Thousands of Americans cross the Atlantic each year to dig for ancestral roots. British Prime Minister John Major, turning the tables, is coming to Pennsylvania to see where an ancestor built blast furnaces for steel mills.
Major's paternal grandparents, Abraham and Sarah Ball, arrived in the Pittsburgh area in the late 19th century, perhaps as early as 1865.When President Clinton learned of Major's roots, he invited the prime minister to Pittsburgh, and the two plan a working dinner here Monday night at a hilltop restaurant overlooking the city's skyline.
Ball, a master bricklayer, apparently was one in a stream of skilled laborers who arrived in Pennsylvania just as the steel industry was bursting forth, said Edward Muller, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh.
"This guy's walking into an environment that's just changing enormously, and he's got a great skill for that world he just walked into," Muller said. "You couldn't be in a better place in a better time."
When Sarah Ball became pregnant with the child who was to be Major's father, she went home so the baby would be born in England. In 1880, she brought little Abraham Thomas Ball to Pennsylvania, where he spent his first 15 years or so.
Little is left of Abraham Ball's world for his grandson to see.
Soot from many mill smokestacks once darkened the noonday sky. Now most of the soot is gone, along with thousands of steel makers' jobs and many of the mills in which they toiled.
The Homestead Steel Works, which forged the steel that built the Empire State Building and the Sears Tower and symbolized the nation's can-do spirit, closed eight years ago. The new owner has pulled down its brick-lined blast furnaces, and a water slide park was built over the mill's railroad yards.
In the river valleys that once cradled the fledgling steel industry, only a few row house neighborhoods remain from the last century, Muller said.
The prime minister's father used to reminisce about a place near Pittsburgh called Fall Hollow, where he dug arrowheads out of trees. No one knows exactly where Fall Hollow is. But Corey Seeman of The Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania found a 1917 waterways guide that mentions Fall Hollow Run, and he believes Fall Hollow is now a strip of houses and shops near the Edgar Thomson Works, a steel mill on the Monongahela River.
According to "The Quiet Rise of John Major," written in 1991 by Edward Pearce, Ball was a master bricklayer from the Birmingham area who was commissioned to line the blast furnaces for steel mills across Pennsylvania.
Some reports have said Major's grandfather cleaned the blast furnaces. Seeman believes Pearce's assertion that Ball built them.