Homestead Strike 1892: Pittsburgh's Bloody Labor Battle

Inside the Homestead Strike of 1892: Labor’s Bloody Stand

In the summer of 1892, the steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania, erupted into one of the most violent labor conflicts in American history. On July 6, roughly 300 armed Pinkerton agents tried to land from river barges at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead Works. Thousands of locked-out steelworkers and their families met them on the riverbank. By nightfall seven workers and several Pinkertons were dead, the agents had surrendered, and the town belonged to the strikers. Six days later the state militia arrived, and within months the union was broken.

This page tells the whole story in order. If you want the dates, names and numbers in a short list, use the quick facts just below. Where the sources disagree, as they do on casualties and on who fired first, this page says so.

What Was the Result of the Homestead Strike?

The strikers lost. On November 20, 1892, the Homestead lodge voted 101–91 to return to work on the company’s terms, Carnegie Steel refused any further dealings with the Amalgamated Association, and the mill ran non-union. Its significance was national: the union’s membership fell from more than 24,000 in 1891 to about 10,000 in 1894, by 1900 no steel plant in Pennsylvania was unionized, and steelworkers did not win lasting union recognition until the 1930s. Homestead also ended Carnegie’s public image as a friend of the worker.

Homestead Strike Quick Facts

Where	Homestead Steel Works, Homestead (and Munhall), Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela River
When	Lockout at the end of June 1892 (sources give June 28 to July 1); battle July 6; strike ended November 20, 1892 (some sources say November 21)
Who	Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) and the Knights of Labor vs. Carnegie Steel Company
The dispute	A new wage scale and the union’s role. The company proposed cuts of about 22 percent for many union men and wanted to end union recognition.
Workforce	About 3,800 workers at the plant, roughly 800 of them AA members
Deaths on July 6	Usually given as 7 strikers and 3 Pinkertons; counts range from 7 to 9 strikers and 3 to 7 Pinkertons, depending on whether later deaths are included (see How Many Died?)
State intervention	Pennsylvania militia arrived July 12 under Maj. Gen. George R. Snowden
Result	Union defeated; Homestead run non-union; steel stayed largely non-union until the 1930s

Setting the Stage: Gilded Age Pittsburgh

By the late nineteenth century Pittsburgh had become the steel capital of the country. Its mills ran day and night, turning out the rails, beams and girders that fueled America’s expansion. That boom, explored in how the steel industry shaped Pittsburgh, brought prosperity and danger in equal measure.

Homestead sat on the Monongahela, a few miles upriver from the Point. Carnegie bought the works in 1883, and in 1886 the company installed open-hearth furnaces that could make armor plate for the U.S. Navy at premium prices. As the mill grew, so did its labor force, including many unskilled immigrant workers. The skilled men on the crews still ran much of the mill floor. The work itself was hot, dangerous and long; 12-hour turns were common in steel at the time.

Pittsburgh had seen labor violence before: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 had put the city on a national stage. Homestead would eclipse it.

The Amalgamated Association: A Union with Teeth

The Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) was founded in 1876 as a craft union for skilled men: puddlers, rollers, heaters. It negotiated a single wage scale and helped set work rules. It also acted as a hiring hall, supplying skilled men to employers who needed them.

The AA organized the Homestead mill in 1881, and the union struck there in 1882, winning. It struck again in July 1889, when the three-year contract talks failed. Thousands of townspeople supported the strikers, who drove off a trainload of strikebreakers. The union won, but accepted wage cuts that left its rates below those at nearby mills with newer technology. After 1889, Carnegie officials conceded that the union essentially ran the plant, and its contract came with 58 pages of footnotes governing work rules.

That arrangement had a built-in problem. The AA represented only a minority of the plant’s workers: about 800 of roughly 3,800 in 1892. Carnegie believed it was a narrow, elite group that did not represent the majority of workers. Management saw it as a limit on output.

