Keystone Tour

My prep for the trip included Vice President Vance's book, Hillbilly Elegy. Rural Western PA is commonly called "Pennsyltucky" - populated by the same Scots-Irish Kentuckians as Vance's family. The post-war manufacturing jobs that brought people to the mills surrounding Pittsburgh

brought JD's grandparents to Middletown, OH, where Vance's grandfather worked at Armco Steel.

The problem of course: what happens when the mill closes? As Vance eloquently describes, Armco paid for everything in Middletown - not just the direct property taxes on its mill, but its contributions to social life and culture, the wages it paid that allowed its workers to spend money in the community, pay taxes on their homes. Middletown wasn't a "company town" in the classic sense, but without the mill, the city became Johnstown (minus the Flood City tourist attraction).

Today's trip was to the functional equivalent of Middletown, to Weirton, WV. First, don't throw the penalty flag on me for leaving the Keystone State. Weirton, in West Virginia's Panhandle region, was originally claimed by Pennsylvania. According to the fascinating book "How the States Got their Shapes" (thanks sponsor Ron!), Pennsylvania's original boundary ran to the Ohio River. But Virginia complained that its forces under Colonel Washington had been instrumental in securing the Ohio River Valley for America and that it deserved to have a boundary along the Ohio River for its efforts. Congress in the 1780's agreed - so - I'm sticking with colonial borders. (Pennsylvania received a port on Lake Erie in exchange).

Weirton has just lost its biggest employer, Cleveland-Cliffs, who idled its tin plate facility last year. The decision cost 900 steelworkers their jobs and ended over a century of steel production in Weirton. (Cleveland-Cliffs itself is an interesting case study - they have launched an acquisition offer for US Steel, attempting to create an effective monopoly on blast furnace steel produced in America. No one would profit more from high steel tariffs than that combined enterprise)

The ride from Pittsburgh to Weirton was truly joyous - vast majority of the trip on the Panhandle Rail Trail (turns out when you stop all the production in Weirton, you don't need the railroad that used to haul that product to Pittsburgh). I had John Denver "Almost Heaven, West Virginia" rattling in my mind rolling through the beautiful countryside.

Then I got to Weirton - and the vastness of the shuttered mill. It's hard to capture the scale in the photographs, but it runs for a mile along the river. The 900 jobs are just the last 900 jobs - Weirton was a Harvard Business School case study in the 1980's when its 3,000 employees entered into an Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP), becoming not just workers but capitalists owning their mill. But underinvestment and competition pushed Weirton Steel into bankruptcy in 2004. Twenty more years of ownership changes and downsizing led to the plant's (probable) final closing last year.

The ray of hope I saw was Form Energy - a new industrial iron-air battery plant (sold to utility battery storage stations to store solar and wind energy generated during daylight hours and discharging at night) that opened on a portion of the former Weirton Works. Their 2023 press release promises 750 jobs, with 300 working today. I saw several hundred cars in the parking lot. Form received over $400 million in private financing in October to support its expansion, so its claims for growth seem supported.

The drive past the factory took me past the United Steelworkers Local headquarters (one car in the parking lot), lots of "for lease" signs in the commercial store fronts, not quite a ghost town, but close.

At lunch in the local diner, I smiled at the irony when Springsteen's "Glory Days" came on the soundtrack. Then, the TV (tuned to Fox News, natch) talked about President Biden's cancer diagnosis. I overhead the diners in the next booth - the first said "I'm glad. Biden ruined our country, he deserves to die". The second "My mom died of cancer, I wouldn't wish that on anyone". They then agreed "maybe it would be just better if he died of AIDS, because that would mean it was his own fault". West Virginia delivered the highest vote share of any state for Trump, 70%. I've seen dozens of Trump/Vance signs in yards during my tour, but I was struck by the intensity of anti-Biden feeling. I then thought about some things I heard after Trump was shot last year that weren't really that different …

Between 1980 and 2000 (the period of peak Weirton Steel job shedding), Weirton's population decline was the greatest of any metro area in the US. The decline has continued since 2000, but it has slowed significantly, not following the catastrophic cliff of Johnstown. I think the biggest difference is the fundamental transportation infrastructure is excellent - via highway, river and rail. It's less than 40 miles to Pittsburgh for cultural options. Weirton faces challenges, but if it can attract one or two more Form Energies, there is a way out.

Through my cyclist lens, the infrastructure around Weirton and along the river was terrible. I shot a picture of the massive cracks in WV-2 which runs along the river. However, heading back to Pennsylvania was a magical experience. I went miles on a beautiful road with literally no cars, singing John Denver loud and proud.

My day ended in Washington, PA - ground zero of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, another Scots-Irish rebellion thing. In 1791, Hamilton got Congress to pass an excise tax on whisky. Western PA, truly the frontier, had two problems. It operated on a barter economy where whiskey was money - they had no cash money to pay excise taxes. Philosophically, they had just fought a revolution against rulers from afar taxing everyday items. So, they did what they did in 1776: tarred and feathered Federal tax collectors, burned their homes, attacked and killed local Federal soldiers. George Washington couldn't let the insurrection pass, he personally marched along with Hamilton and 13,000 Federal troops (Pittsburgh in 1800 had 1,500 residents) to shut things down. Visiting the Whiskey Rebellion museum and David Bradford House (he was the leader of the Rebellion, convicted of treason, he escaped to Spanish Louisiana), you got a strong sense that the spirit of "f'in Federal Government" remains entrenched today. The photo below will outline more details on the Rebellion for the curious. I bought a bottle of the local whiskey and will enjoy a glass to celebrate the conclusion of the trip!