North Texas Steel Co history

North Star Steel was founded in October 1965 for the purpose of constructing a single-plant steel mill in St Paul, Minnesota.

Within two years of North Star's first minimill production in 1967, the Nuclear Corporation of America of Charlotte, North Carolina, opened a $6 million minimill in Darlington, South Carolina.

In 1977 the Duluth grinding ball plant began operations.

In 1982 United States steelmakers fell victim to a punishing industrywide depression that raked corporate profits for four years.

In 1984, within a year of his promotion to executive vice president, Garvey was lifted to the presidency of North Star and continued the breakneck acquisition program he had begun the year before.

After an aborted move to Phoenix Steel in 1986, Garvey returned to North Star in time to see the newly retooled Youngstown facility come on line in November and to lead the acquisition of Universal Tubular Services of Houston, Texas, which was promptly renamed North Star Steel Houston.

In January 1987, Garvey invited North Star's plant managers and corporate staff to a Florida business retreat where they were introduced to the tenets of the "total quality management" (TQM) movement then sweeping corporate America.

In 1993, North Star announced it would double the production capacity of its St Paul mill to 650,000 tons and won Cargill's final approval for the construction of a new $140 million minimill in Kingman, Arizona.

North Star, for example, did not announce plans to build its own thin-slab mill until 1994 when it found a partner for the venture in the form of Australia's BHP Steel.

By 1995 it was becoming clear that the original minimills would face competition in their ongoing quest to unseat the big integrated producers' dominance of United States steel; ironically, it would come from a new generation of minimills.