Frick’s Iron Hand: Fortifying the Mill

Carnegie put Henry Clay Frick in charge of the company. Frick, as we cover in the life of Henry Clay Frick, was determined to end union influence at Homestead. “The mills have never been able to turn out the product they should, owing to being held back by the Amalgamated men,” he wrote.

Carnegie publicly supported unions and, according to biographer Les Standiford, said no mill was worth a drop of blood. Privately he agreed with Frick. In an April 4, 1892 letter he wrote that the works “will be necessarily non-union after the expiration of the present agreement.” He told the plant to build up inventory so it could survive a stoppage, and he left for Scotland before the contract ran out.

Negotiations started in February. The AA, with the steel industry doing well, asked for a raise. Frick countered with a wage cut of around 22 percent that would have hit nearly half the union’s members and removed some jobs from union coverage. On April 30 he said he would bargain for 29 more days, after which the company would stop recognizing the union. Carnegie approved the tactic on May 4.

Meanwhile Frick turned the plant into a fort. A high board fence topped with barbed wire, begun in January, ringed the works. Sniper towers with searchlights and high-pressure water cannons, some reported capable of spraying scalding water, were added. The workers called the place “Fort Frick.”

The Lockout, June 28–July 5

The lockout began on June 28, when the company locked out about 800 workers in the armor-plate and open-hearth departments. According to the Battle of Homestead Foundation’s timeline, thousands more walked off on June 29, the day before the contract expired, and the company said it would no longer recognize the union. At a mass meeting on June 30 union leaders said the company had broken the contract by acting early. The Knights of Labor, which represented the mill’s mechanics and transportation workers, walked out alongside the AA, and sympathy strikes followed at other Carnegie plants. Historians usually describe it as a lockout rather than a strike, though the name “Homestead Strike” stuck.

The workers then organized the town. They formed an advisory committee under Hugh O’Donnell, a heater at the mill, and divided into units along military lines. They patrolled the Monongahela in a steam launch and rowboats, watched the trains and ferries, questioned strangers, and issued badges to reporters. On July 4 Frick asked the county sheriff, William McCleary, to help get supervisors into the plant. The sheriff sent 11 deputies on July 5. The strikers tore down their handbills, put them on a boat and sent them back to Pittsburgh.

July 6, 1892: A Bloody Day on the River

Frick’s answer was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. About 300 agents, recruited in several cities, gathered at Davis Island Dam on the Ohio River at around 10:30 p.m. on July 5. They were given Winchester rifles and loaded onto two barges towed upriver by a tug. Many were reportedly hired out of lodging houses at $2.50 a day and did not know what they were being sent to do.

The union learned of the plan almost as soon as the agents left Boston and went downriver to meet them. The plant whistle blew at about 2:30 a.m., and thousands of men, women and children came running to the riverbank. The Pinkertons tried to land at around 4 a.m. The crowd tore down part of the fence and surged onto the mill grounds.

Who fired first?

Accounts disagree. John McCurry, a boatman on the steamboat Little Bill who was wounded, swore the workers shot first. The New York Times reported that the Pinkertons did. By most counts, the first two people wounded were William Foy, a striker, and Frederick Heinde, a Pinkerton captain. The initial exchange lasted perhaps ten minutes and, by one count, killed two on each side.

The siege of the barges

The agents pulled back to the barges, cut firing holes in their sides, and sent the tug away with their wounded. Strikers built a rampart of steel beams above the landing and fired from the hillside. Hundreds of women stood along the bank. A small brass cannon was set up across the river, and a second landing attempt at about 8 a.m. failed, with four more strikers killed. Over the course of the day the strikers floated a raft loaded with burning oil-soaked timber toward the barges, sent a burning railcar of oil down the tracks, threw dynamite and poured oil on the river. None of these did much damage, though a cannon shell is blamed for one striker’s death. A sniper killed a Pinkerton before noon.

