Carnegie Hero Fund Commission
Springdale, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Established April 15, 1904, by Andrew Carnegie. The Pittsburgh-based foundation awards the Carnegie Medal in the U.S. and Canada to persons who risk their lives to save others. Heroic acts that followed the January 25, 1904, explosion in the nearby Harwick Mine inspired Carnegie, who also founded ten similar funds in Europe. Many of the explosion's 181 victims are buried in St. Mark's Cemetery just south of here.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
When an explosion ripped through the nearby Harwick Mine on January 25, 1904, killing 181 workers, would-be rescuers gave their own lives trying to reach the trapped men. Their courage moved steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who that April established the Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Hero Fund Commission to recognize ordinary people who risk everything to save others. The commission still awards the Carnegie Medal across the United States and Canada, and Carnegie went on to found ten similar funds in Europe.
Why it matters
Born of a mining tragedy, the Hero Fund gave lasting institutional form to the idea that everyday heroism deserves a nation's honor — one of the era's most distinctive acts of American philanthropy.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Andrew Carnegie
Related events
- · Harwick Mine explosion, January 25, 1904
- · Founding of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, April 15, 1904
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014)
New Kensington, PA
In a New Kensington laboratory, chemist Stephanie Kwolek pursued a stubborn cloudy polymer solution that most would have discarded — and in doing so opened the door to Kevlar, the DuPont fiber patented in the 1960s. Ounce for ounce far stronger than steel, the material found its way into everything from tires to aircraft, but it became famous as the fabric of bullet-resistant vests. Kwolek, honored with the National Medal of Technology in 1996, lived here in the western Pennsylvania mill country where so much American industrial chemistry took root.
Fanny Sellins
Arnold, PA
Fannie Sellins organized for the United Mine Workers and became a rallying figure for labor in Western Pennsylvania's coal and steel country. On August 26, 1919, on the eve of a nationwide steel strike, she was gunned down in Brackenridge; a miner named Joseph Starzelski was killed the same day. The two lie buried together here in Union Cemetery, where a monument honors them.
Bost Building
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1992
Completed in early 1892, the Bost Building became the nerve center of one of the most consequential labor battles in American history. That summer it housed the strike committee of the Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers, and the telegraph wires strung into it carried dispatches from journalists covering the Homestead Strike to newspapers nationwide. From this address, the workers' cause was argued to the wider public even as the confrontation with Carnegie Steel turned violent.
Frank Conrad (1874-1941)
Wilkinsburg, PA · est. 1990
In a Wilkinsburg garage around 1919 and 1920, Westinghouse engineer Frank Conrad tinkered with an amateur wireless station, 8XK, and began sending out music and talk to fellow hobbyists. Those experiments proved there was a public eager to listen, and they led directly to the launch of KDKA and the birth of commercial broadcasting. Over a 37-year career Conrad amassed more than 200 patents.