HOW IMMIGRATION GREW THE MAHONING VALLEY

Between 1910 and 1920, Mahoning County experienced one of the most dramatic population increases in its history. According to the Fourteenth Census of the United States (1920), the county’s population rose from 116,247 to 141,858 — a surge of more than 22 percent in just ten years. This period of rapid growth reflected a broader national trend of industrial expansion and mass immigration, but nowhere was that transformation more visible than in the steel towns of the Mahoning Valley.

At the dawn of the 20th century, Mahoning County was fast becoming one of Ohio’s industrial powerhouses. Youngstown’s mills and foundries—many clustered along the

Mahoning River—offered steady work and higher wages than most agricultural regions could provide. The booming iron and steel industries drew thousands of laborers from across the United States and abroad. Immigrants from Italy, Hungary, Austria, Poland, and Czechoslovakia poured into Youngstown, Struthers, and Campbell, where entire neighborhoods soon reflected the languages, foods, and traditions of the Old World.

The Sharon Steel Company - Lowellville Works (Lowellville, Ohio) was one of the steel mills that relied heavily on immigrant laborers.

The promise of jobs in the mills and related industries coincided with the larger waves of immigration that swept into America in the early 1900s. Steamships arrived weekly in New York and Philadelphia, carrying southern and eastern Europeans who fled poverty, political unrest, and limited opportunities in their homelands. Recruiters for Youngstown’s mills often met these newcomers at the docks, directing them toward the Mahoning Valley, where labor demand was high. By 1920, more than 45,000 residents of Mahoning County were foreign-born, with Germans, Italians, Hungarians, and Poles forming the largest groups.

The Top 5 Countries of Origin for Mahoning County’s Foreign-Born Residents

Source: 1920 US Federal Census

World War I temporarily slowed immigration from Europe, but the county’s population continued to expand as families reunited and new arrivals filled labor shortages caused by the draft. African Americans also began arriving from the South during the early years of the Great Migration, seeking the same industrial opportunities that had lured immigrants a decade earlier.

By the end of the decade, Mahoning County had transformed from a largely rural landscape into a vibrant, multicultural industrial center. Streets that once echoed with the sounds of wagons and livestock now rang with the whistles of mills, streetcars, and trains. The children of immigrants filled local schools, churches multiplied, and community organizations—ethnic clubs, lodges, and mutual aid societies—became essential to neighborhood life. The population boom of 1910 to 1920 laid the foundation for the county’s identity as a melting pot of nations, a place where the hard work of newcomers built not only steel but a community that still bears their legacy today.