You can see the gravesite from the Stan “The Man” Musial Bridge, but you would find it unremarkable. It is an odd gravesite, sitting as it does on a patch of grass in the middle of a dirt parking area next to a welding company in an industrial park on the banks of the Monongahela River.

A yellow-brick wall about 3 feet high and 20 feet long forms the back of the grave, and at each corner is a pair of brick cornerstones. Steel tubes connect the structures. A small American flag stands next to a concrete cross with a bronze plate bearing the words, “Andrew Posey.”

There are no dates, no markings of relatives buried next to him, just the one cross that bears his name. Posey had been one of tens of thousands of men who returned home from Europe after World War I. He found work as a ladle stopper in the open hearth plant in Donora, which is where the 21-year-old veteran died.

Ladle stoppers were responsible for ensuring that the exit for a ladle — some ladles weighed 100 tons or more — was clear, so steel could pour out. On January 8, 1920, Posey had jumped, or perhaps fallen, into an empty ladle to clear a blocked exit when an explosion blasted out the back of the ladle’s furnace. The blast poured thousands of pounds of 3,000-degree molten steel into the ladle, incinerating the poor man into mist.

The family was understandably angry at the mill and pushed to have their loved one’s remains memorialized in some way, but because there were no remains, plant officials decided to transport the entire ladle, complete with the now-solid steel, and bury it down the road. That ladle is buried at the Posey gravesite. Quite a story.

But here’s the thing. The story is a myth.

Yes, Andrew Posey was killed in an explosion, but to think that any plant supervisor at that time would have done anything to memorialize one of its workers is to greatly overestimate the level of concern management expressed about its workers. Management viewed its workers as essentially chattel back then, knowing that if a mill worker was injured or killed on the job, another able-bodied man (women didn’t do such work) was ready to take his place. Workers who suffered burns, fractures, or other injuries were expected to go right back to work, sometimes the same day. And the workers didn’t put up a fight; they knew that their and their family’s survival required that they keep working, no matter what.

Donora plants sometimes kept notes on workers, but not always. If a plant kept any notes, they tended to be scant and barely indicative of the worker’s impact on the plant’s success. James McKenzie, PhD, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of North Dakota, found his father’s entire 48-year work history in the Donora mills notated in a few lines, including these:

• 12-3-28 open hearth laborer
• 11-2-58 combustion chemist
• Wife sick
• Vacation
• Replace Louis Miller
• 5-2-77 last day of work

No, the management of the Donora steel mills in 1920 most likely would not have cared enough about Andrew Posey to take a furnace offline, remove a 100-ton ladle, cart it a half-mile down the road, and bury it. They might have, and most probably did, tell the family that they had buried it, and then given the “event” some hoopla, just to get the Posey relatives off their back. They also probably told workers that day not to say anything about the accident. Unfortunately no solid evidence is available of exactly what steps the mill took.

So, what’s the truth?

A study by the Mon Valley Progress Council in 1995 indicated that the earth beneath Posey’s gravesite is just dirt, nothing more. “No slab or ingot of steel is located within the area of our investigation,” the report noted.

Even though Andrew Posey is, in all probability, not buried under that square of grass and weeds, his memorial still demands attention. It symbolizes, in an antithetical way, the continuing issues faced by workers across the nation. Don’t people deserve a wage high enough to at least qualify for a poverty-level life? Don’t they deserve a safe work environment? Don’t they deserve a chance to fight for their rights when management becomes greedy?

I would argue that unquestionably they need all those things, and I believe Mr. Posey and his family would argue that as well.