With the steel industry booming in the early part of the 1900s, immigrants from throughout Europe flooded into Struthers. A village in 1902 when it was officially incorporated, Struthers quickly became a city in 1920. The steel industry allowed the city to flourish until 1977, when several area plants closed their doors for good. The city padded the loss of thousands of jobs by using its industrial infrastructure to lure non-steel making jobs, but population losses have continued throughout the start of the new century.