The Lost Chapter — Pittsburgh Before Steel
As many an author knows, draft treatises struggle to go from vast tomes to readable manuscripts. Likewise, with my recent book: Beyond Steel — Pittsburgh and the Economics of Transformation, my original content went far beyond what would fit into any single book. Here is the bulk of an entire chapter on Pittsburgh well before it became dominated by the metals industry that has long defined it. As the book evolved closer to its published form, much of this early history became superfluous, which is another way to say it just didn’t fit in the end. As I type, it is almost the long July 4th weekend, and much of this early Pittsburgh history flows around the Revolutionary War. It seemed a good time to make this unpublished chapter available.
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September 18, 1784
Departing near modern-day Forward Township, 17 miles south of Fort Pitt and the settlement named Pittsburgh, Devore’s Ferry was carrying its single most famous passenger and his entourage over the Monongahela River.[1] In 1775, a Virginia Commonwealth court licensed James Devore to operate a commercial ferry “from his house on the Monongahela River to the mouth of Pigeon Creek.”[2] Devore passed away in 1779, but the ferry retained his name and continued to operate until the Williamsport Bridge was built across its route in 1836. When the ferry service began, the Commonwealth of Virginia claimed the land on both sides of the river, a legalism disputed by the neighboring Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Travelers did not care about the territorial dispute and demand for the ferry was generated by increasing flows of migrants heading westward on the continent.
Also traveling westward was not only the most famous Virginian but arguably the single most famous American worldwide. Barely a year after the signing of the Treaty of Paris brought the Revolutionary War to a definitive conclusion, retired General George Washington was coming to inspect lands he owned on the far side of the Allegheny Mountains. Washington had resigned as Commander-in-Chief at the end of December 1783 and returned home to his home at Mount Vernon after an eight-year hiatus. He immediately took up his multifaceted business activities which included farming and the management of sizable land holdings. Despite his long time away, just nine months after his return home Washington was again on the move.
George Washington was not a migrant, nor was it his first trip into what was eventually acknowledged as part of southwestern Pennsylvania. Just 21 years old in 1753, Washington passed through the region as a recently-appointed major in the Virginia colonial militia charged with delivering a message to French colonial forces moving south from Lake Erie. He had returned as a volunteer aide to British General Braddock on his ill-fated military expedition — ambushed and destroyed 10 miles to the north of the ferry crossing in 1754 — and yet again in command of the Virginia Regiment with General John Forbes when he finally displaced French forces from the head of the Ohio River in 1758. His travels gave the future president plenty of time to contemplate the opportunities offered by the vast wilderness on the far side of the Allegheny Mountains. What Washington saw clearly was that the trans-Alleghenies linked the coastal population centers of the early colonies with the economic opportunities offered by the limitless continent.
As the French and Indian War concluded, Washington took up civilian life and was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758. As early as 1759, Washington began suggesting to fellow legislators the need for an engineered water portage connecting the upper Potomac and Ohio Rivers.[3] In 1762, a notice in the Maryland Gazette solicited investors for a commercial venture “opening the River Patowmack and making it passable for Small Craft, from Fort Cumberland to the Great Falls . . . The whole Land-Carriage from Alexandria, or George-Town to Pittsburgh, will then be short of 90 Miles.”[4] In 1763, Washington became a principal of the Mississippi Land Company which petitioned to create a new colony along the Ohio River on 2.5 million acres located in areas of modern Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. To succeed, the new colony needed reliable trade and transportation routes with the existing colonies to the east. In the era before railroads, only waterborne routes were feasible. The plans of the Mississippi Company did not advance, but creating a waterborne portage to bridge the Eastern Continental Divide became a lifelong quest for the farmer, general and politician.
The commercial potential of the notional transportation route may have been his early motivation, but by the end of the Revolutionary War Washington envisioned the notional transportation network as something more. Washington held “a more extensive view of the vast inland navigation of these United States.” Linking east and west was crucial to forming a unified nation, a cause he had already dedicated over eight years to in the armed conflict with Great Britain. As the war came to a conclusion in 1783, he vowed to “not rest contented till I have explored the Western country, and traversed those lines, or great part of them, which have given bounds to a new empire.”[5]
Which is not to say his 1784 trip was without self-interest. Improved transportation options inevitably benefited large landowners and Washington had amassed an enviable real estate portfolio far from his home at Mount Vernon. Washington had acquired vast swaths of frontier real estate as reward for service in the French and Indian Wars. Veterans of the Great Meadows campaign of 1754 and later veterans of the Forbes campaign that captured Fort Duquesne from the French were rewarded with charters to western land. Washington supplemented this by purchases of similar charters granted to fellow veterans and outright purchases of lands that eventually accumulated to over 58 thousand acres in Pennsylvania and western Virginia. In addition, he co-owned a mill constructed near present-day Perryopolis, 11 miles southeast from Devore’s Ferry. Freed from his military duties, the business of such large landholding required his attention. Wartime service had forced Washington to be an absentee landlord for too long, a situation he set out to remedy soon after peace returned.