Across Pittsburgh, thousands of steelworkers heard the news and many headed for Homestead, some armed. Sheriff McCleary telegraphed Governor Robert Pattison three times that day, but the governor told him to raise his own force. Frick refused a request to meet with the union.

The surrender

By late afternoon more than 5,000 men, many of them armed mill hands from nearby plants, were at Homestead. William Weihe, the AA president, urged the crowd to let the Pinkertons surrender and was shouted down. O’Donnell offered the agents safe passage after they handed over their weapons. At about 5 p.m. the Pinkertons raised a white flag.

As they left the barges they were forced to run a gauntlet. Men and women threw sand and stones, spat on them, and beat them. Several were knocked unconscious, and the crowd looted the barges and burned them. The agents were held overnight in the town’s opera house and put on a special train to Pittsburgh in the early hours of July 7. The press was shocked by the abuse, and the coverage began to turn against the strikers.

How Many Died? What the Sources Say

The commonly cited toll is seven workers and three Pinkertons, a total of ten. The AFL-CIO and the Library of Congress use those numbers, and Wikipedia’s summary does too. But the details are less tidy:

Strikers: Seven deaths, documented in Allegheny County coroner’s inquest files held at the University of Pittsburgh.
Pinkertons: William Pinkerton testified to Congress that three agents died. The agents themselves counted seven dead and eleven wounded. Wikipedia lists up to eight names on the Pinkerton side, including a steamboat captain, John Shingle, and some who died later of wounds or by suicide.
The “16 dead” figure: A Library of Congress research guide to Chronicling America says the confrontation killed 16 people, and Encyclopedia.com also gives 16 in one passage. We have not found a list that supports that number. The inquest-based count is seven strikers and three Pinkertons, and more of the wounded died later. Most accounts, including the other Library of Congress and AFL-CIO pages, use ten.
Wounded: Counts run from dozens to more than 30 agents in hospital; a newspaper tally put the number of captured Pinkertons at 324.

For the debate, historians usually turn to Paul Krause’s The Battle for Homestead, 1890–1892, which Wikipedia treats as the most thorough list of the dead and wounded.

The Aftermath: Occupying the Town

For about six days, the strikers controlled the town. The Pinkertons had been defeated, and Homestead became a national symbol of labor defiance. But the strike committee’s plea to the governor on July 7 went nowhere. Union leaders met Pattison in Harrisburg on July 9. Pattison, elected with support from a Carnegie-friendly political machine, waited for emotions to cool and then acted.

On July 12 the state militia under Major General George R. Snowden arrived at the Munhall station, not the downtown one where the strikers waited to greet them. Snowden told the union leaders that he was “the master of this situation.” More than 4,000 soldiers surrounded the plant within the hour, and thousands more camped on the heights. The size of the force is reported differently. The figure most often cited, by the AFL-CIO and PBS among others, is 8,500 Pennsylvania National Guardsmen; Encyclopedia.com says 8,000. Taken together, the sources suggest about 8,000 to 8,500. Congress also held hearings, with the first sessions in Homestead on July 12–14, according to the Library of Congress.

Under militia protection the company brought in strikebreakers, built bunkhouses on the grounds and relit the furnaces on July 15. On July 18 the town was placed under martial law. The company recruited the replacement workers, among them a number of Black men brought in from outside the area, and racial tension among the nonunion workers flared into a clash inside the plant on July 22 (see Krause, The Battle for Homestead). The company’s decision to use strikebreakers is the context for that conflict.

The legal fight was lopsided. On July 18, sixteen strike leaders were charged with conspiracy, riot and murder. Later, treason charges against 33 strikers were filed, with the Library of Congress dating them to September 30 (Wikipedia says August 30). Most never faced a jury: only four men were tried on the original charges. Three were acquitted, and the fourth, Hugh Dempsey, a Knights of Labor leader, was convicted of conspiring to poison nonunion workers. In February 1893 the company and the union dropped their remaining charges against each other.

