The idea of a steel mill in Utah is older than the war. In 1936 President Franklin Roosevelt floated one as a way to put people to work during the Depression, and within a couple of months it was shelved. Then the world went to war. By 1941 the country needed far more steel for itself and its allies, and in November 1941, a month before Pearl Harbor, the Utah mill was approved.
Why here
On a map the site made sense. Coal could come from Carbon County, iron ore from Iron County, limestone and dolomite from a quarry near Genola. Water came from Deer Creek Reservoir and wells on the site. Main rail lines ran alongside. And it was far inland, out of reach of any attack on the West Coast, which mattered more after Pearl Harbor than before it.
It also sat on farms. By March 1942 the government had bought the farmland along the east shore, including land from a landowner named J.O. Stone. Then construction began, and nothing about it was easy. Planners had hoped for a year. A string of fires set the work back, and shortages of workers, equipment and materials slowed it and pushed up the cost.
Ten thousand builders
More than 10,000 workers built the mill from November 1941 to December 1944. It took about $200 million in federal money, the largest wartime project the government financed. One of those builders was Dean Hardy, who signed on in 1942. He was the first of a family that would spend generations at the mill.
The valley did not have homes for everyone who came. Many families lived in trailers. Ken Jolley, then a young newspaper boy, stretched his route until it reached hundreds of trailer homes. Years later he went to work at Geneva himself.
Help wanted
Running the mill took even more people than building it. Geneva advertised in local papers, in Salt Lake City papers and in papers across the country. One ad called for 2,000 laborers, machinists and millwrights. A 1943 Deseret News ad wanted men seventeen and older for the blast furnaces, the power house and the machines. On October 26, 1944, a recruiter sat in the Provo employment office to sign up farmers, with a promise of time off for their own fields. The pay beat anything else in the area, and over the years many farmers became steelworkers.
At night, she said, the lit up mill looked like a cruise ship.
In April 1944 the first steel plate shipped to California shipyards building Liberty ships. About 4,200 people ran the mill during the war, and it turned out 634,000 tons of plate and 144,000 tons of steel shapes.
Inside the mill
What was it like inside? Writing in the Daily Herald years later, Mark Johnson compared the dust, the noise and the machinery to standing at the gates of hell. People came anyway. Ron Miller, who started in the early 1970s, said it was simply the place to work, because that was where the money was.
Families of steel
One family shows how deep the mill ran. Four generations of the Millers worked about 160 years in all at Geneva and another valley mill. Dean Hardy's daughter Jackie worked in the payroll office, and her husband Art spent eighteen years as a machinist. Gwen Miller remembered her father, Wendell Watkins, who worked 36 years at Geneva beginning in the Liberty ship days and always tucked candy for her in his lunch box. At night, she said, the lit up mill looked like a cruise ship.
When the war ended, nobody knew what would happen. Production fell, only about 900 workers stayed on, and in August 1945 county leaders met to keep the plant open. In June 1946 the government sold it to U.S. Steel for $47.5 million. Its engineers had planned for peacetime work, and it was ready.
Ten thousand people built Geneva in about three years. For nearly sixty years after, the people who ran it, and their children, turned Vineyard's farm country into steel country.
