Rebirth of the Ohio

Ever since the turn of the century, the Ohio River valley has been the slumbering giant of the U.S. industrial economy. As railroads and highways won away the transportation market from river barges, great stretches of the once-busy Ohio faded to a relative backwater, its banks lined with decaying Victorian towns, its countryside a forgotten land of rutted roads, one-room schoolhouses, gnarled and feuding farmers. But in the past few years, even the most remote valleys of the Ohio have been stirring with new life as industry after industry has taken advantage of low-cost, coal-fueled power supplies, cheap land and water, and, most important, an untapped supply of labor.

Last week at Ravenswood, W. Va., the valley's biggest industrial project to date was going into production. Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Corp., No. 3 U.S. producer, rolled the first light-gauge sheet aluminum at one of the world's biggest smelters and mills, a $230 million giant that it hopes will soon push Kaiser past Reynolds Metals into the industry's No. 2 spot. For Ravenswood, like dozens of other towns along the river, the future is now wide open.

Goliath in Pee Wee. Once a thriving river port. Ravenswood had a population of barely 2,000 when Kaiser bought 2,500 acres of land in 1954 for a plant to process its Louisiana bauxite and supply its East Coast markets. Planned employment by 1958: 5,000. From the start. Kaiser realized that one of its biggest problems was, as one Kaiser official put it, "to prepare these people for something which is going to change the whole pattern of their lives." The company flew in a squad of public-relations men from the West Coast, sent them on a seven-week tour of hillside hamlets with names like Pee Wee, Rocky Knob, Gay Given, Frozen Camp. At each stop Kaiser's emissaries showed three movies (a cartoon, a western, a film on Kaiser Aluminum), served soft drinks and cake (bought at $2 apiece from local house wives), and patiently outlined what the company was up to. As a result, Kaiser got 2.000 job applications the first morning it opened an office in Ravenswood, now has 30,000 on file, is still getting new applica tions at the rate of 1,000 a month.

Jury Trouble. Looming over the countryside last week, Kaiser's Ravenswood plant was still only partially finished, had only 400 production workers. Yet it had already shattered Ravenswood's past.

The town has laid out a new residential district for 6,000 future houses, boasts a new highway to Parkersburg 30 miles away, has a new $350,000 elementary school, which Kaiser is building and is to be leased to the county for $1 a year. Telephone service has been vastly improved with 200 miles of new lines; city gas lines have been extended. Ravenswood's bank has added more than $1,000,000 in new assets in two years, and the local loan association has financed 200 new houses since 1955, figures to finance many hundreds more. About the only real worry in Ravenswood today is how to get its residents to serve on jury duty, something they once sought eagerly for its $5 daily pay. Complained one native last week: "But judge, they're paying $20 a day for work on the Kaiser construction."

Chain Reaction. The same amazing growth is evident everywhere up and down the Ohio. The Atomic Energy Commission alone has poured $1.7 billion into huge nuclear plants in Kentucky and Ohio. Steelmen have spent close to $1 billion expanding their plants, while so many chemical companies have come in that the Ohio now surpasses Germany's famed Rhine as the world's most important "chemical river." For power to drive the new industry, Ohio valley electric companies, led by American Gas & Electric, have already spent $1.4 billion for a chain of 25 huge plants generating 9,250,000 kw. All told, some 500 companies have spent $10.5 billion in the Ohio valley since 1946, and that is only the beginning of an industrial chain reaction.

Barely twelve months ago Olin Mathieson Chemical Corp. announced plans for a $120 million aluminum plant at Buckhill Bottom, 20 miles from Wheeling, W. Va.; soon afterward it joined forces with Revere Copper & Brass to boost the ante to $304 million. In quick succession the Pennsylvania Railroad spent $4,000,000 building twelve miles of spur track to the plant site, and M. A. Hanna Coal Co. started work on a big new mine to provide coal for Ohio Power Co.'s expanding plant at Cresap, W. Va., which in turn contracted to supply power for the new aluminum works.

As the Ohio bends into West Virginia, the advantages of cheap power and good water, plus a vast underground block of salt 200 miles long and more than 100 ft. thick, have attracted scores of chemical companies: Columbia--Southern Chemical Corp., Koppers Co., Shea Chemical Corp., Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., Monsanto Chemical. Farther along, other companies are spending over $300 million to make everything from jet-engine parts to autos and electronic tubes.

The Ohio valley still has plenty of problems to solve before it realizes its full promise. River channels, locks and navigation facilities are badly outdated, need to be modernized before industry can get the most out of the Ohio as a new route to market. Much of the highway system is in even worse shape. The Ohio valley's population, with one of the lowest per-family incomes ($1,391 a year) in the entire U.S., needs to be trained to operate modern industry's new machines. But no businessman doubts that it will be done. Said a Kaiser Aluminum official: "What we have here is essentially the industrial revolution in miniature."

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