Chief The most notable build ing in Youngstown and one of the most beauti ful in the country is thegallery of The Butler Art Institute, erected by Jos. U. Butler. Jr., at a cost of $600,000 and opened in 1919. It is of marble, the simple, chaste design having been made by McKim. Mead and White. The Ma honing County Court House built in 1911. cost ing $1,000,000, is a classic building containing excellent mural paintings by E. H. Blashtield and C. Y. Turner. In 1915 the city erected a handsome six-story municipal building at a cost of $340,000 The Reuben McMillan Free Li brary building (named in honor of a former superintendent of schools) is a handsome Indi ana Stone structure, planned with unusual suc cess and built in 1911 at a cost of $155,000. of which $50,0110 was contributed by Andrew Carnegic The Y.M A. building was opened in 1915, having cost $375,000. It has 137 dor mitory rooms. The Y.W.C.A. building was opened in 1912, and an annex given by Robert Bentley in 1918, the total cost having been $250,0®. A post-office building, erected to 1898 (cost, $75,000) and an addition in 1910 (cost, $100,000) have for several years been totally inadequate so that temporary additions have been resorted to. Important business buildings include the Dollar Savings, Commercial Na tional and Mahoning bank buildings, the Wide, Stambaugh and Home Savings and Loan build ings and others under construction. Three of the forVg are 13 stories high. Reyes and South schools offer interesting contrast, the first o Ionic style opened in 1866 built dur ing the Civil War, btu with two recent addi tions; the latter a buff brick building costing $350.000 opened 1911. Other buildings of note are the Youngstown and Saint Elizabeth's hospi tals, Masonic Temple. Saint Columbia's, Saint Edward's and Saint John's churches.
The Pennsylvania and Ohio Canal, built in 1839, _stimulated mining of large deposits of Brier Hill block-coal, which long formed a principal part of Youngstown's com merce and warranted building a railroad to Cleveland, opened in 1856. There are now the Erie, Pittsburgh and Lake Erie, Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Ohio, New York Central, and Lake Erie and F.astern roads four stations, and 57 passenger trains daily. Bonds for $900,000 were issued by the city in 1915 to eliminate the Erie grade crossings and land has been con demned for a union passenger station costing $5,000,000 to be erected by the Erie Railroad. One mile east of the do the railroads converge into what is reputed the heaviest traffic point in the United States. Of this tonnage the larger part is raw and finished products of the steel works which line the Mahoning River for 21 miles. Some relief is promised in the proposed Lake Erie and Ohio River barge canal, surveys for which have been completed Steel The growth and import ance of the city has been due to the iron and steel industry. As early as 1805 a blast furnace was built with a capacity of two tons of pig iron per day. The second blast furnace in the United States to use raw block coal, and a rolling mill for making bar iron were both built here in 1846. In 1856 shipments of Lake Superior ores brought much new smelting in dustry to Youngstown. and blast furnaces sprang up rapidly during the next generation, using lake ore and Pennsylvania coal and coke as the native supplies became exhausted. Roll
ing mills were built between 1880 and 1890 and the first general steel mill in the valley was erected in 1895 by the Ohio Steel Company, now the 'OhioWorks' of the Carnegie Steel Com pany. The close proximity of limestone, one of the raw materials for steel making, has been a great aid in the industry. Four limestone quar ries, nearby, have a combined output of 5,000, 000 tons a year, employ over 2.000 people, and besides steel material supply the largest paving brick plant in the world, as well as agricultural lime and other bv-products.
During 1917 the American Iron and Steel In stitute recognired the growing importance of Youngstown by creating the Youngstown Dis trict, which includes works in the Mahoning, Shenango and Beaver valleys and adjacent ter ritory, and produces one-sixth of the pig iron and one-eighth of all steel made in the United States. In 1918 there were in the district 51 blast furnaces producing 6250,611 tons of pig iron, 47 steel works and rolling mills producing 2,843,455 tons of Bessemer, 4,462,061 of open hearth and 20,680 of other castings; wire rods, 225,306; plates and sheets, 1,133,712; merchant bars, 791,691; skelp, 701,376; other rolled prod ucts, 913,913 tons; a total of rolled products, 3,765,998. In addition there are coke-oven plants at three of the Youngstown works, with a total of 533 Koppers ovens. From the by products large quantities of tar, benzol, ammo mum sulphate, toluol, xylol and solvent naph thas are made locally, while other by-products are shipped for manufacture elsewhere.
Subsidiary and Other Industries,— Sub sidiary to the steel industry are many manu factures which use steel or its by-products. Among these are steel furniture and structural parts; steel sash and pressed-steel buildings; waterproofing, asbesteos, cement, shingles, blast furnace equipment, boilers, bridges, cars, cranes, engines, forgings, machine-shop products, stoves and washed metal. Independent of the steel industry are manufactories of automobile trucks, brass, cement, flour, gas mantles, mill work, electric bulbs, leather, powder, wagons and rubber.
Finances and Banking.—The assessed val uation of the city is $215,260,960; tax rate, $15; bonded debt, $5,502,356. The State tax law makes bonding practically the only method for public improvements with the result that of a total city revenue of $2,766,666, the annual In terest on bonds and debts is $1,778,882, while $987,784 is spent on operating expenses. The school board levies its own tax, expending $1,180,324 on public schools. The city owns property valued at $17,717,110. Post-office re ceipts are $457,190. The banking business is conducted by five banks and three building and loan associations, which have a combined capital of $5,400,000 and total deposits of $70,000,000. The savings deposits alone amount to $41,428,036, an unusual average for the population. The First National (the third oldest national bank in the United States) and Dollar Bank has 61, 000 depositors, and the largest retail foreign ex change department in the country, with 10,000 depositors and $7,000,000 deposits. No bank failures have occurred in Youngstown.