IN THE SPRING OF 1889, WHEN AN EVENT WHOSE ONLY COMPARISONS were biblical descriptions of the awful Last Day of Judgment came rushing into Johnstown, few people in the valley knew for certain who belonged to the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, the private retreat up on the mountain, with its marvelous, sparkling artificial lake. Almost all of the club’s members lived in Pittsburgh, not Johnstown, and they weren’t the kind of men who wanted their private affairs bandied about for all to see.
Some were already world-famous and didn’t need gawkers coming around. Many weren’t famous, but they too liked the privacy, and maybe even more they liked the sensation of belonging to a club with men who did have such needs. These were steel magnates, railroad tycoons, coal barons, ironmasters, glass producers, and other entrepreneurs in the process of creating what Mark Twain was soon to call the Gilded Age, along with the lawyers and bankers and insurance men who served various processes for the great industries that those men were building. They all did business together, less in cutthroat competition than in a strange kind of communalism, sewing up business in impromptu, often undocumented consortiums, seeking and often achieving industrial monopolies.
For it was in monopoly that the secret of great American wealth lay. These few men, centered in the booming city of Pittsburgh, created and held a huge piece of that wealth. In its pursuit, they invested in wresting ore from the mountains and altering molecular structures. They conceived and then actually brought into being great networks of water, rail, human toil, and financial capital, to spread the products of their desire and ingenuity from coast to coast. These efforts, with the rewards they birthed, had become the signal American achievement, celebrated not only in the United States but around the world as harbingers of a coming new century.
If such men could conceive whole new industries, new technologies, and new ways of moving capital around the globe, surely they could manifest for themselves a rustic retreat, far above all the haze and smell and noise that their imaginations were creating down below. Up where the air was still cool and clear, they could imagine big bass gobbling hooks and fighting lines, wildlife succumbing to bullet and shot, well-cared-for youngsters darting gaily colored sails about a mountain lake, and summer cottages—meaning oversize “gingerbread homes”—with docks and boathouses along a lakeshore. Whatever they could imagine they could make real.
What they couldn’t imagine, and what none of them would ever consider, let alone admit, was that they would be the cause of the greatest disaster to that point in American history. Catastrophe was so far from their purpose, it scarcely entered their minds.
The members had two goals in forming the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club. They would seek relaxation and recreation in healthful outdoor sport, and they would provide their growing families a place to cavort, in a genteel way, with others of their station. In those pursuits, the members of the club expected to remain undisturbed, beholden to nobody not in the club. They formed the organization in 1879 and had it going in 1881. The membership rolls remained secret.
In 1889, the most famous name to be found among the secret membership rolls of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club was Andrew Carnegie. Nobody in the United States had more money, it was said; some counted him the richest man in the world. And Carnegie gave his money away. Libraries, concert halls, and other great institutions of culture and learning were beginning to bear his name from coast to coast.
And it was Andrew Carnegie, of all the South Fork Club members, who most fully expressed the new spirit of the age. That spirit had changed the Conemaugh Valley, in a few short years, from a farming town to a canal town to the archetype of the loud, harsh, smoky, clanking, polluted industrial environment, stripped of trees. From the workers’ mere survival, in the hard labor of the mills and mines, to the genteel classes’ prosperity, in the stores and offices, that spirit presaged the dawn of modern America, and Andrew Carnegie was becoming world-famous for leading the effort.
But what Carnegie most epitomized was the interconnectedness of all industry via capital. By 1889, he’d made deals that linked his own steel company with that of the Cambria company of Johnstown, which little Johnny thought made the world. Carnegie competed with, poached from, and appropriated many of the innovations in production that made Cambria great; and by 1889, for all of Cambria’s might, he was already beating it, in part dictating to it. And Carnegie didn’t only own steel mills—soon almost all of them—in western Pennsylvania, where so much of the world’s steel was produced. He owned or held powerful interests in the coal that fired the steel hearths, and in the railroad trains that hauled the coal to the mills and hauled the steel products away, and even in the hotels where his fellow businessmen stayed when pursuing their many great aims. Working closely with those who might otherwise have been competitors, Carnegie’s consortiums were financed by banks in which he also held powerful interests, allowing him to “capture markets,” as he liked to put his ceaseless quest for monopoly.
To the Pittsburgh industrialists and businessmen, Andrew Carnegie was thus not only their partner and their leader but also the model to which they all aspired. And not only in business.
