All Material Copyrighted. Reproduced with permission of the authors, C. Robert Barnett and Linda Terhume
The Tanks become Ironton's source of pride during the 1920's. With a population of 14,007 in 1920, Ironton was the smallest and slowest growing of the four cities in its immediate area.
Huntington WV, a late starter, was the largest with a population of over 75,000 in 1930. Its population had increased 25,000 during the '20's. Likewise, Portsmouth had grown from a town of 23,000 to over 42,000 in 1930. Ashland KY, which had been about the same size as Ironton in 1920 with 14,600 persons, grew to a bustling 29,000 a decade later. Despite national and local prosperity and growth in the 1920's, Ironton's population increased by only 2,600 people.
From the Civil War to the turn of the century, Ironton was a booming iron producing city. When Huntington was just a crossroads on the Ohio River flood plain, Ironton was already well established. But the iron and steel industry shifted to the Pittsburgh-Youngstown-Cleveland triangle, and Ironton failed to attract new industry.
Huntington and Portsmouth were developing as rail centers, and Ashland had mills and an emerging petroleum complex to spur it's growth during the '20's. Ironton was left with only a few small factories. It was a long fall fro a town which had shown so much early promise.
Ironton was a typical river town with an active "red light" and "bootlegging" district around Third and Buckhorn Streets, but residents claim it was no rougher than any of the hundred other towns along the Ohio River. As one person said, "law enforcement was tolerant, but Ironton was by no means wide open."
The people were hard-nosed industrial workers who took pride in producing through difficult, physical work. In the 1920's, the city had little to show for all that work.
Yet is there anywhere anyone so cold that the pulse does no quicken or the heart swell with pride at the mention of his hometown? In the 1920's, this feeling ran rampant in the United States and was known as "boosterism." (Remember the boosters of Zenith, the fictional city in Sinclair Lewis' novels?) Cities all over the country boasted of their growth, their prosperity, their beauty. Huntington, Portsmouth and Ashland did this and looked down their respective noses at Ironton.
The people of Ironton needed some way to prove the worth of the city to the world, a way to show that Ironton was something special: The Ironton Tanks.