Howard Pyle, The Burning of Jamestown, an early-twentieth-century illustration, not an eyewitness view. Public domain.
At Carnegie’s Homestead mill, a lockout and a gun battle with private guards broke the union.
A poor steel household lost the union scale and then, for many, the job itself, and blacklists followed them to other mills.
A small merchant in Homestead lived on those wages and felt the town go quiet and bitter.
Carnegie was abroad, Henry Clay Frick ran the lockout, and the company kept the works on its own terms.
In July 1892 the steelworkers’ union fought Frick’s Pinkerton guards on the river when the company tried to reopen Homestead with nonunion men.
The Pennsylvania militia then occupied the town.
The union was crushed in that mill, and Carnegie Steel went on without it.
David P. Demarest, editor, The River Ran Red (1992); Paul Krause, The Battle for Homestead (1992)