When the rich men of Pittsburgh formed the South Fork Club up on the mountain, Andrew Carnegie was their guiding spirit in that effort, too. While his rise to fabulous wealth and fame involved an extraordinary degree of sheer toughness, more important to the founding of the South Fork Club was another side of Carnegie: a love of contemplation, artistic beauty, philosophical thought, and natural wonder.
It was that combination of qualities, seemingly incongruous to later generations, that made Carnegie the highly idiosyncratic American icon of wealth and philanthropy that he would become. That combination formed the mentality that enabled the men of the idyllic mountain club to revel in their pastoral, romantic mountain retreat to the exclusion of any sense of the danger they were posing thousands of people who were living and working below. Often remembered later as the hard-nosed if generously philanthropic capitalist archetype of the booming America of the late nineteenth century, Andrew Carnegie was really a romantic. It was he who first started promoting the healthful benefits that might accrue, to a hard-driving, urban, modern man of business, from the physically and mentally restorative powers of recreation in a natural, breezy, pastoral, mountainous retreat. That idea, in such stark contrast to the scarring of the countryside and the fouling of the air and the blocking of the rivers that Carnegie’s and others’ industries were causing throughout the region, inspired the members of the South Fork Club to build a mountain retreat. His colleagues were copying Carnegie’s peripatetic search for rest and recreation in beautiful mountain settings.
His joining the South Fork Club gave them their apotheosis. Why they dammed the river and made a lake, and why they refused, in the face of multiple warnings and expert advice, to prevent the dam’s breaking, and to prevent the lake’s becoming a biblical monster of destruction, can only be understood—or approached, anyway—in the irresistible rise of Andrew Carnegie, the relationships that formed through and around him, and the meaning to Carnegie and his fellow industrialists of the joys of mental restoration in a simple, natural setting.
That rise to extraordinary wealth and power wasn’t a fake tale. Andrew Carnegie really did begin life in poverty and really did become one of the richest men in America. He truly did live and help invent a vaulting part of the American Dream.
His biography would thus become perhaps one of the best-known rags-to-riches stories of the age. For well more than a century after Carnegie’s birth, ambitious boys and young men would pore over cheap, repetitive editions of his life in search of inspiration and encouragement. The career seemed to give proof to the notion that in America, any lad possessed of the right virtues could grow up to become fabulously successful, rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, and yet immortal for goodness and benevolence, with his name on every philanthropic effort you could see.
The story remains pretty awe-inspiring. Andrew Carnegie was born and raised far from Pennsylvania and, unlike most other members of the class he would ascend to, he had no role models to guide his ambition. He came not from wealth in the United States but from poverty in Scotland. The amazing transformation in Carnegie’s life encapsulates both how the whole region around Johnstown could be changed so utterly and quickly, and how it could then be so devastated by death and destruction.
He was born in 1835, in Dunfermline, long a center for making textiles, when the famous cottage-industry approach to textile production was well under way. In that system, workers were saddled with some of the worst aspects of both wage slavery and tenant dependency: living conditions for the poorest laborers had become worse, in certain ways, than for some of the medieval peasants they’d superseded. Andrew Carnegie, called Andy by his family, was born in a two-family house, one room for each family, typical of weavers’ cottages, and better described as a semidetached brick hut. His father, William Carnegie, worked a hand loom there, making linen damask for fancy drapes, and at first the Carnegies seemed to be moving up in the world. The family soon moved to a larger house.
Then the work disappeared overnight. The whole region fell into a state of literal starvation.
For “progress” had occurred. Industrialization had developed. The boy who would grow up to become one of the richest industrialists in the world saw things go, nearly overnight, from bad to outright impossible when the steam-powered loom, newly perfected, came to Dunfermline and changed everything. Andy’s father went from being a skilled laborer, moving up somewhat in the world, to being a displaced and unemployed man begging for work, deeply humiliated and disgraced. Just like that.
Automation actually came late to Dunfermline. The trend had been under way for some time in the British Isles’ textile industry. With sudden shifts to factory work, skilled laborers were being thrown out of work. Children could now be set to work for long hours. Injuries became rampant. In some parts of England, skilled workers rioted in protest over this wholesale, overnight reorganization of labor, by which they felt they lost not only work but ancient rights: Luddites, some of them were called. Rallying behind a fictitious figure they sometimes called Ned Ludd, after an actual rioter, and other times called King Ludd, they attacked and burned factories that were using the new stocking frames, spinning frames, and power looms.
