Homestead, where you are now, was the site of the most violent and consequential labor battle in American history. On July 6, 1892, the Carnegie Steel Company, operated by Henry Clay Frick while Carnegie was vacationing in Scotland, locked out the workers at the Homestead Steel Works and hired three hundred Pinkerton detectives to protect replacement workers brought in to break the union. The barges carrying the Pinkertons attempted to land on the Monongahela riverbank near here.
The locked-out steelworkers were waiting. In the battle that followed, seven Pinkertons and nine workers were killed, and dozens were wounded. Pennsylvania's governor sent eight thousand National Guard troops to end the standoff.
The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers was crushed, and it would be forty years before steel workers organized again. Carnegie never returned to Homestead. But in 1898 he built and donated a library, music hall, and athletic club to the community his policies had devastated.
The Carnegie Library of Homestead, the building you see here, was built on the blood-soaked ground of the 1892 battle — Carnegie's attempt at atonement — still operates free to all, more than 125 years later.