page_title: Beaver Falls Cutlery Company
section_title: Labor dispute, 1872
hierarchical_section_title: Beaver Falls Cutlery Company / Labor dispute, 1872
caption_attribution_description: English: Overview of City View Playground, located at the southern end of Eighth Avenue in the College Hill neighborhood of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, United States. The site was previously a cemetery for Chinese workers at the Beaver Falls Cutlery Company.
context_page_description: Beaver Falls Cutlery Company, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, is a former company which manufactured steel cutlery, razors and pocketknives. The company was founded as Binns & Mason in 1866 by skilled cutlers from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, as a small enterprise making pocketknives in Rochester, Pennsylvania, then it briefly became The Pittsburgh Cutlery Company. It was purchased in 1867 by the Harmony Society, brought to Beaver Falls, and developed for mass production, to employ 300 people and to cover a two-acre site. In 1872 it suffered a labor dispute which was resolved by the employment of up to 225 Chinese workers. In 1876 it produced the "largest knife and fork in the world," of its time, for display at the Centennial Exposition. The company closed in 1886.
context_section_description: In 1872 the company was stable and Harmony was making a profit. At this point the largely English skilled workforce took the opportunity to initiate a labor dispute and strike for higher wages. The director John Reeves refused the demand. Instead he closed the factory, then he gave a five-year contract to 225 Chinese workers gradually brought in from California and New Orleans. With them was Madam Chow, the wife of Chow Hung and the only Chinese woman at Beaver Falls at that time. The Beaver County Times has suggested that it was she who brought the antique manuscript of Dream of the Red Chamber which was discovered at Beaver Falls in 2019. Reeves brought in the Chinese with some difficulty, travelling for fifteen days to San Francisco to find only reluctant travellers, then riding the new railroad to New Orleans to gratefully collect his first seventy Chinese men who had been working on the railway. Another thirty men followed them to Beaver Falls the following week. A further influence in this matter was the Methodist minister Reverend Dyer, a missionary who knew that the Chinese worked hard and did not drink. 
  It was not an easy transition though. The Chinese were met off the train by an angry mob of workers, and saloon keepers who had discovered that the Chinese did not drink. The local policeman, assisted by John Reeves and Judge Henry Hice, had to keep order for some weeks. The Chinese workers resided in The Old Mansion House, built in 1875 with a cookhouse, dining room and sleeping quarters, at the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue. The contract for the Chinese workers was with San Francisco merchant Ah Chuck, who had the responsibility of returning their bodies to China should they die in American employ. The contract provided for rice, sleeping quarters and a gold dollar a day for each man. Ah Chuck also provided an interpreter, Lee Ten Pay. 
  At first there was a settlement with the company workers, following a delegation from the Beaver Falls community. Management agreed as follows: "All cutlery workers were paid each month with the privilege of leaving if dissatisfied, and if they would leave the Chinamen alone and permit them to remain, the strikers would be reinstated with pay and all profits from the cutlery would be used for the community for seven years." The Chinese were satisfactory workers; their appearance attracted tourists who in turn brought good custom to the factory. 
  However the Chinese had been brought in to reduce theft and to reduce the payroll. The payroll dropped from $13,000 to $5,000 per month. Beaver Falls residents resented the Chinese, pushing them from the wooden walkways onto the muddy streets. Some Chinese workers died after such attacks, and were buried at the far end of town in a specially dedicated cemetery, near Twenty-Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue on College Hill. Their bones were then "removed and carried away in sacks." Although rumour had it that a mysterious benefactor paid for the removal of the bodies, which were exhumed and returned to China for traditional burial rites, another story suggests that a developer wanted to build homes on the land. Over the years, half of the Chinese left the company, and in 1877 the other half left, their fare to San Francisco being paid by the company, as per their contract. Local residents returned to work at the plant. 
  The background to the use of Chinese labor was the immigration of 60,000 Chinese to the Pacific Coast and Rockies between the California Gold Rush and 1869. With the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the Chinese began to move east, and potential employment at Beaver Falls made it one of their first eastern destinations. The local controversy following the strike at the cutlery company took the notice of Pennsylvania General Assembly and Congress, in the context of the contemporary Chinese question debate about immigration. "In some measure it contributed to the eventual passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act" of 1882.
caption: City View Playground in College Hill, formerly the Chinese cemetery
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