Steel Country

When the war ended, nobody knew what would happen to the mill. In August 1945 Utah County leaders met to keep it from closing. In June 1946 the government sold it to U.S. Steel for $47.5 million, far less than the $200 million that built it.

That year Life magazine called Geneva the "new decade's answer to the gloomy '30s." For four decades it was the biggest employer in Utah County. By 1960 it employed 30 percent of the county's workers, and in the early 1960s it reached nearly 8,000 workers.

Families gave it their whole working lives. Four generations of the Miller family worked about 160 years in all at Geneva and another valley mill. At night, one daughter remembered, the lit up mill looked like a cruise ship.

By the 1980s American steel was in trouble, and U.S. Steel shut Geneva down. Joe Cannon, a Utah native and Washington lawyer, believed the mill could make money again. With his brother Chris and a group of investors, many from the BYU law school, he set out to buy it.

When the deal nearly collapsed, Senator Orrin Hatch persuaded U.S. Steel to keep the mill going for one more month. At midnight on August 31, 1987, the first shift walked back through the gates. About 1,100 jobs were saved.

Geneva made money in its first month. New furnaces, bought from an idle mill near Chicago and carried west on five barges and 92 trucks, cut a batch of steel from five and a half hours to 45 minutes. The Wall Street Journal called it a "miracle mill."