FORD CITY, Pa. — Between Ford City Memorial Park and 13th Street, the Armstrong Trail carries you past the old tunnel through which thousands once streamed to industrial worksites along the Allegheny River. It passes the town clock, whose four different faces show four different times. And then the former rail line runs alongside blocks of abandoned concrete pads.
Several residents using the trail last week said they had a hard time remembering what, exactly, had occupied the site. The Pittsburgh Plate Glass works, closed amid a labor dispute in 1991? The Eljer toilet factory? Something else?
But in places like Ford City, just over five months before a crucial national election, it may be easier to forget than to forgive.
“Small towns like this are going down the tubes,” said longtime resident Cindy Seely. “Half the town is for sale.”
“A lot of jobs have walked out of here,” agreed Mel Truby, who was speaking with Ms. Seely outside their apartment building.
It was in the late 1880s that John B. Ford built what was said to be the world’s largest plate-glass factory, a mainstay of what would become Pittsburgh Plate Glass. By 1910, the borough bearing his name grew to nearly 5,000 people. “No city in Pennsylvania, and few in the United States, grew so fast as Ford City,” one biographer wrote.
The borough’s decline, has been slower. And more painful.
The jobs picture has only gotten worse since PPG’s closure. As of 2014, state data shows, fewer than 2,200 people in all of Armstrong County held manufacturing jobs. That’s a decline of 30 percent since the mid-2000s, and it’s less than two-thirds the number of workers once employed by Ford City’s glass plant alone.
Pundits say that festering resentment among white working class communities are among the biggest challenges facing Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton this November.
“[D]ecades of deindustrialization [are] one of the most crucial sources of anger among working-class Americans,” wrote Brookings Institution researchers Mark Muro and Siddharth Kulkarni in March. The United States has lost 7 million manufacturing jobs since 1980, they wrote, a decline that offers an “explanation for the populist rage that has driven Donald Trump and [Vermont Senator] Bernie Sanders to victory.”
Indeed, while Armstrong is solidly Republican, it’s also the only Pittsburgh-area county where Democrats backed Mr. Sanders over Ms. Clinton.
“People here haven’t been getting results,” said Kirk Atwood, a Sanders supporter and the two-term mayor of Kittanning ,the Armstrong County seat. “So they voted for outsiders.”
The Clinton campaign isn’t giving up on places like Ford City. In a statement, state director Corey Dukes pledged “to revitalize our hardest-hit manufacturing communities, and to create incentives for companies to bring back jobs from overseas.”
But while Democrats outnumbered Republicans here until 2004, party-switchers have since given Republicans a 20,642 to 15,884 edge. Mr. Trump’s rise has sharpened the trend: For every Armstrong County Republican that became a Democrat since January, three Democrats have gone the opposite direction.
“We have a lot of supporters in Armstrong County,” said Tricia Cunningham, who coordinates the efforts of local Trump volunteers. “They used to work in coal, steel or other manufacturing. Now they’re begging for $30,000-a-year jobs.”
Ford City still boasts local treasures like the A Mano Pasta shop, and smaller manufacturers, like disc-spring maker Belleflex Technologies, occupy some of PPG’s former riverside site.
But Ford City suffered another painful loss in 2008, when the Eljer toilet factory closed after a merger with American Standard Brands. David Wolfe, a former United Steelworkers official who represented Eljer employees, said the merged company moved production to China.
“It’s a sin, because the workers here made the best plumbing ware in the world,” he said. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
Since then, the borough has struggled to pay its police and salt its roads. And like communities across the country, it’s battling what new mayor Jeff Cogley calls a “very serious problem” with heroin abuse.
“When you have people not working, they get into stuff like drugs,” said Mr. Cogley, who was himself laid off from steelmaker ATI’s nearby Bagdad plant last month. The company cited a “record surge of low-priced imports, primarily from China.”
And though he’s a union member, Mr. Cogley said he’ll vote Republican this year.
“The Republicans aren’t for unions,” he said. “But they also aren’t the ones shutting down industries.”
American Standard’s investors included Bain Capital, a firm founded by 2012 Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Armstrong County voters backed Mr. Romney in 2012 anyway, by margins of more than two-to-one.
But residents like Mr. Truby blame much of the area’s woes on trade pacts ushered in by former President Bill Clinton, whose wife is the likely 2016 Democratic nominee. Trade pacts like 1994’s NAFTA “outsourced everything,” he said. “You get rid of all those jobs, and where’s the money going to come from?”
Meanwhile said Tyson Klukan, a Ford City borough councilman, “Our area is big on coal and natural resources, and it seems the Democrats don’t support that.”
Such perceptions stem from Democratic efforts to regulate coal-fired power plants. The shutdown of such plants has hurt mining companies nationwide. Rosebud Mining, Armstrong County’s third-largest employer, idled roughly half its workforce this winter. Mr. Atwood, the Kittanning mayor, said the move “scared the pants off everyone,” though workers were called back this spring.
Ms. Clinton has addressed such fears by proposing a $30 billion plan to shore up coal miners’ pensions and spur economic development in coal patches. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has pledged to scrap environmental regulations, though it’s unclear how much that would help coal producers.
Coal’s decline, “happened as drastically as it did because of natural gas” rather than regulations, said Anna Zubets-Anderson, a senior analyst who studies the coal industry for Moody’s.
“Regulation makes it very difficult to build coal-fired plants, [which] caps the potential for coal’s recovery,” she said. But even with no regulations, she said, there’d still be low-priced gas to contend with, and “environmental sentiment is a global phenomenon. If I’m a utility, I’m concerned that I’d build a plant and then have another regulatory change 10 years down the road.”
Between now and November, Ms. Clinton’s allies plan to make the case that Mr. Trump’s promises can’t be relied upon. The Steelworkers, Mr. Cogley’s union, released a statement this month noting that despite Mr. Trump’s criticisms of global trade, “his own signature line of dress clothes are produced in low-wage countries. … [W]e aren’t going to fall for the kind of bait and switch that is being played out by Trump.”
Even if such efforts don’t sway voters around Ford City, Armstrong County holds fewer than 41,000 voters in a state of 8.2 million. Democratic losses in the west have been more than offset by gains in former GOP strongholds around Philadelphia. Democrats hold a 49-to-38 percent registration edge statewide, and a Bloomberg Politics poll last week showed Ms. Clinton leading Mr. Trump by 7 percent among middle-income voters in Pennsylvania and three other “Rust Belt” states.
But Mr. Wolfe, for one, lamented the fact that many of his neighbors wouldn’t respond to either candidate. “A lot of people have given up,” he said. “It’s terrible they feel that way. But they have justification for it.”
Chris Potter: cpotter@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2533.
