At least the stack will stay. Jefferson County is about to lose almost the last evidence of one of its longest-standing industries when most of the final buildings of the Doe Run Co. plant in Herculaneum are leveled.
The lead smelter was the last one to operate in the United States until it was shut down in 2013 when its owner and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency came to an agreement after decades of tussling over lead contamination.
There were 290 employees at Doe Run (which old-timers still call by its former name, St. Joe Lead) at the start of 2013. When the smelter was closed, it ended 121 years of commercial production at that location.
In a strict sense, it was more than 200 years. According to a town history produced for the 175th anniversary of its founding, the first lead was produced in Herculaneum in 1809 when John Maclot built a shot tower. Bullet makers would melt lead at the top of the tower, then let it fall through a colander-type container. On the way down it formed into more or less similar-sized balls before hitting water.
Voila! Musket balls.
Additional towers were erected in 1810 and 1811, one of them by Herculaneum founder Moses Austin, father of Stephen F. Austin, famous for being the father and founder of Texas.
The lead business was still strong enough in 1996 that Doe Run got permission to build an even larger stack – 550 feet high, the tallest man-made structure in the county and only 80 feet shorter than the Gateway Arch.
In confirming last week that five buildings will come down in 2017, a company spokesman said the stack would remain because it could be used by a different occupant of the land. Maybe.
Our landscape changes constantly. Anyone driving down one of the county’s main thoroughfares doesn’t have to go far to see something new rising out of the ground. The first reaction is, “What is it?”
The second is, “What used to be there?”
How quickly we forget.
Jefferson County used to have a fair amount of manufacturing, anchored by the two giants – Pittsburgh Plate Glass in Crystal City, which had more than 4,000 workers at its peak in the 1940s, and St. Joe/Doe Run.
PPG has been gone for 25 years. Doe Run is on its last legs for the few dozen remaining workers. A handful of maintenance jobs will remain.
The era of the mega-employer has been over for a couple of decades in this county. It has been replaced by a proliferation of small businesses, ranging from mom-and-pops up to mid-sized service firms.
In one sense, this is healthier for the local economy. Becoming too dependent on one large employer for both jobs and tax revenue can be hazardous. Exhibit A would be Fenton and the now-departed Chrysler plant.
Crystal City was known as Glasstown for a reason, but at least the decline of PPG took place over a couple of decades as those several thousand workers gradually became a few hundred at the end. Still, it was a blow to the city and the school district that had depended on “the company” for years.
In Herculaneum, the relationship was more complicated. There were labor problems in the 1980s, followed by increasing warnings about the effects of lead on the population. Doe Run shadow-boxed with the EPA for years after that, installing scrubbers and other pollution-fighting devices that ultimately weren’t enough for ever-tightening environmental standards.
When soil-replacement of nearby yards was deemed inadequate to protect residents, remediation became a full-scale buyout of properties within a certain distance of the smelter. Families were displaced even as Doe Run moved toward a shutdown of the plant.
For much of the 20th century, there was no science warning about the effects of lead, no EPA. There were just good-paying jobs that sustained families. When the warnings began, there were disbelievers and defenders, not too different from the climate change debate of today.
The worm turned when the next steps were blood tests for kids who grew up in town. Elevated lead levels turned into lawsuits, which proceeded into buyouts and eventually, shutdown.
The stack will remain for now, a monument for some, a memorial for others. If nothing else, it should be a reminder that progress often comes with a price.
