HOMESTEAD AND ST. MARY MAGDALENE CEMETERIES

At the 1992 centennial, the Pennsylvania Labor History Society marked the graves of five Homestead workers who were casualties of the July 6, 1892 battle. George Rutter, oldest of the strike victims and Civil War veteran wounded at Gettysburg, was buried in Tarentum. Overlooking Homestead, two cemeteries hold the remains of six strikers. John E. Morris, a skilled worker of English/ Welsh descent with a marked grave, was the first killed, struck in the forehead as he looked out a Pump House window. Also in Homestead Cemetery, an Englishman Silas Wain died from shrapnel in the neck. Joseph Sotak, a Slovak leader of the Eastern European steel workers, was shot while attempting to rescue a wounded worker.

Across the road, St. Mary Magdalene Cemetery provided burial for three more strikers. Peter Ferris, a Slovak/Hungarian carrying a loaf of bread, was shot by a Pinkerton sharpshooter. Dying, he raised the bread and said: “You cannot take this from our mouths.” Joseph Streagel, the youngest of the strikers killed, apparently wounded himself in the neck with his revolver. Thomas Weldon, an Irishman born in England, died from a captured Winchester rifle discharged by accident. At his burial, Father Bullion asserted a worker’s right to his job: ”A workman has a certain right…as long as he does nothing wrong, he has the right to expect permanent employment…it is wrong for a mob to come here and deprive the workman of the right that is his.”

102 E. 22nd St. near Main St., Munhall