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CHAPTER VI. THE LORAIN STEEL COMPANY.     This industry is the second largest in the county. It is operated as a department of the National Tube Company of Ohio, with its general offices in Lorain, of which Max M. Suppes, a son of Conrad Suppes, and a former residence of Johnstown is the manager. These companies are subsidiary organization of the great United States Steel Corporation.     The National Tube Company has a capital of $9,000,000, of which $3,000,000 is 8 per cent cumulative preferred stock and the remainder, common. It operates four stack furnaces with an annual capacity of 650,000 tons of pig metal, and is at present building furnace E, which will increase its output to 800,000 tons. It also operates a rail mill, blooming mill and skelp mill. Its annual products are: Bessemer steel ingots, 720,000 tons; billets, 630,000; rails, 220,000 and 360,000 tons of skelp. Also a Wrought Pipe Mill and Galvanizing plant of an annual output of 300,000 tons. It makes pipe in all sizes from one-eighth of an inch to twenty inches inclusive, and operates an Iron and Brass Foundry with an annual capacity of 12,000 tons of ingot molds; 9,000 tons of iron castings and 300 tons of brass castings.     The Lorain Steel Company is the successor of the Johnson Steel Street Rail Company, the laudable ambition of two men – Tom L. Johnson, the present mayor of Cleveland, and Arthur James Moxham, president of the Dupont Powder Company of Wilmington, Delaware. The office of the rail company in 1882 was located in Louisville, Kentucky. These gentlemen believed that a steel girder rail should take the place of the flat steel railway rail laid on wooden stringers then in use. In the latter part of the year Mr. Moxham came to Johnstown, to superintend the manufacture of the girder rails which were being made by the Cambria Iron Company. These steel girder rails were to be fitted to cast iron frogs, switches and curves for street railways.     In the following March he opened an office at No. 421 Main street, which building was destroyed in the flood. At that time the castings were being made in Indianapolis and the rails in

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