Instructors from a local community college can conduct classes at the mill. Grants from the state and federal government partially fund the training program. Lone Star also offers an area for workers to contemplate. Set away from the plant's bustling mills, a shaded chapel called Chapel in the Pines was built by the company in 1955. Some employees have held their weddings there.
Legend says it was used to produce cannonballs during the Civil War.
The legend might be true. Lone Star, which is in northeastern Texas, is near large underground beds of iron ore. The U.S. federal government built a steel mill there in 1945 because of the beds. The mill, then called the Daingerfield mill, was close to its raw materials and far from the military airbases of the U.S.'s potential enemies. A group of Dallas business executives bought the Texas mill in 1948 and renamed it Lone Star Steel.