During World War I, the town of Donora, Pennsylvania, located about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh, roared with activity. The mills in Donora manufactured steel for all sorts of wartime materiel and zinc, used to galvanize the steel to prevent rust. The mills required a growing number of workers, and those workers needed houses to live in, an increasingly scarce commodity. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote in 1915, the year the zinc factory was built, that “accommodations are proving entirely insufficient. Some of the 1,400 men have found lodging and boarding in Webster,…