Anarchist Violence: The Berkman Assassination Attempt

On July 23, Alexander Berkman, a New York anarchist with no ties to steel or organized labor, gained entrance to Frick’s Pittsburgh office. He shot and stabbed the executive. Frick survived and kept running the company. Berkman, who had planned the attack with Emma Goldman, was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Berkman acted alone, and labor leaders condemned him. It did not help. The attack undercut public sympathy for the strikers when they needed it most.

The Collapse of the Strike

By August 12 the company said 1,700 men were working, and production had resumed. Hugh O’Donnell was removed from the strike committee after he proposed that the men go back at the lower scale if they could get their jobs back. The AFL refused to boycott Carnegie products. Immigrant workers drifted back first, and then others did. The militia left on October 13.

On November 20, 1892, with only 192 of more than 3,800 strikers present, the Homestead lodge voted 101–91 to return to work on the company’s terms. (The Library of Congress dates the vote November 21.) Frick announced afterward: “Under no circumstances will we have any further dealing with the Amalgamated Association as an organization. This is final.” He kept his word.

Legacy: Labor’s Turning Point

The AA lost its footing across the industry. Its membership fell from more than 24,000 in 1891 to about 10,000 in 1894, and by 1900 no steel plant in Pennsylvania was unionized. A 1901 strike against U.S. Steel failed, and so did a nationwide steel strike in 1919. Steelworkers did not win lasting union recognition until the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in the 1930s, which became the United Steelworkers in 1942.

Homestead also damaged Carnegie’s reputation. PBS’s American Experience timeline says it “marks the end of Carnegie’s image as a friend of the worker.” For the rest of his story, read our Andrew Carnegie biography and Carnegie’s legacy and philanthropy, including the criticism of it. For the larger picture of the Mon Valley towns, see Braddock, Homestead and the decline of the Mon Valley.

Remembering Homestead Today

Today the once-mighty Homestead Works is almost entirely gone, its mills replaced by retail stores, chain restaurants and a movie theater at The Waterfront shopping center. On the surface it is hard to imagine that this stretch of riverfront was the site of one of the bloodiest labor battles in American history.

But a few things remain. The Pump House at 880 E. Waterfront Drive in Munhall was built by the Carnegie Steel Company and, as Rivers of Steel says, it was the site of the 1892 battle. The grounds are open on a seasonal schedule, with interpretive panels and the Homestead Labyrinth, a 68-foot memorial created by artist Lorraine Vullo in 2009. Across the river stand the Carrie Blast Furnaces, also run by Rivers of Steel. The Bost Building, the AA’s headquarters during the strike, is a National Historic Landmark and houses a museum of the strike and the steel industry. Two Pennsylvania historical markers recognize the Pinkerton landing site and the cemeteries where six of the seven slain workers are buried.

Check Rivers of Steel for current hours and tour options before you go. The story of the Homestead Strike lives on as a reminder of the human cost of industrial conflict and of the people who stood up to it.

Key People

Frick, Carnegie and Berkman are covered above. Other figures in the story:

Hugh O’Donnell: Heater at the mill; chairman of the strikers’ advisory committee.
John McLuckie: Burgess (mayor) of Homestead; among the strike leaders charged with murder after the battle.
William Weihe: AA president; tried to prevent bloodshed.
William McCleary: Allegheny County sheriff.
Robert Pattison: Pennsylvania governor who sent in the militia.
George R. Snowden: Militia commander.
Frederick Heinde: Pinkerton captain; one of the first wounded.

Where the Sources Disagree: A Summary

When it began: the lockout began at the end of June 1892; sources give dates from June 28 to July 1.
Who fired first on July 6: the New York Times and a wounded boatman gave opposite answers.
Deaths: seven strikers and three Pinkertons is the common figure, based on coroner’s inquests; some sources give 12 or 16, but we have not found a list that supports those totals.
Militia strength: about 8,000 to 8,500; 8,500 is the figure most often cited.
When it ended: November 20 or 21, 1892.
Treason charges: dated August 30 or September 30.