Fiat City

One day late in 1905 Elbert Henry Gary, board chairman of U. S. Steel Corp., set a well-manicured finger firmly down on a map of northern Indiana. Said he to his directors: "This will be our metropolis. We'll build near the railroad junction of Chicago where acres of land can be had for almost the asking, midway between the ore regions of the North and the coal lands of the South and East." The Steel directors nodded consent.

Purchased were 8,000 acres of barren sand dunes. On March 12, 1906 surveyors drove their first stakes among the tumbleweeds for U. S. Steel's fiat city. Streets were laid out, houses built, water and gas mains sunk. Top soil was brought in to spread over the sand, to grow trees and grass in. Great scoopers chewed a mile-long harbor back from Lake Michigan. Railroad connections were made. Against the sky began to rise the jagged outlines of steel mills, foundries, tin-plate plants. Within a year $100,000,000 was dumped into this desolate Indiana waste and out of it by industrial magic rose Gary, great est single steel city in the U. S. A public demonstration occurred in July 1908, when, with the city finished, the first cigar-shaped ore boat nosed its way into Gary Harbor, unloaded its cargo, set the mills to thundering.

Last week it took Gary four days of boisterous civic celebrating to commemorate its 25th anniversary and the passing of the 100,000 population mark. Parades moved down its smoke-begrimed streets (Gary has aged far beyond its years). Schoolboys drilled, bands played, horns tooted -- and the mills closed for a whole day while workers of 50 nationalities made merry. A downpour bedraggled the last day of the celebration, caused a postponement of park pageants.

What the late Chairman Gary would have liked best about his city's jubilee was a banquet at the Hotel Gary at which was formed the Pioneer Society of Gary, composed of men who helped build the city a quarter century ago. Presiding was William Palmer Gleason who superintended the construction of the steel plants. Near him sat H. S. Norton, now president of the Commercial Club who as agent for the Gary Land Co. did as much as anybody to develop the city. Present also was William Albert Wirt, the first and only superintendent of schools, who devised the famed "Gary Plan."*

*Under this plan public schools operate 48 weeks per year. Work, study and play are joined together as one educational unit. The school plant combines classrooms, playgrounds, gardens, workshops, library and social centre. High-school subjects are started in grammar school. The school capacity is doubled by operating on an 8-hour day with indoor and outdoor activities conducted simultaneously. Critics once loudly complained that this school system was arranged by the efficient Steel Corp. to meet the domestic needs of employes who used to work 12 hr. per day in the mills.

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