Sons of Vulcan

Dark Chocolate, Blueberry, Toffee

Named for the Roman god of fire, the Sons of Vulcan was one of the first steel-industry labor unions in the United States. Officially called ‘Iron City Forge of the Sons of Vulcan,' the union was founded on April 12, 1858, at a secret meeting of a group of iron ‘puddlers’ at a hotel bar in downtown Pittsburgh. Puddlers had one of the most skilled, dangerous and physically demanding jobs in the steel making process—having to stand over molten pig iron and stir with iron bars in order to infuse air into the molten mixture, which will allow the carbon in the iron to oxidize and burn off—thereby refining the pig iron into steel. Predating chemical testing—it was up to the puddlers to rely on experience and expertise to know when the right level of carbon had been removed. Puddlers were also responsible for removing slag and draining and moving molten steel out of the furnaces. It’s easy to see why by the 1870’s, there were one of the strongest unions in the US, eventually merging with the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steelworkers—which would eventually become the United Steelworkers Union—the largest labor union in North America with over 1.2 million members today.