Description: Dated ca. 1930-1939, this photograph shows an American Steel & Wire Company worker preparing for the fence-wrapping machine. American Steel & Wire Company was founded around 1899 by Elbert Henry Gary, who purchased several competing barbed wire companies in order to limit competition and drive up prices. In 1901, American Steel and Wire became a subsidiary of the U.S. Steel Company. Their main Cleveland facilities were American Works, Central Furnaces and Dock and Newburgh Works. In 1924, the division’s national headquarters moved to the Rockefeller Building in Cleveland, Ohio. Starting in the 1940s, renovations began to modernized the old building, which dated to 1857 with the founding of Jones & Company in Newburgh Township, a suburb south of Cleveland. The American Steel & Wire division of U.S. Steel dissolved in 1964 and the Cleveland offices moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1986, the American Steel & Wire Corporation purchased the Cuyahoga Works (same location, but a consolidated version of the aforementioned facilities). This photograph is one of the many visual materials collected for use in the Ohio Guide. In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration by executive order to create jobs for the large numbers of unemployed laborers, as well as artists, musicians, actors, and writers. The Federal Arts Program, a sector of the Works Progress Administration, included the Federal Writers’ Project, one of the primary goals of which was to complete the America Guide series, a series of guidebooks for each state which included state history, art, architecture, music, literature, and points of interest to the major cities and tours throughout the state. Work on the Ohio Guide began in 1935 with the publication of several pamphlets and brochures. The Reorganization Act of 1939 consolidated the Works Progress Administration and other agencies into the Federal Works Administration, and the Federal Writers’ Project became the Federal Writers’ Project in Ohio. The final product was published in 1940 and went through several editions. The Ohio Guide Collection consists of 4,769 photographs collected for use in Ohio Guide and other publications of the Federal Writers’ Project in Ohio from 1935-1939. View on Ohio Memory.
Image ID: SA1039AV_B08F01_025_001
Subjects: American Steel and Wire Company; U.S. Steel Corporation; Steel-works--Ohio; Employees
Places: Cleveland (Ohio); Cuyahoga County (Ohio)