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Unlike Silicon Valley, many of the key innovators, such as David Saylor, Jose De Navarro, Amable Bonneville and Thomas Whittaker were older men with business careers behind them before entering the industry, rather than young men straight from college or graduate school. This reflects in part that university education was not as widespread as by the 1960s but also that cement was still a process industry requiring considerable capital to enter. One could not operate a cement plant, with quarry, rotary kiln and grinders from a garage. That being said the cement industry did go through a speculative stage, complete with dodgy promoters, but this mainly took place outside of the Lehigh Valley. Money was still made in the Lehigh Valley though. The Philadelphia Inquirer in May 1899 ran a story about the boom in Lehigh County. The price of rural land is described as having doubled from $75 an acre to $150 an acre and a similar story in April 1900 about the boom in Northampton county features even greater increases in land prices!
Like in other industries, cement companies imported their workforce from Central and Eastern Europe. Working in a cement plant with quarrying, with explosives, grinding, burning, and more grinding could be dangerous. Nevertheless the industry in the Lehigh Valley does not appear to have been systematically unionized until the 1930s. Kim B. Clark, in his study of unionization in the cement industry, suggests this reflects a reluctance of the first generation of workers to join unions but also a lack of interest by traditional craft based unions to organize the industry or even support industrial action. Once a second generation arrived and conditions changed in the 1930s the Lehigh Valley quickly unionized as did much of the industry.
While the American Portland cement industry never became concentrated the way steel, oil or car industries did, nevertheless Lehigh Valley firms such as Atlas, Lehigh Portland and Alpha Portland, in varying degrees, built new plants across the United States or purchased existing ones to create chains of plants. As we have already seen Lehigh Valley firms could not retain control of their innovations the way a Microsoft could. Furthermore the decision taken by the industry in the 1900s to adopt standardized products removed any advantage brands such as Atlas may have had and led to the regionalized markets characterizing the cement industry today. Beyond Eastern Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Valley plants mainly shipped to New York, southern New England, Maryland and Washington DC. With such a market, the Lehigh Valley remained the largest producing district in the United States until 1970, when passed by the set of plants around Los Angeles. Peak production was probably around 40 million barrels (6.8 million metric tons) around 1927. Over time the smaller plants found their plants or quarries to be uneconomical in the long run and shut down. Investment ceased in the larger plants of Alpha, Atlas and the Lehigh Portland Cement Companies, and older capacity started to be scrapped as early as 1907. After 1913 just four more plants were built in the Lehigh Valley – two at sites that had been purchased but not developed in the 1900s.
