Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Homestead, PA

Homestead is a borough in Allegheny County on the Monongahela River, about 7 miles southeast of downtown Pittsburgh.

The Homestead area saw its first white settlers arrive in the 1770s, and the town itself was laid out from farmland and chartered in 1880.

Homestead boomed after its first iron mill opened in 1881, and in 1883 Andrew Carnegie bought the Homestead Steel Works, adding it to his steel and coke empire.

Homestead became world-famous in 1892 for the Homestead Strike, when locked-out steelworkers fought a day-long gun battle with Pinkerton guards on July 6, 1892, leaving about a dozen men dead and broken only after the state militia occupied the town.

The Bost Building, which served as the union's headquarters during the 1892 strike, is now a National Historic Landmark and a museum of the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Area.

The Homestead Works grew into one of the largest steel plants in the world, sprawling across Homestead and the neighboring boroughs of Munhall and West Homestead.

Homestead's population peaked at 18,713 in the 1910 census, and the borough counted 3,569 people in 1,607 households in the 2000 census.

Homestead had a population of 2,884 at the 2020 census, a small fraction of its steel-era size.

Homestead was the home of the Homestead Grays, one of the most successful baseball teams in Negro League history.

The Carnegie Library of Homestead, opened in 1898 just over the line in Munhall, is sometimes said to have been offered as a peace gesture to the community after the violence of 1892.