Geneva in the Cold War

When U.S. Steel took over Geneva in the summer of 1946, the mill on the Vineyard shore was a giant built for one customer that no longer existed. It had been designed to roll heavy plate and structural shapes for wartime shipyards. In August 1946 two of its three blast furnaces, two of four coke oven batteries and three of nine open hearth furnaces were running, along with the slabbing and plate mills. The structural mill sat idle. A little more than 2,000 people worked at the plant, the Horse Canyon coal mine and the Payson quarry. Late that year the works ran at roughly a quarter of capacity.

Over the next decade the Cold War would refill it. The new owner spent about $75 million converting and enlarging Geneva for a peacetime market, and much of what came off its mills went into the long steel arteries of the postwar oil and gas economy.

Plate for the pipelines

The key customer was in Los Angeles. In 1947 U.S. Steel's Columbia subsidiary agreed to buy Consolidated Steel, a West Coast fabricator, which became Consolidated Western Steel in 1948. The Justice Department challenged the deal under the Sherman Act, and the case went to the Supreme Court, whose June 1948 decision let the purchase stand. Geneva now had a captive buyer for its plate.

Consolidated rolled that plate into big pipe. Geneva supplied the plate for a 214 mile segment of the El Paso gas line between Blythe and Santa Fe Springs in California. One account says Consolidated also bought Geneva plate for 980 miles of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline being built across Saudi Arabia. Then came the Kirkuk to Baniyas line, a 30 inch oil pipe from the fields of northern Iraq to the Syrian coast, which went into operation in April 1952. Consolidated bought 167,918 tons of plate for it in 1950 and 1951, and Geneva rolled the plates.

In 1954 Consolidated Western announced it would move pipe making to Utah. Its new pipe mill at Provo began shipping in May 1955, first for the Pacific Northwest Pipeline Corporation, turning out large pipe from 20 to 36 inches across. In January 1956 a small diameter pipe mill arrived from Berkeley, California. In 1957 the Provo mill produced 241 miles of 30 inch pipe for a line between Needles and Newhall, California. Railroad historian Mark Hemphill counts it as an $8 million welded pipe mill added to Geneva's operations in 1955.

Meanwhile the rest of the mill was remade for consumer steel. Late in 1948 the plate mill was nearly converted to hot rolled coil, which was shipped to Columbia Steel's new cold reduction plant at Pittsburg, California, to become sheet and tin plate. A hot rolled coil mill was in service by 1950. That fall Geneva announced another 100,000 tons a year of hot rolled sheet, adding about 50 jobs.

Seized for Korea

War came again in June 1950, this time in Korea. Instead of the hard price controls of World War II, the Truman administration tried to restrain inflation through a Wage Stabilization Board. In 1952 the steel companies refused the board's proposed raises unless they could lift prices by more than the government would allow, and the United Steelworkers called a national strike for April 9.

The night before, President Harry S. Truman ordered his Secretary of Commerce to seize the nation's steel mills. Executive Order 10340 justified the step by noting that American forces were "now engaged in deadly combat with the forces of aggression in Korea." The list of seized companies included the Geneva Steel Company of Salt Lake City and, separately, the Columbia Steel Company of San Francisco. For eight weeks the federal government was again, on paper, the operator of the plant it had built. On June 2, 1952, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer that the seizure was unconstitutional, and the mills went back to their owners. The steelworkers struck again for more than 50 days. Decades later Louis Ringger, an assistant to Geneva's general superintendent, still counted the day Truman "took over the plants" among the ways government had hurt the steel business.

A boom in the valley

Geneva kept growing through it all. A tenth open hearth furnace was added in 1952 and a hot rolled sheet mill in 1953. On January 1, 1953, Geneva Steel and Columbia Steel became U.S. Steel's Columbia Geneva Steel Division. By 1957 Geneva was producing more than two million tons of steel ingots a year, and through the 1950s it met roughly a quarter of the West's steel needs. A nitrogen products plant, described at the time as one of the first of its kind, was completed in 1957. In March 1958 U.S. Steel finished a coal preparation plant at Wellington in Carbon County to wash coal for Geneva's coke ovens.

The steel reshaped Utah Valley. By 1951 Geneva Steel and Columbia Iron Mining together were the largest single employer in Utah, and about 5,000 employees lived in Utah County. In 1950 the plant employed 19.3 percent of the valley's labor force. Orem, which had 2,914 residents in 1940, counted 8,351 in 1950 and 18,394 in 1960. By 1960, according to one estimate, 30 percent of Utah County's workers worked at Geneva, most of them former farm hands from the orchards and fields it replaced.

The mill also learned to live with its farm neighbors. Fluoride from the plant had hurt dairy herds, and farmers took the company to court; one West Jordan dairyman, whose son David Bigler later became U.S. Steel's top public relations man in Salt Lake City, won compensation after fluoride ruined his cows' teeth. In 1953 Geneva opened an experimental farm where company scientists studied fluoride's effects on more than 150 crop varieties. In a valley that had once been wary of a federal war plant, a 1951 farewell banquet for Geneva's first president, Walther Mathesius, drew David O. McKay, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with five other apostles.

The good years had a limit that planners had spotted from the start. Geneva sat roughly a thousand miles from either coast and shipped by rail. Starting in 1959, imported steel began arriving on the Pacific Coast by sea at much lower freight costs, and Geneva's long Cold War boom began, slowly, to turn.