Era VI · 1946 to 2005

Steel Country

Sixty years as the heartbeat of the valley.

After the war, the mill that was built for battle became the engine of Utah Valley. It made fortunes and paychecks, fed families for generations, nearly died, came back as a "miracle mill," and finally fell silent.

June 1946

U.S. Steel buys Geneva

When the war ended, nobody knew what would happen to the mill. In August 1945 Utah County leaders met to keep it from closing. In June 1946 the government sold it to U.S. Steel for $47.5 million, far less than the $200 million that built it.

That year Life magazine called Geneva the "new decade's answer to the gloomy '30s." For four decades it was the biggest employer in Utah County. By 1960 it employed 30 percent of the county's workers, and in the early 1960s it reached nearly 8,000 workers.

Families gave it their whole working lives. Four generations of the Miller family worked about 160 years in all at Geneva and another valley mill. At night, one daughter remembered, the lit up mill looked like a cruise ship.

$47.5MU.S. Steel paid, 1946

8,000workers at the peak, early 1960s

30%of Utah County's workers, 1960

Geneva under construction below Mount Timpanogos, 1942Andreas Feininger, Library of Congress

August 31, 1987

The miracle mill

By the 1980s American steel was in trouble, and U.S. Steel shut Geneva down. Joe Cannon, a Utah native and Washington lawyer, believed the mill could make money again. With his brother Chris and a group of investors, many from the BYU law school, he set out to buy it.

When the deal nearly collapsed, Senator Orrin Hatch persuaded U.S. Steel to keep the mill going for one more month. At midnight on August 31, 1987, the first shift walked back through the gates. About 1,100 jobs were saved.

Geneva made money in its first month. New furnaces, bought from an idle mill near Chicago and carried west on five barges and 92 trucks, cut a batch of steel from five and a half hours to 45 minutes. The Wall Street Journal called it a "miracle mill."

Furnaces rising at Geneva, 1942Andreas Feininger, Library of Congress

1999 to 2005

The end of steel

In 1992 steel prices fell more than 30 percent and cheap foreign steel flooded American ports. Geneva filed for bankruptcy in early 1999, owing about $325 million. In November 2001 most of its roughly 1,200 workers were laid off, and in 2002 a second bankruptcy ended steelmaking for good.

On February 4, 2004, a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the mill's core equipment to Qingdao Iron and Steel of China for $40 million. It was taken apart and shipped across the Pacific to be rebuilt.

In the summer of 2005, at daybreak, explosives brought down two smokestacks, nine stoves and three blast furnaces that had stood for 61 years. Former workers gathered to watch. That November a developer, Anderson Geneva, bought 1,750 acres of the site for $46.8 million.