The stretch of U.S. Route 422 between Youngstown and Girard once represented one of the busiest sections of a growing Mahoning Valley. Companies like Ohio Leather Works, Unger Brothers Packing and the massive Youngstown Sheet and Tube Brier Hill Works, lined the heavily traveled route. Deindustrialization in the 1970s ended a long era of both economic growth and pollution in the corridor, but left behind all varieties of blight.