Geneva Steel and the War

In November 1941, one month before Pearl Harbor, the federal government approved a steel mill on the farmland at Vineyard. The site made sense on a map: coal, iron ore and limestone could come by rail from mines around Utah, water from Deer Creek Reservoir and wells, and the land sat far inland, safe from any attack on the West Coast.

By March 1942 the government had bought the farms. More than 10,000 workers built the mill, from November 1941 to December 1944. It cost about $200 million in federal money, the largest wartime project the government financed.

Fires, and shortages of workers, equipment and materials, slowed the work. Traffic grew so heavy that in April 1942 American Fork asked the county to widen the road north from Geneva.

In April 1944 the first order, 600 tons of steel plate, went to California shipyards, where it was used to build Liberty ships, the cargo ships that carried supplies across the oceans. Geneva steel also went into shells for the Army.

About 4,200 people worked at the mill during the war. It turned out 634,000 tons of plate steel and 144,000 tons of steel shapes. Short of hands, Geneva advertised for workers in newspapers across the country and hired 613 women between January 1944 and September 1945.

On February 25, 1945, three American airmen who had been held in a German prison camp wrote to the company asking for jobs.

Vineyard was a small farm community with its own ward and its own column of neighborhood news in the local paper. In December 1941 its Sunday School sent books to "the boys of Vineyard ward who are serving in the army or navy."

The column followed them all through the war: four Utah National Guardsmen waiting at Angel Island for ships to the Pacific, a sailor near the Philippines when Japan attacked, a son stationed at San Diego. Then, from 1945 on, it printed the news families waited for. They were coming home.

At Christmas 1946, carols played from a loudspeaker at the mill's Number 2 gate, and the paper reported that members of Vineyard ward greatly appreciated it. The war had taken Vineyard's sons away and put a steel mill in its fields, and now both belonged to the town.