Hugh O'Donnell

Photo of Hughey O'Donnell as he appeared around the time of the Homestead Strike.

Hugh O'Donnell (c. 1869–1935) was an American steel mill worker and labor leader. He is best remembered as the chairman of the Homestead Strike Advisory Committee during the Homestead Steel Strike of July 1892.

Biography Early years

Hugh O'Donnell came to work at the Carnegie Steel Company works at Homestead, Pennsylvania in 1886, at the age of 17. After 6 months in the sheet metal mill he moved to the Homestead works' mill which produced 119-inch steel plate, in which he worked as a heater. In this capacity he had cautioned against violence and trespassing upon company property in an attempt to keep the company from availing itself of judicial injunction or the seizing of the moral high ground.

The Advisory Committee established its headquarters on the third floor of the Bost Building, located at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Heisel Street in Homestead.

Events of July 6 Union leaders made their headquarters on the third floor of the Bost Building in Homestead, now the site of a labor history museum.

At 10:30 pm on July 5, 1892, some 300 employees of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency arrived by rail at Bellevue, about five miles south of Pittsburgh along the Ohio River. These were put aboard two specially equipped barges, laden with 300 pistols and 250 Winchester rifles, and pulled by tugboat up the river to Homestead.

As dawn began to break at 4:00 am, a crowd had gathered along the riverbank next to a barbed wire fence which ran from the plant to the river, which had been erected by the company some weeks earlier.

Gangplanks were lowered and William Foy and Capt. Frederick H. Heinde, commander of the Pinkerton landing operation, tensely faced off amidst mutual threats. A fracas erupted, with clubs wielded and shots were fired, with both Foy and Heinde hit by bullets.

The Pinkertons remained trapped aboard the barges, while O'Donnell and his associates of the Advisory Committee attempted to restore order to the tense and bloody situation, removing wives and wounded strikers from the scene and O'Donnell personally attempting, to the best of his ability, to calm and organize the crowd. The meeting was addressed by Homestead burgess (mayor) John McLuckie, who railed against the Pinkertons as members of a "dirty, filthy, stinking" organization while encouraging reception of the militia "with open arms," since "they are not dangerous so long as the dignity of the state is not insulted." He was held without bail on the charges, coming to trial on one of the murder charges in February 1893.

In about 1903, O'Donnell accepted a position in government employment as a deputy to the Pennsylvania state factory inspector. This job placed O'Donnell in crowded Pennsylvania tenements and poorly ventilated factories on a regular basis, and he subsequently contracted tuberculosis as a result. Stricken seriously ill by the disease, in November 1905 O'Donnell left the Northeast for the warmer and drier climate of the Southwest, accompanied by relatives, in an effort to regain his health.