18921776 Club
Pinkertons try to land at Homestead in darkness; at least sixteen are dead by morning
Frick's barbed-wire lockout turns to open battle on the Monongahela after armed steelworkers and their families open fire from the riverbank on two barges of agents.
By the summer of 1892, Andrew Carnegie's steel empire ran on the open-hearth furnace, a technology that made workers more productive and, in Henry Clay Frick's calculation, less necessary at the old pay scale. When the union contract expired June 30, Frick demanded a 22 percent wage cut, locked the mill gates, and ringed the works with barbed wire and sniper towers. On July 6, two barges of Pinkerton agents tried to land at the mill under cover of darkness. Steelworkers and their families met them with rifle fire from the riverbank, and by the time the guns went quiet, at least sixteen men were dead and dozens more wounded…
