The Midvale Steel Company manufactured steel parts and was known for casting, forging, and machining high-quality steels, including alloy steels, and precision steel products for a wide array of industries. Their primary business came from work related to railroad and ordnance manufacturing. They had contracts for producing ordnance for the U.S government and making tools and products for private companies like the Pennsylvania Railroad and Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia.

The company was established in 1867 in the Nicetown area of Germantown, Philadelphia near the Reading Railroad line by English steel-maker William Butcher (circa 1791-1871). Upon his death in 1871, the Butcher Steel Works became the Midvale Steel Works with engineer Wiliam Sellers (1824-1905) as president. They changed their name again in 1880 to the Midvale Steel Company.

Midvale Steel was notable for its early experimentation with alloy steels. In 1870, they produced a specialized chrome alloy for the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, considered among the largest practical applications of alloyed steel at the time. In 1879, they supplied steel for the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1875, the company began the manufacture naval guns and shells and became an important contractor for the U.S. government. Starting in 1900, they supplied the government with marine engines, gun carriages, and armor plates for U.S. Navy ships.

With the rapid expansion brought about by World War I, the company became the Midvale Steel and Ordnance Company in 1915, and owned plants in Johnstown and Coatesville, Pennsylvania, as well as the original works in Philadelphia. In 1917 Midvale ranked among the top twenty American corporations in revenue.

Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915), esteemed efficiency expert, started his career at Midvale in the early 1880s working his way from a Store Room clerk to becoming their Chief Engineer. He left to work for the Bethlehem Steel Company in 1890.

Midvale began hiring African American workers starting in the 1890s. In an introduction by sociologist E. Digby Baltzell to the 1967 edition of W.E.B. DuBois groundbreaking The Philadelphia Negro, he wrote:

“Clerks and white- collar jobs were, of course, unobtainable [for African Americans], but so were both skilled and unskilled jobs in industry. DuBois noted one exception to this at the Midvale Steel Works, where the manager, dubbed a 'crank' by many of his peers, had employed [in 1896] some 200 Negroes who worked along with white mechanics ‘without friction or trouble.’"

With a major increase of ordnance production in 1917, Midvale employed nearly 4,000 African Americans out of a workforce estimated at 11,000 at their Nicetown plant.

In 1923, Midvale’s Johnstown and Coatesville plants were acquired by the Bethlehem Steel Company. The company operated under the name Midvale Steel Company in its original location in Nicetown until 1955 when it merged with the Heppenstall Steel Company to become Midvale-Heppenstall Company. The Nicetown plant in Philadelphia closed in 1976.