1987

1987 is the year the Buell steel mill closed, a decisive marker of the region’s industrial collapse and of the changed lives that follow. The closure is not an isolated date: it stands at the center of the novel’s account of a Valley losing work, population, and public resources, even as its landscape retains the material remains of steelmaking.

The mill’s closing and the landscape it left

The mill had once been large enough to seem like a small city. After it closed in 1987, it was partially dismantled ten years later, but the work stopped before the site was cleared. Its empty buildings, rusted furnaces, pipes, slag cars, and abandoned steel remain as an industrial ruin; vines and trees grow through the grounds, and deer and coyotes leave tracks where only an occasional person passes. The date thus marks both the end of production and the beginning of a long, incomplete afterlife for the plant.

The broader setting makes that change legible beyond the mill gates. Buell, Pennsylvania, retains its orderly hillside rows, churches, cathedral, and historic stone buildings, but many downtown storefronts are boarded and some blocks are abandoned. Elsewhere in the Valley, old plants and smokestacks recall the network of smaller industries—tool and die, specialty coating, mining equipment, and coal—that had supported steelmaking. Isaac English sees the mill closures as the collapse of an interconnected system, and wonders whether the Valley will eventually rust away until only its stone remains.

Work, families, and lost prospects

The consequences of the industrial reversal reach into family histories. Grace Poe recalls being sent to work at Penn Steel after high school, then meeting Virgil Poe on the rolling line. She began college while pregnant and caring for a baby, but layoffs ended her studies before she completed her associate degree. Virgil survived several rounds of cuts before losing his job; his short seniority left him vulnerable even though he had been proud to work in the mill. The closure and the layoffs around it narrowed choices that had once seemed ordinary: steady employment, continued education, and the ability to plan a future elsewhere.

The scale of the loss extends beyond individual households. In the decades surrounding Isaac English and Billy Poe’s childhoods, the area lost 150,000 jobs. Many towns could no longer afford basic services, and some could not maintain a police force. The decline also unsettled housing and migration: after foreclosures began, residents picketed sheriff’s sales, and a moratorium eventually became law. Grace and Virgil kept their trailer with help from the food bank and the deer Virgil poached. Some workers left for places such as Houston, New Jersey, and Virginia, but many returned; for Grace, staying poor among familiar people could seem preferable to starting over elsewhere.

A regional decline, not a single failure

The novel places the mill’s closure within a larger history of industrial choices. Henry English recalls that Penn Steel had failed to invest in its factories for fifteen years, while other major American mills also allowed their plants to fall behind. He contrasts that neglect with continued investment in steelmaking infrastructure in Germany and Japan. His recollection shifts the explanation away from workers’ individual shortcomings and toward decisions about capital, equipment, and the future of production.

The damage persists in the region’s public life. In Bud Harris’s account, population may be growing again, but incomes continue to fall, municipal budgets shrink, and infrastructure has gone without investment for decades. Buell’s police budget is cut sharply while the city is under pressure to repair a sewer system that spills into the river during heavy storms. Harris describes small-town budgets facing big-city problems, and connects the scarcity of stable jobs to the erosion of social stability. The year 1987 therefore functions as a landmark within a decline whose consequences continue well beyond the factory’s closing.

The industrial past in everyday view

The novel repeatedly sets the memory of industrial work against the present landscape. Isaac remembers the shift change, the traffic, and workers emerging coated in steel dust; his father once lifted him from that stream of laborers, before an accident changed his father’s life. Later, walking past the mill’s remaining furnaces and structural steel, Isaac leaves the town by the railbed. The route carries him away from Buell, but the abandoned plant remains part of the world he is trying to leave.

The river likewise bears the history that the closure did not erase. Barges still push coal through the valley, while a fish jumps in water Isaac knows is contaminated with mercury and PCBs. The contrast between the forested banks and the industrial traffic makes the region’s environmental burden part of its daily scenery. In this sense, 1987 is more than a date in the mill’s history: it marks the rupture between a community organized around steel and the unsettled, still-industrial landscape left after production recedes.