| Abstract | The effects of industrial decline are nowhere more apparent than in the once bustling steel town of Youngstown, Ohio. Home to four integrated mills that closed between 1977 and 1985, the city has won the dubious distinction of becoming the Rust Belt city par excellence. How then have area residents come to terms with deindustrialization? Do their memories of the steel mill closings correspond to the Youngstown story being told by popular artists based outside the region? In exploring these questions, this paper turns to Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson's haunting photo‐essay Journey to Nowhere, to Bruce Springsteen's moving ballad ‘Youngstown’ to the commemorative narratives written by local journalists on successive anniversaries of Black Monday (the day the first mill closed), to the erection of two local monuments to steel, and to the establishment of a steel museum. In so doing, we find that the lingering memory of the Great Depression has provided a template for popular story‐tellers who cast displaced industrial workers as the Dust Bowl refugees of the 1980s.
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