All that had begun early in the century, and the Luddites’ labor actions had been put down with force by the British Army. But the power loom didn’t get to Dunfermline until the 1840s, when young Andrew Carnegie was old enough to see and feel its effects on the already overwhelmingly harsh lot of postfeudal laborers.
Andy might have become a kind of Luddite. He could have viewed technological and industrial change as a deadly force. In the end, he would go the other way. Instead of resisting industrial change, he would embrace it in order at first to own it, and then to rise above it.
Amid the devastation brought on by the arrival of the steam loom, Andy’s mother, Margaret, soon became the family’s sole support. She went to work for her brother, a shoemaker, and she sold baked goods. And it was Margaret Carnegie who decided that the region around Pittsburgh, in western Pennsylvania, so far across the ocean, was the right destination for the desperate Carnegie family.
Here was wholesale, overnight change of a different kind. Andrew Carnegie would always have a healthy respect for the stunning speed at which things can transform, and yet far from fearing such forces, he would always hope to turn speed to his advantage. And even as a boy he would have known that a move to Pittsburgh probably made sense.
Like Dunfermline, in the 1840s and ’50s Pittsburgh and its nearby towns were among other things a textile center. In America, cotton had recently become king, and the town of Allegheny, on the north side of the river of the same name, right across from Pittsburgh, had become a cotton brand. MADE IN ALLEGHENY: so read the labels on bolts of cotton sold throughout the country. Many other products bore that label too, from iron to rope, from wool to paper, from steam engines to linseed oil. Allegheny was putting people to work, and Margaret Carnegie had two sisters living there who testified to this. It was a tough town, with workers housed in shabby, crowded houses blackened by coal smoke. Yet all that dirt and smell came from human toil at steam-driven machines. To eat, there had to be work, and Allegheny was about labor and little else. Not long after the family arrived in Allegheny, William Carnegie was fully employed in a Pittsburgh cotton mill.
And so was Andy. Twelve hours a day and six days a week, beginning before dawn and ending in the dark, the thirteen-year-old changed out spools of thread for $1.20 per week. The job was at once boring and dangerous. The repetition was mind-numbing, yet kids were expected to reach adeptly into huge machines whose sharp needles were mercilessly driven by the hard force of steam, and fix any broken threads and parts. To say there were no safety regulations is putting it too mildly: nobody had ever heard of them.
At his second job, making a little more money, Andy had to run the steam engine itself. Down in the factory’s cellar, his face and clothing thickly covered by coal dust, he would fire the boiler and work the gauges to send up enough steam to give the workers power to operate the machines, yet not so much that he would burst the boiler and be killed in the explosion. Things like that happened.
He also had to bathe new spools in giant vats of oil. That task literally made him vomit.
And yet Andy’s daily life was typical for children in the booming industrial economy of the American Midwest of the mid-nineteenth century. The hard-bitten kids of Allegheny grew up tough, accustomed to discomfort and fatigue, and Andy did, too. Not typical was his rise.
Back in Scotland, he’d attended the free school, and his handwriting wasn’t bad. That was an advantage not every boy had. He found himself occasionally taken from his harder labors to write up bills as a clerk. That work was easier, safer, more restful. Internally, too, Andy had some distinct advantages. He was filled with dreams that drew his imagination upward, far from the world of hard physical work. Being steeped in the literary and heroic wasn’t necessarily regarded as an asset in the immigrant community of hard laborers in which he now lived, yet having been given at a young age a high sense of Scottish tradition and legend, Andy idolized figures like Robert the Bruce and William Wallace, men who led the clans against England for Scottish independence. Even as he worked these dull and deadly jobs, Andy Carnegie was mentally reciting the poetry of the great Scottish poet Robert Burns.
So as he labored in boredom and danger, he imagined following in the footsteps of great men, leading his family out of poverty and making a name that would resound in legend for all time. His voice still had the brogue. Some of the other boys taunted him as “Scotchie.” Andy refused to take being Scottish as an insult.
Inveterate practicality played a part, too. Having learned to write up a neat single ledger, Andrew enrolled in a winter night school to learn double-entry bookkeeping. Soon he had a job lacking the physical rigors and dangers of the factories: messenger, at $2.50 per week, for the Atlantic & Ohio Telegraph Company office in Pittsburgh. It was like being paid to get out of prison.
