The Battle of Homestead took place at the Pump House on July 6, 1892, as a critically important conflict between industrialists and organized labor that cost ten lives. On June 29, Carnegie Steel Works manager Henry Clay Frick shut down the plant and locked out workers, then declared that the company would no longer recognize the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers after its three-year contract expired on June 30. The union rallied the community, bringing together unionists, nonunionists, and townspeople in collective action to defend jobs, the community, the union, and the right to associate freely. Frick then hired Pinkerton armed guards, who arrived on river barges with instructions to clear the way for strikebreakers. The standoff between the Pinkertons and the townspeople turned violent, and a fierce daylong battle ended with the deaths of seven workers and three Pinkertons, while the workers held their ground and won the day. The known dead among workers and Homestead citizens were Peter Ferris, John E. Morris, George Rutter, Joseph Sotak, Henry Striegel, Silas Wain, and Thomas Weldon, and among the Pinkertons were Thomas J. Connor, J.W. Kline, and Edward A. R. Speer. Afterward, workers ultimately lost the labor dispute, their union, and many of their constitutional rights when the state militia occupied the town and protected strikebreakers. Anti-union corporate power became entrenched in Homestead and across the nation's steel communities, and more than 44 years passed before Homestead steelworkers and others successfully unionized through the Steel Workers Organizing Committee of the Committee for Industrial Organization.
