Rising from the barren sand dunes and scrub vegetation of northwest Indiana in 1906, the city of Gary rapidly emerged as the largest American city founded in the 20th century and the home of the world's largest steel mill. Born in the boardroom of financier J. P. Morgan, and named for U.S. Steel's chairman of the board, Elbert H. Gary, Gary was the largest company town ever conceived and executed by American free enterprise.
Gary native and historian Kendall Svengalis paints a vivid and fascinating portrait of the city's birth and formative era when an enormous infusion of capital, entrepreneurial spirit, and the muscle of thousands of recent European immigrants and American blacks combined to construct both a city and a massive steel plant.
This nostalgic, 455-page, over-sized volume, contains twenty chapters, each detailing an aspect of Gary's rich history and its neighborhoods. Printed in full-color, this lavish pictorial history uses over 650 rare archival photographic and postcard images, maps, aerial photographs, and illustrations, many never before appearing in print. The book concludes with a fascinating case study of the author's Lithuanian pioneer family, whose saga led them from the Suvalkai province of western Lithuania to Gary in 1908.
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