That was 1850. Only five years later, Andrew Carnegie made his first investment.
That’s how fast he worked his way up after leaving the telegraph company—they’d begged him to stay—and going to work for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Coming on as a private secretary and telegraph operator—he’d taught himself Morse code—Carnegie worked directly for the head of the railroad’s Pittsburgh division, Tom Scott, and such was his eagerness and competence that he quickly drew the attention not only of Scott but also of J. Edgar Thomson, the company’s president. They became his mentors.
It was in such relationships that Carnegie would thrive. And no matter what else he did later, he would always maintain valuable business connections with the Pennsylvania Railroad. That company was becoming the most important rail line in the world when Carnegie joined it, a multifaceted new blend of physical infrastructure, high-powered technology, and complex, high-stakes, high-speed daily administration. Undaunted by the new challenges of moving freight about on such a massive and complicated scale, Andrew Carnegie, a true company man, rose fast.
In 1855, Tom Scott invested $500 for Andy in an express company that managed the shipping of documents. It was a sure thing: the railroad company was giving the shipping company an inside-track deal, and Scott was taking care of young Andy by personally lending him the money for his first investment, thus welcoming him into the real processes of getting rich. This insider move, tiny and insignificant by Carnegie’s later standards, exemplified the way all of his future business would work.
He received ten dollars a month as a dividend. He saw now that money, not work, is what made money grow, and that knowing who was who offered the key to investing money well.
Meanwhile, he was learning that cutting costs offered another way of making profits. Working closely with Scott, he began finding efficiencies throughout the Pennsylvania Railroad, and by 1860 he was the railroad’s western division supervisor himself. It was clear to his superiors and to his rising peers that Andy Carnegie could make things work.
Government helped, too. During the Civil War, Carnegie was appointed by Thomson—once Carnegie’s biggest boss at the railroad company, now assistant secretary of war for military transportation—to superintend all military rail and telegraph. Here was a movement of matériel and troops at a scale never before known in the United States. Previous gigantic movements of troops, like Napoleon’s in Europe earlier that century, hadn’t had the railroad. There was the quick laying of track, the massive scheduling, the demand for total reliability, the management of a newly critical volume of information communicated by telegraph wire, without which rail couldn’t operate at all, at this scale. Carnegie executed the position with immense efficiency, and what he achieved in wartime presaged efficiencies and scales to come in the postwar world of industrial development. He came out of the war not only working for the Pennsylvania Railroad but as perhaps its most important executive. And now he had some real capital to work with.
In 1864 came Pennsylvania’s oil boom. Carnegie put $40,000 into an oil-producing property, and thanks to the insane noise and bustle of hundreds of pumping derricks and teams of horses and barrel makers, with raw petroleum slopping and flowing everywhere—and thanks, Carnegie also thought, to the heroic, go-for-broke attitude of drillers in search of oil wealth—he drew a million dollars in cash dividends out of the property, without ever touching any oil.
Now he could go into the biggest business of all. In the 1860s, that was iron.
It took iron to make the locomotive engines and the tracks those engines ran on. On iron rails, train cars carried the raw materials of iron, mined from the earth, and the charcoal and coke that could turn the ore into product. Carnegie had his eye on becoming what was called an ironmaster. Big iron, and then the radical improvement of iron called steel, was to change the face of western Pennsylvania almost overnight, bring about whole new ways of working, attract laborers by the tens of thousands, make millions, and heat and smell things up so badly that the men who brought about that change would need to seek relief by the shores of a lake in the fresh mountain air.
Possibly about four billion years before the rise of Andrew Carnegie, radioactivity heated some of the asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter to extreme temperatures. That heat separated the asteroids’ melted rocky material from the melted metal at the cores, like oil and water: iron and nickel were isolated. They cooled within the asteroids over millions of years and then suddenly, with some collision or other catastrophic event, scattered as iron-nickel fragments.
Some few of those scattered meteorites came flying through the earth’s atmosphere, melting again during that plunge. Then they cooled on land as hard iron and nickel rocks. There isn’t much of this meteoric iron on earth, and when people began finding it, only maybe 3,500 years before the rise of Andrew Carnegie, they prized it for strength in weaponry and jewelry, as well as for sheer rarity.
