Donora: Cement City. May 10, 2018

Copyright © 2018                                      John F. Oyler

May 10, 2018

Donora: Cement City

The April program meeting for the Bridgeville Area Historical Society was an interesting presentation on a progressive (at least at that time) planned development in Donora early in the twentieth center. The speaker was Brian Charlton, a self-described “conceptual historian” whose talk was focused on connecting concepts: social, economic, industrial and demographics. 

Mr. Charlton’s credentials include teaching history in the Belle Vernon School District, serving as curator of the Donora Smog Museum, and being a co-author of the Arcadia publication, “Donora”.  His specific subject was “Cement City”, a Donora neighborhood that includes about eighty residences constructed from concrete.

The speaker began by discussing Thomas A. Edison. He caught my attention immediately by referencing two movies I saw nearly eight decades ago – “Young Tom Edison”, with Mickey Rooney, and “Edison, the Man”, Spencer Tracy – and the caricature of Edison, the hard-working genius inventor, that they presented.

According to Mr. Charlton, Edison was much more than that. In addition to being a hard-boiled capitalist, he was also altruistic and a pioneer in social engineering, and very concerned in his legacy. Late in the nineteenth century he became interested in a commercial venture milling iron ore, a business that was not successful.

A by-product of this process was a large quantity of finely ground sand which he sold to cement producers. This contact got him interested in the production of Portland Cement and the founding of the Edison Portland Cement Company. To generate uses for his cement he experimented with making concrete furniture, refrigerators, and even phonographs.

In Edison’s mind the ideal concrete product was affordable housing. His experiments in this area led to numerous improvements in technology, including re-useable forms, continuous pouring from a derrick high above the forms, and the process of pumping concrete. He became convinced this technology would revolutionize the housing industry and provide quality housing for low income families.

Philanthropist Henry Phipps partnered with investor Charles Ingersoll and builder Frank Lambie and began to construct communities of concrete houses. The basic design was “American Four Square”, a post-Victorian style that was sometimes called “Prairie Box”. The houses were square, with four boxy rooms on each floor, a hipped roof, a center dormer, and a large front porch.

They began to build houses throughout the northeast and Midwest and eventually perfected the construction process. In 1916 the American Steel and Wire Company greatly expanded its production facilities in Donora, creating a shortage of affordable housing in that community. To counter this they hired the Lambie Concrete House Construction Company to build sixty single and twenty duplex residences, which they would then rent to foremen and middle management personnel.
When Lambie encountered problems maintaining schedule, two other firms were contracted to participate – Boston’s Aberthaw Construction Company and a Pittsburgh firm, the Nicola Building Company. Fourteen months later the neighborhood, dubbed “Cement City” by its residents, was complete and fully occupied.
American Steel and Wire sold the properties to John Galbraith in 1942; eventually they were purchased by private individuals. They have been lovingly maintained; in 1996 they were listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. The Donora Historical Society conducts popular walking tours of “Cement City” on spring and fall weekends.
Edison’s innovative technology resulted in the construction of several hundred houses; its failure to match the cost effectiveness of conventional “stick frame” houses built with dimensioned lumber, (about sixty percent more expensive) was too great to overcome.
I was puzzled at some of the technical information Mr. Charlton presented and have communicated with him regarding it. I was surprised to learn that Edison pumped concrete in 1915; most references trace the origin of that technology to about twelve years later.
I also was puzzled about the addition of bentonite to Edison’s concrete recipe. Bentonite is useful today as drilling mud, as a slurry for slurry wall construction, as a seal for landfills, as a binder in pelletizing, as an absorbent in Kitty litter, and as a laxative. It is reported Edison added it to his concrete mix to hold the slag (coarse aggregate) in suspension and retard segregation.
The entire topic of Edison’s concrete recipe is interesting. One source reports a ratio of one part cement to three parts sand to five parts slag, a significant difference from the typical one:two:three recipe prevalent in those days. A quick check of the quantities reported in Mr. Charlton’s excellent article in the Western Pennsylvania History Magazine, Fall 2013, suggests that the finished concrete weighed significantly less than one hundred pounds per cubic foot; concrete typically weighs about one and a half pounds per cubic foot.
Interestingly, the result of my correspondence with Mr. Charlton has been his suggestion that I do some research on “Edison concrete” from an engineering perspective and sort out the truth from the body of information that currently is available. Sounds like a good idea; perhaps Edison had some knowledge about materials that has not survived.
It would indeed be a treat if we could recover some samples from the existing houses and subject them to physical tests and petrographic examination of microstructure. The light weight and implied pumpability of Edison concrete could have been produced by purposely introducing voids in it; after all his concrete phonograph is reported to be made of “foam concrete”.
Mr. Charlton’s presentation was well received by the audience, as much in response to his skill as a communicator as to the content of his talk. He did a fine job reporting on a relevant historic event, one with significance to social, economic, industrial and demographic concepts. 

The next Historical Society program meeting will be at the Chartiers Room, Bridgeville Volunteer Fire Department, on Commercial Street, at 7:30 pm, Tuesday, May 29, 2018. Ms. Marjorie (Dolanch) Stein will speak on “Early Upper St. Clair, Pa.” The public is cordially invited.