim he merely persuaded him to see the land for himself. Whatever it was it worked.
The barb wire industry was only beginning to get organized in the early 1880s. It was made up of large number of small producers. Since the creation of barb wire was relatively simple, competition was common. It drove the price down. Several plans were tried by early wire men Joseph Glidden and Isaac L. Ellwood through patents and pooling operations to raise the price. It drove some of the competition out of the business, but it was not the total monopoly that the bigger producers wanted. It was the arrival on the scene of the colorful figure of John Warne Gates, better known to the press and public as “Bet-a-Million Gates” that the mega barbed wire corporation of which Allentown Barb Wire was eventually a part, was accomplished.
The few who knew Gates in his early years thought he would ever amount to much. A farm boy who hated farming, he started several businesses that failed. What he seemed to be most interested in was playing poker at the railroad station with his buddies. It was not until Gates became a salesman for the Washburn-Moen barb wire company that he seemed to have found his niche. Assigned to the Texas sales territory, he was given the task of convincing stubborn local cattlemen that barb wire was the best way to keep their cattle from wandering off. Taking over the San Antonio Military Plaza, he had a large herd of cattle charge the wire fence. When they saw how it stopped stampeding cattle, the ranchers were sold. Soon Gates was so successful he decided to form his own company.
Starting in 1890, Gates, through a serious of mergers and take-overs, created the monopoly that other barb wire makers had found impossible. His gambler’s instinct, as he saw it, was a way to see the weakness of opponents. It was in 1892 that Gates acquired Allentown Barb Wire. By 1899 it was a part of a huge barbed wire business eventually called the American Steel and Wire Company. Asked by Congress what his goal was, Gates replied, “We wanted to be the wire manufactures of the world.” A detailed account of Gates’ business doings appears in the 1978 issue of “Business History Review” magazine in an article by historian Joseph McFadden.
But also in those ten years that he created his monopoly Gates was making headlines for things other than his business interests. It was over a horse race bet that he got his colorful nickname. In 1900 Gates won $600,000 on a $70,000 bet on a race in England. Newspapers inflated this to a million dollars and the name stuck. Gates claimed not to like his nickname, but he never tried to stop its use. His riotous poker games at the Waldorf Astoria hotel were legendary and not a good kind of legend. The elevator staff was warned not to argue with Gates when he pounded on the doors after a heavy drinking, card playing night. He was refused admission to London’s Claridge hotel after one disastrous visit.
It was natural that Gates would eventually clash with his total opposite, mega investment banker J.P. Morgan. Morgan’s idea of a “wild” card game was solitaire. He enjoyed discussing theology with Episcopal bishops. He liked nothing better than wandering through his New York mansion’s library, looking over his collection of illuminated medieval manuscripts presided over by his expert librarian, Belle da Costa Greene. According to Morgan biographer Jean Strouse, although she claimed Portuguese/Dutch ancestry Greene was an African American, Belle Marion Greener, whose father was the first Black man to graduate from Harvard. “If Morgan knew about Belle’s background he left no indication of it,” Strouse writes. ”Once she had become indispensable in his library he might not have cared.”
Morgan’s passion in business was like Gates in one way: he believed in consolidation he controlled. Morgan eventually, in 1901, acquired American Steel and Wire from Gates and made it a part of the new U.S. Steel Company headed by 39-year-old Charles “Charlie” Schwab. But that was not before he let an enraged Gates know his presence on its board was not welcome. The two continued to battle over other business interests until Gates’ death in Paris in 1911. He is remembered today in Port Arthur, Texas for his many contributions to that city.
Meanwhile the workers in Allentown continued their work. Steel ingots would arrive from Pittsburgh where they were melted and rolled into wire that was transformed into barbed wire, galvanized wire and nails of all shapes and sizes. It was extremely productive in its time and continued to prosper into the 1920s. The arrival of the Great Depression was the start of the long, slow decline of the Allentown Wire Mill. During World War II it won a few defense contracts but in the summer of 1943 U.S. Steel moved its operations to its Ohio plants. That December the wire mill was closed for good.
Roofless and in ruin, fires there were frequent in the 1950s and 60’s. Finally, the buildings were knocked down and a parklike space created. In 1995, 109 years after the famous buggy ride, the city with the help of the Allentown Garden Club dedicated the site as the Wire Mill Meadow, an arboretum.
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