But there was also stuff in the earth’s crust that could be turned into iron. The element was obviously impressively strong, and ways of getting the ore out of the ground, and then getting the iron out of the ore—that rocky, non-useful stuff that iron is mixed with—began early, too. The ancient world mined for iron ore, and experts knew how to separate the molten iron from what would later be called the “slag,” or everything not iron. The oldest iron furnaces were ingenious earthen or stone chimneys, packed with glowing charcoal. Hot iron and slag were pulled from the bottom of the chimney and separated, and sometimes small amounts of slag were mixed with the iron. Before the iron cooled, it could be hammered, or wrought, into a multitude of products, hardening into something amazingly durable, heated red hot again, reshaped, and so on.
Such was the technological inventiveness of people living thousands of years before the dawn of the American age of industry. Iron smelting went on in sub-Saharan Africa, in Europe, and in China, where the blast furnace first took over from the earlier chimneys and created what would become known as pig iron. That product emerged in fully liquid form and could be either cooled to create workable iron, or poured wet into molds to create what would be called cast-iron objects, fully set in complicated shapes, useful in days to come for ambitious projects like bridge building.
Such was the business Andrew Carnegie now had the capital to invest in. By the early eighteenth century, iron and other industries had already stripped the country of the forests for charcoal, and Abraham Darby began using coke instead of charcoal to fire his blast furnace in Shropshire, England. Coal mining to supply ironmaking began ripping countrysides apart and filling the air with coal ash. That was more or less the process that Andrew Carnegie would take up in the 1870s.
Soon Carnegie had opened three iron and iron-related companies in Pittsburgh: the Superior Rail Mill and Blast Furnaces, both a furnace and a rolling mill; the Pittsburgh Locomotive Works, turning iron into railroad engines; and the Keystone Bridge Company, which would use iron for the all-important spans that now had to hold up iron rails, locomotives, and hundreds of freight cars, passing back and forth day after day to make all this industry happen. When Carnegie and his partners proposed to span the Ohio River at Steubenville with a bridge made of both cast and wrought iron, people couldn’t believe the iron would stand up, let alone support heavy train traffic. Iron bridges had failed before, leading to some of the worst railway disasters. But Carnegie had hired the best engineers and builders—hiring, more than ironmaking and bridge building, was among his key skills—and Keystone Works bridges were soon in use in nearly every state of the Union. In 1868, Keystone would span the Mississippi River at Dubuque, Iowa. That first bridge at Steubenville, despite all the initial skepticism, would continue to carry train traffic well into the twentieth century.
Through all of that accomplishment, what Andrew Carnegie had shown himself especially good at was boldly embracing change and turning it to his advantage. The steam-powered loom had nearly destroyed his family. The brilliance of his investing, always via insider connections, had to do with seeing change coming before others did and owning it early.
His abilities also had to do with scale. Big, national ventures like rail, along with the telegraph, which enabled rail to run more or less reliably and safely, benefited from state and federal contracts, always tending toward the monopoly that Carnegie was relentlessly seeking. Such ventures boomed not locally, like oil or coal, but on broad scales; oil, coal, agriculture, manufacture, and every other form of enterprise were coming to depend on them.
Carnegie saw the future in another way, too. He learned quickly that the trick to making the easiest money wasn’t by investing in a new rail company, for example, but by knowing where the existing rail companies were planning to lay track. He already had the connections for that: he sold iron rail to the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he still also served as an executive, and he knew the right people in other rail companies. They were consolidating fast and forming huge enterprises, and Carnegie was in a uniquely good position to learn in advance where their trains would run. This path to wealth involved efforts no more complicated than buying up land at low prices in far-flung places like Kansas, when nobody there knew how valuable that land was about to become.
Carnegie also formed a telegraph company, but not the kind that owned telegraph stations and hardware and sent and received messages. This business owned but one asset: an exclusive right—gained, again, via Carnegie’s friends at the Pennsylvania Railroad—to run wires along the railroad’s existing telegraph poles. Without running a single line, Carnegie then sold that company, along with a contract to run wires from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, combined with a right to run wires from St. Louis to Indianapolis, for a nice stake in the Western Union telegraph company, an investment that was to profit him enormously over the decades.
Nobody can say Carnegie wasn’t in the telegraph business. Yet he’d never run a single wire, and by 1865 he had no time to run a railway company, either.
He had to tend to his investments. He was only thirty. Steel was still a few years away.
