August 24 to September 4, 2026 — To allow Hagley to complete important preservation work, the historic powder yard area of the museum is closed to all museum guests, including members, from August 24 to September 4, 2026.

Aerial photograph of the Brown-Bonnell Iron Co., Youngstown, Ohio

Smokestacks are standing in for candles this week to note the 216th birthday of the co-founder and first president of the Brown-Bonnell Iron Company of Youngstown, Ohio, shown here in a ca. 1892 photograph.

Joseph Henry Brown (1810-1886) was born on July 24, 1810 in Wales. Around 1820, his family emigrated to Franklin County, Pennsylvania, where they established one of the region's early ironworks. As an adult, Joseph Henry Brown's efforts to establish himself in the family business led him first to an appointment as foreman of an iron plant in Franklin County, then to work in the mercantile iron trade in New Castle, Pennsylvania. In 1855, Brown moved to Youngstown, Ohio, where he partnered with William Bonnell to establish small guide mill, which grew into a nail and nail plate mill factory with a puddling department. 

The company continued to expand, adding a rolling mill with multiple blast furnaces and a staff of around five hundred. In 1876, Joseph Henry Brown sold the company and moved to Chicago, where he founded the Joseph H. Brown Iron & Steel Company.

Division: Executive Administration
Reports To: CEO

The Executive Assistant provides high-level, confidential administrative and organizational support to the CEO and the Board of Trustees. This position plays a critical role in supporting effective communication, coordination, and decision-making across all levels of leadership.

Color photograph of a steelworker in protective clothing

One of the oldest trade associations in the United States has a home at Hagley Library. Our American Iron and Steel Institute photographs and audiovisual materials (Accession: 1986.268) collection consists of photographs, research notes, audio, film, and video documenting the Institute and the history of the North American iron and steel industry.

The American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) was established under the leadership of United States Steel Corporation co-founder and chairman Elbert H. Gary (1846-1927) in 1908 after the Panic of 1907 brought an end to industry-wide consolidations. But its precursors date back to 1855, starting with the American Iron Association, which became the American Iron and Steel Association in 1864 following the American adoption of the Bessemer steel-making process.

Isabelle Marina Held will offer our second author talk on December 3. Her book, Atomic Bombshells: How Plastics Shaped Postwar Bodies, deftly traces how nylon and other technologies moved from wartime use into domestic life.

The first author talk of the fall on Thursday October 8 will be offered by Dylan Gottlieb on his new book, Yuppies: The Bankers, Lawyers, Joggers, and Gourmands Who Conquered New York.

Let’s say that poison gas leaks from a plant, sickening workers and residents. Should OSHA investigate, or the EPA? Who is responsible when both agencies have a claim to jurisdiction? The American federal government regulates the workplace and the environment separately, despite their material inseparability, that the workplace is part of the environment. How and why did the American regulatory landscape come to have this awkward and contradictory split?

This manuscript (a chapter of my book in progress) uses two early examples of installation of AC systems to explore the priorities of those who invested in it. Both instances took place in 1902. That year, Alfred Wolff received approval to place his AC system into the New York Stock Exchange (for worker comfort) and Willis Carrier installed the world’s first modern AC system at a Brooklyn factory (to stabilize product).

This chapter tells a parochial story of how Luzerne County was remade as a site for “capital formation” by the activities of holding companies in the 1950s and 1960s, laying groundwork to explain how Salem Township became ripe for predation in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Previous speculative frenzies transformed the social fabric along the North Branch. The Connecticut Susquehanna Company colonization of the Wyoming Valley sparked agrarian settler violence feeding the post-Revolutionary “land mania” of the 1790s.

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