Title	1937 Ohio River flood of Steubenville
Subject	Industries--Ohio Steel-works--Ohio--Pictorial works Wheeling Steel Corporation Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corporation Floods--Ohio--Ohio River Steubenville (Ohio)--History--Pictorial works
Time Period	1930s
Place	Steubenville (Ohio) Jefferson County (Ohio)
Description	Handwritten on reverse: "Steubenville, Ohio. Sat. Jan 23, 1937. Taken from Market Street Bridge - Incinerator plant and Steubenville Plant of the Wheeling Steel Corp beyond. Looking south. District 6 files." The greatest volume of water ever known to pass along Ohio’s southern shores flooded all Ohio River communities during the last two weeks of January 1937. With damage stretching from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, 1 million were left homeless, with 385 dead and property losses reaching $500 million, further worsened by the fact that it occurred during the Great Depression and just a few years after the Dust Bowl. Crests were 20 to 28 feet above flood stage and 4 to 9 feet above previous records. Six to 12 inches of rain fell in Ohio during January 13-25, 1937, totals never before or since experienced over such a large area of Ohio. January 1937 remains as the wettest month ever recorded in Ohio. The Wheeling Steel Corporation, founded in 1920, was located at 227 South Third Street at Bates Street and was one of the largest plants of its kind in the Ohio Valley. Covering an area a mile long and a quarter of a mile wide, the plant produced raw steel, coils, bars and sheet pipe. Included in the equipment are private railroad tracks and locomotives, two blast furnaces with a daily capacity of 1,600 tons, 11 open hearth mills, and a hot strip mill. Steamboats and barges owned by the company plied the river between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Memphis, Tennessee. In addition, a company owned bridge almost a mile long connects with a large byproduct plant on the West Virginia side of the Ohio River. In December 1968, Pittsburgh Steel Company was merged into Wheeling Steel Corporation to form the Wheeling-Pitt. Esmark, Inc. engaged in a successful proxy takeover battle for Wheeling-Pitt in 2005 and formally took over the steelmaker in November 2007. In August 2008, Severstal acquired Esmark's Wheeling-Pitt steel holdings for $1.25 billion. The plant was closed, supposedly temporarily, on April 3, 2009.
Creator	Ohio Federal Writers' Project
Date of Original	January 23, 1937
Collection	Ohio Guide Photographs
Source	State Archives Series 1039 AV
Submitting Institution	Ohio Historical Society
Rights	Online access is provided for research purposes only. For rights and reproduction requests or more information, go to http://www.ohiohistory.org/images/information
Type	StillImage
File Name	SA1039AV_B08F06_008_001.tif
Image Height	2584
Image Width	3204
File Size	33003720 Bytes
Display File Type	image/jp2
Format	picture
Date created	2010-04-30
Date modified	2010-06-02

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1937 Ohio River flood of Steubenville

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