Twenty years before anyone poured steel on the Vineyard shore, Utah Valley already had a blast furnace. It stood in the fields between Provo and Springville, at a place its builders named Ironton, and the story of how Geneva Steel ended up in private hands runs straight through it.
A furnace in the fields
The company behind it was Columbia Steel, a West Coast steelmaker that wanted its own supply of pig iron. In February 1923 the newly organized Columbia Steel Corporation, capitalized at $20 million and headed by Wigginton E. Creed, president of Pacific Gas and Electric, announced a blast furnace at Provo. The Provo Chamber of Commerce had bought 1,200 acres for $147,000, and about 400 acres between Provo and Springville were turned over for the plant. Construction formally began on May 1, 1923.
The plan stitched together Utah's raw materials. Coal came by rail from the company's Columbia Mine near Sunnyside in Carbon County and was baked into coke in Koppers by-product ovens at the plant. Iron ore came from the Iron Springs district west of Cedar City, and limestone from quarries near Provo. The furnace was blown in on April 30, 1924, and drew its first iron the next day, which made Columbia the first integrated steelmaker in the Far West. Provo held a Steel Day that June, with an iron pour scheduled for 11 in the morning and a crowd of 25,000 expected.
Ironton was rated at about 350 tons of pig iron a day and was soon running above 400. Its 33 coke ovens grew to 56 by 1928. Most of the iron went west by rail to Columbia's open hearth furnaces in Pittsburg and Torrance, California, and Portland, Oregon. In 1926 the Pacific States Cast Iron Pipe Company opened next door, using Ironton's iron, coke and electric power, with 80 employees at the start. Around 1930 the United States Steel Corporation bought Columbia, and Ironton became the Utah outpost of the largest steel company in the country.
Seed of a bigger mill
Ironton's quiet importance came later. Walther Mathesius, who would run Geneva, credited Columbia's experiments with Utah coal, which at first made coke below Eastern standards, for proving that the state's resources could support a big steel mill. When Columbia proposed a $57 million defense expansion in 1941, Utah County leaders first pushed to build it at Ironton, which had more than 600 acres and four rail lines. Their committee listed three fallback sites. One was the old Geneva resort on Utah Lake.
The war mill went to the lake shore instead, but Ironton grew too. In 1943 the government moved a blast furnace from Joliet, Illinois, to Ironton and blew it in on July 1. Wilford Oveson was one of the men who moved between the two plants: he worked at Ironton before taking a construction job at Geneva and then spent decades in its rolling mill.
Who would run Geneva
By 1945 the question was what would happen to Geneva when the war ended. The government had spent around $200 million on it. In August 1945 U.S. Steel announced it was no longer interested in buying, citing the difficulty of making the plant pay in peacetime. Henry J. Kaiser, whose Fontana mill in California had been built with a federal loan, announced in July 1945 that he wanted Geneva as the cornerstone of a western steel empire. Utah Senator Abe Murdock tried to calm a valley watching its biggest employer wind down: "The only question is who will operate it."
Any bidder on Geneva Steel sees a need for reduction in freight rates.U.S. Steel, quoted in Time, May 1946
Governor Herbert Maw and the Utah senators had already appealed, without success, when the War Production Board halted work on Geneva's structural steel unit in 1944. Western business groups argued that the West needed both Geneva and Fontana, and that freight rates had to be set on Western costs rather than Eastern ones. In October 1945 the plant was formally declared surplus.
The sealed bids were opened in Washington on May 1, 1946. There were seven, starting at $38.75 million. The strongest came from Columbia Steel on behalf of U.S. Steel, which had changed its mind: $47.5 million, with $40 million for the plant and $7.5 million for inventory, plus promises to spend at least $18 million more at Geneva and $25 million on a cold reduction mill at Pittsburg, California, to finish Geneva's steel. The offer depended on lower rail rates for Western steel. Big Steel told reporters, "Any bidder on Geneva Steel sees a need for reduction in freight rates." Colorado Fuel and Iron offered to lease the plant with an option to buy.
Kaiser never bid. Time magazine guessed that the $115 million he still owed the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was enough debt for the moment, and the New York Times reported that he wanted his Fontana debt marked down to whatever price Geneva fetched. On May 23, 1946, the War Assets Administration accepted U.S. Steel's offer as the most advantageous. The terms called for $5 million at turnover, $7.5 million at the inventory transfer and $35 million two years later.
Critics said Big Steel was getting a gift. The Justice Department's own Antitrust Division advised against the sale, but Attorney General Tom C. Clark ruled on June 17 that it did not appear to violate the antitrust laws, while saying his approval did not cover how U.S. Steel used the property. The sale closed on June 19, 1946, for roughly a quarter of what the plant had cost. Utah opinion favored the deal, and steelmaking resumed at Geneva that July.
The end of Ironton
Geneva Steel Company was headquartered in Salt Lake City, with Mathesius as president until 1951. In 1953 Geneva and Columbia became U.S. Steel's Columbia Geneva Steel Division, and the old Ironton plant came under the same roof. Kaiser did get a piece of Utah steel after all: in 1949 the government sold the wartime Joliet furnace at Ironton to a Kaiser company, which ran it until May 1950. U.S. Steel leased it in 1951 and used it at peak times to send hot metal to Geneva.
Geneva had made the small furnace south of Provo redundant. U.S. Steel blew out Ironton's furnaces for the last time in April 1962, and some support work continued until the plant was closed in 1966. Dismantling began in August 1969 and was finished by October 1971. Provo later bought parts of the 338-acre site, and an environmental cleanup there ran from 1998 to 2000. The mill that Ironton helped make possible outlived its predecessor by four decades, on the farmland that is now Vineyard.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/ironton-and-the-sale-of-geneva/
