Capital's Utopia

Mosher blends her skills as a geographer, historian, and storyteller to create a deep history of a most unique locale. In Capital's Utopia, the story of Vandergrift becomes a crucial and unexplored intersection between industrial land use and community planning all wrapped in the issues of economic class and paternalism that defined the Gilded Age. Through iron, railroad, and finally steel, readers will follow Vandergrift's surprising relevance in the Olmsted tradition of community planning. Mosher makes superb use of primary historical sources, including tables utilizing demographic census and tax assessment data and a superb selection of maps, community diagrams, photos, and sketches from the original plans. -- Brian Black, The Pennsylvania State University

It is a window into an important period of industrial development and its consequences on communities and environments in the world-famous steel country of southwestern Pennsylvania.In the 1890s the Apollo Iron and Steel Company ended a bitterly contested labor dispute by hiring replacement workers from the surrounding countryside. To avoid future unrest, however, the company sought to gain tighter control over its workers not only at the factory but also in their homes. Drawing upon a philosophy of reform movements in Europe and the United States, the firm decided that providing workers with good housing and a good urban environment would make them more loyal and productive. In 1895, Apollo Iron and Steel built a new, integrated, non-unionized steelworks and hired the nation's preeminent landscape architectural firm (Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot) to design the model industrial town: Vandergrift. In Capital's Utopia: Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, 1855-1916, Anne E. Mosher offers the first comprehensive geographical overview of the industrial restructuring of an American steelworks and its workforce in the late nineteenth-century. In addition, by offering a thorough analysis of the Olmsted plan, Mosher integrates historical geography and labor history with landscape architectural history and urban studies. As a result, this book is far more than a case study. It is a window into an important period of industrial development and its consequences on communities and environments in the world-famous steel country of southwestern Pennsylvania.