MANSEL G. BLACKFORD
Scientific Management and Welfare
Work in
Early Twentieth Century
American Business: The Buckeye
Steel Castings Company
At 5 o'clock Tuesday afternoon the first
heat was turned off from one of the
furnaces in the new works of the Buckeye
Malleable Iron and Coupler
Company in South Columbus.... Someone
gave a signal and in a minute
everyone in the building and out of it
was on hand to watch the great crane
as it lifted the smoking ladle and
carried it to the furnace. Then at a touch
the furnace itself slowly turned on its
axis until the steel came pouring forth
in a stream of liquid fire amid a cloud
of fiery spray. It was a beautiful sight,
indeed.1
With these vivid words a newspaper
reporter described the en-
trance of the Buckeye Steel Castings
Company of Columbus, Ohio,
into the steel age in 1902. On October
14 of that year the company
began producing steel castings.2
By this time Buckeye already had a
twenty-one year history, for the firm
had started as a malleable iron
manufacturer in 1881. In its early years
the company had difficulty
in carving out a market for its goods
and had hovered on the brink of
failure for about a decade. In the
1890s, however, the corporation's
management saw the importance of what
was then the growth in-
dustry of its day, American railroads,
and Buckeye started making
Mansel G. Blackford is Associate
Professor of History at The Ohio State Universi-
ty. This article is based on parts of
chapters three and four of the author's Buckeye
International: Past to Present,
1881-1978, in preparation. The author
wishes to thank
Lewis I. Day and other officers at
Buckeye International for allowing him complete
access to corporate records, without any
restrictions on writing. The author would
also like to thank Andrea Lentz for her
research assistance in the preparation of this
study.
1. Columbus, Citizen, Oct. 15,
1902.
2. The Buckeye Steel Castings Company
later became part of Buckeye Interna-
tional, and Buckeye International merged
with Worthington Industries in 1980.