So Andrew Carnegie might easily have been taken, even at that relatively young age, for the ultimate hard-driving, all-business industrialist, a man with nothing but steam and oil and coal and rail and speed and stocks and bonds on his brain, a crude man of the booming factory Midwest, embodying entrepreneurial Pittsburgh, even though he stopped living there in the mid-1860s. Over the next twenty years, as the steel business began and then boomed, and as he became in monopolizing that business not only Pittsburgh’s but also the nation’s and then maybe the world’s richest man, he naturally kept a big foot in his city at the Ohio headwaters. His frequent visits there were met with excitement and headlines and galas.
But where the old ironmasters knew iron, Carnegie understood investment, cost-cutting, vertical integration, and monopoly, and he knew how to hire managers. Because his real business was investing, selling securities in his ventures, capturing markets, registering patents, and directing subordinates not so much in hands-on management as in cost-cutting initiatives, he could live anywhere. And so he did. He traveled often to his beloved native Scotland, and he became headquartered in New York City. His mother, Margaret, who had brought the family from Pittsburgh, lived with Andrew in New York, in hotels: she liked having a staff, amenities, and a built-in social life, and she didn’t want to manage a big household. Early on, and despite the work ethic that had played a role in his rise, Andrew Carnegie was working smart, not hard. Where his fellow Pittsburgh industrialists found it difficult to tear themselves away from the minute-to-minute business squabbles and stresses and gossip, Carnegie was having fun and improving his mind.
In the mornings in New York, he sent letters to his many managers. Then he visited art galleries, read books, and hosted big parties full of the most famous and interesting people he could find. They flocked to him, and much of his life now involved jovial, charming, and informative conversation. He wanted to write his own books, too, and further public appreciation of the arts. He wanted to convert people to his way of seeing the world, and of seeing money, and he wanted to improve the American mind.
He and Margaret did also live in Pennsylvania—just not in Pittsburgh. In the 1870s, Carnegie began making annual summer escapes from city life, up on the Alleghenies. He and his mother would travel to Cresson Springs and live in a house Andrew had built there, near the famous Mountain House, a resort hotel operated by the same railway company whose management he had given up. There, two thousand feet above sea level, at the crest of the mountains, the air was clear and cool in summer; far from the cares of business, and far from the excitements of glittering New York, the mind could come to rest on higher things.
For Carnegie, there was no contradiction between this pursuit of inspiring natural beauty, healthy exercise, and a religious sense of the sublime on the one hand, and relentless pursuit of business on the other. The book he wrote was The Gospel of Wealth, and he meant “gospel” not as metaphor but as reality. For him, the pursuit of wealth, in its most monopolistic form, with strong government backing, was tantamount to the good news of spiritual redemption for individuals—some of them, anyway—and nations as a whole. An inveterate romanticism fed both his remarkable business efforts and his desire to get away from it all. This ultimate man of business, with offices in New York and multiple investments in Pittsburgh, was still immersed in Robert Burns, still sure there was something bigger and better beyond industrial pursuits. The Alleghenies reminded him of Scotland—not the textile-town Scotland he’d actually known but the Scotland of Burns’s burr and those brave tales of Wallace and the Bruce.
Dominating business, Carnegie didn’t need to track its every move. A new idea was out there, and it wasn’t Carnegie’s alone. The simple life was the better life, both spiritually and physically. Mental restoration could be found only in return to nature.
Simplicity, but with amenities. After a few visits, Carnegie built a Queen Anne–style house up at Cresson. The nearby Mountain House, social hub of his world on the mountain, was a classic of the mountain retreat becoming popular among the rich and upper-middle classes of the day. By 1881, a new structure had been completed there, four stories tall with a front facade that spanned more than 300 feet. It could accommodate 700 guests, and an amazingly large dining room could seat 800 diners. Guests bowled and played shuffleboard and tennis. Carnegie put friends up and hosted parties there. He read books and went on nature hikes and bird-watching walks. He engaged in elevating conversation. On the mountain above Johnstown, Andrew Carnegie, presiding spirit of his entrepreneurial age, leader and model of the Pittsburgh industrialists who were turning the whole region into a scarred, smoky mess, was taking up the growing fad for simple outdoor pleasures, clean air, and contemplation of nature. It was in following Carnegie’s lead, and then inducing him to join their organization, that in 1879 the members of the South Fork Club determined to dam up a river and make a beautiful mountain lake.