Blood & Biohazard Cleanup Near North Vandergrift Vandergrift, PA

Vandergrift is a borough on the Kiskiminetas River in Westmoreland County, about 30 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, founded in 1895 when the Apollo Iron and Steel Company built a new integrated, non-unionized steelworks there.

Vandergrift was designed by Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot, the nation's preeminent landscape architecture firm, as a model industrial town with curvilinear, tree-lined streets, parks, sewers and running water.

Vandergrift is described as the first successful planned industrial town designed to be sold to its workers, who built or commissioned their own homes - and where alcohol sales were banned from the start.

A model of Vandergrift won two gold medals at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

In the early twentieth century, Vandergrift had the largest sheet steel mill in the world.

Vandergrift was named for Captain J.J. Vandergrift, a director of the Apollo Iron and Steel Company.

Vandergrift's founder, company president George G. McMurtry, used the town's worker-residents in 1901 to break the first major strike against the newly formed United States Steel Corporation.

The neighboring Borough of Vandergrift Heights was consolidated into Vandergrift on June 28, 1915.

Vandergrift's population peaked at around 11,500 in 1930 and had fallen to 5,075 by the 2020 census, with 5,205 residents counted in 2010 and 5,455 in 2000.

St. Gertrude Roman Catholic Church and the Vandergrift Historic District are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places.