Dedication:

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Midland - 1906	Midland - 1956

This book is by us and about us, the people of Midland, and our town. In a way, then, it seems appropriate, on the fiftieth birthday of our town, that we might dedicate this book to ourselves, the people of Midland, who have worked to make our town the things it is, the things we are proud of. But in another way that seems immodest.

When a man is fifty years old, he is mature. When a town reaches that age it has established itself but is just beginning to escape its early growing pains. It is still so young it looks forward eagerly to tomorrow.

And so because we are proud of what we have wrought here in Midland and because we are proud of our people, but most of all because we have confirmed confidence in our town's tomorrow-we dedicate this book to THE FUTURE OF MIDLAND.

Fifty years of fires and floods, and snows and rains, 50 years of making, doing, buying, selling, building, changing, 50 years of working, playing, learning, earning, praying, all in one place, all within less than two square miles, all within the bounds of a town called Midland, that's what this book is about. But mostly it's about the people who made this town, who experienced these things, who did these things, because a people make a town and it lasts and grows or falls and disappears because the people want it that way. When a town lasts 50 years, it's a tribute to the place and the good things that happen there or the people wouldn't stay and the town wouldn't last. So in this book we want to tell you about the things that have happened here and the reasons Midland is a good place that has kept its people 50 years.

Some people rate a town as something if it's on the map. Midland is. In the western Pennsylvania county of Beaver, against the right bank of the Ohio River, three miles from the Ohio State line, seven miles east and north of East Liverpool, 35 miles down the river, which really flows up the map before it recognizes that it should flow down, 35 miles down the river and northwest of Pittsburgh, there's Midland and all 7,000 of its people.

Like every town that's American, Midland has its "Main Street," but it's called Midland Avenue, the parade route, where each fourth day in July, the people, their work clothes doffed for the holiday in favor of sports togs, put on one of the greatest parades of flowered floats anywhere. And the visitors who gather from as many as 100 miles away and more swell the size of the crowd on the sidelines to 20,000 and more.

The right side of Midland Avenue belongs mostly to businesses and stores, the left side is given over primarily to industry, Rem-Cru Titanium, Treadwell, Mackintosh-Hemphill, and especially Crucible Steel. The huge steel works, Midland Works, has been like a magnet in the core

of Midland drawing more than 7,000 workers here every day.

One of the steel plant's giant blast furnaces, towering to a height equal to that of an 18-story building, is higher by 14 stories than any of our town's structures. Their activity, along with the plant's electric and open hearth furnaces, means good times for Midland. And many of us can, but don't like to, remember other days when many of the furnaces were silent and times were not so good for Midland or America.

At Christmas time in our town, the big No. 1 Blast Furnace has been made in recent years a symbol of another side of Midland life. Colored lights are hung from the furnace and the miracle of illumination and the contrast with the night made darker by the hills across the river combine to transform No. I into a tremendous Christmas tree famous enough to bring strangers from miles around to see.

We're going to talk about our churches in this book, too, and our stores and our government and how water and gas and electricity came to Midland. We're going to talk about how the autos came in and the trolley cars left, and how we have protected ourselves against fire and the elements and how we set up our educational system and the games we play, the clubs we belong to. We're going to talk about all those things here with a little remembering from our people, some good and some bad, so that those who have forgotten will recall and those who never knew will learn.

There's something fine about the 50th year of anything to have it known as the golden year. We hope we can help explain it to you in terms of what we've built here -our town.