Washington set off from Mount Vernon at the beginning of September 1784. The trip’s agenda included addressing business affairs at his mill, inspection of his lands, and to deal with squatters who had taken up residence on property he owned without permission or rental payments. But Washington’s detailed journal admitted that the broader purpose for the trip was gathering information on land and water routes across the region. His grand vision was to connect Alexandria on the Potomac tidewaters of the Chesapeake Bay to the watersheds of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. Soon after his return, Washington and partners chartered The Potomac Company in 1785, which began efforts to clear the river channels of the lower Potomac River and begin to extend river navigation inland. He envisioned a future water route connecting the upper Potomac River with the Cheat River, a tributary of the Monongahela which then begat the Ohio at its confluence with the Allegheny River. If successful, the bulk of all colonial trade with the west would flow down the Ohio River which began at Pittsburgh.
Washington’s vision was formulated well before it was feasible. The Potomac Company’s legacy was as a precursor to a far more ambitious project. President James Monroe signed the charter for the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal in 1826. Just the eastern section of the canal, which paralleled the Potomac River for 180 miles between Cumberland, Maryland, and Georgetown in Maryland, was completed in 1850. The western section, which would have completed the connection from Cumberland to the tributaries of the Ohio River, was never attempted. Technology was having its inevitable impact; the dawn of rail travel had mitigated the efficiency offered by canals. Construction of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad began on July 4, 1828, coincidentally the very same day construction of the C&O Canal began. Rail proved faster and more flexible than the canal and eventually extended far past Cumberland. Having never paid off its capital debts, the C&O went into receivership in 1889, its largest debt holder being the B&O Railroad. The canal continued limited operations through 1924. Though the means of travel were changing, western Pennsylvania remained the “gateway to the west,” linking old and new America.
Pennsylvania’s moniker as the Keystone State derived from its geographic and political role along the arc of the original American colonies clinging to the Atlantic seaboard. As Washington envisioned, western Pennsylvania proved to be a greater lynchpin for the growing nation. In 1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “Europe stretches to the Alleghenies; America Lies Beyond.” Past the Alleghenies, the original American frontier was defined by the vast Appalachian plateau. From its earliest European settlement to the present day, Pittsburgh and its environs have remained the largest economic center of greater Appalachia.
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Downtown Pittsburgh today sits at the head of the Ohio River, formed from the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny. The future city began as an 18th century military outpost on the triangle of land framed by the rivers. Two centuries later Pittsburgh proper covers 55 square miles in municipal extent. The city itself forms the urban core of a far larger Greater Pittsburgh region that has maintained no single definition, but since 2010, the federal government defines the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) as seven counties of southwestern Pennsylvania — home to over 2.3 million people across 5,706 square miles. From Pittsburgh, the Ohio stretches nearly a thousand miles before it flows into the Mississippi, providing a navigable water route all the way to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. In the era before the advent of rail transportation, access to the Ohio River and its tributaries opened up a vast swath of the American interior to expanding European settlements. The strategic location made the site an inevitable hub of commerce as colonizers began reaching out from their early coastal bastions.
Natural resources and providential geography bestowed economic advantages to the vast region surrounding the forks of the Ohio. Early traders noted that the area “abounds in Bears, Elks, Buffaloes, Deer, Turkeys, etc.”[6] The economic potential of the inland ‘Ohio Country’ — as the British described northern territories west of the Allegheny Mountains — was clear long before permanent European settlements arrived. By 1730, settlers were already moving into the region in distinct flows from both Virginia and Pennsylvania. In an era when frontier boundaries were far from defined, both commonwealths viewed the region as extensions of their nascent colonies.
So rich was the commercial potential of the Ohio Country that it sparked the first truly global war as distant nations fought to control it. France viewed the region as part of the Pays D’en Haut, or Upper Country of New France, and the Ohio River as La Belle Rivière. In 1748, Britain and France had just concluded the long-simmering King George’s War — an extension of the broader Austrian War of Succession in Europe — which in North America had been mostly limited to New England colonies and Canada. Soon a newer conflict between the two European powers extended into the Ohio Country and beyond.
That same year, a well-connected group of Virginia investors, including both Augustine and Lawrence Washington –older brothers of the future president — formed the Ohio Company to exploit the commercial potential of lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. In 1749, the new company was granted a British royal charter with exclusive British rights to over 200,000 acres stretching westward from the head of the Ohio River. The Ohio Company and its principals soon became proxies for British interests, and in particular Virginia interests, in the contested region.
To advance their territorial claims, in 1747 French forces built 30 log cabins at a Shawnee settlement named Logstown, adjacent to the Ohio River just 15 miles from its head. In 1749, a French military expedition led by Celeron de Bienville came south from Montreal charged with taking formal possession of the Ohio River Valley. De Bienville and over 250 troops, the largest European force to ever come into the region, first descended along the Allegheny River and then continued along the Ohio. The English settlers they encountered were ordered: “to retire to their country with all their employees.”[7] Where major rivers flowed into the Ohio, metal plaques were attached to trees and lead plates buried attesting to French territorial claims. But the expedition did not remain in the region long and soon departed for French settlements farther to the west at Detroit.
De Bienville’s expedition failed to remove the British as intended. Particularly irksome was the continuing British presence collocated with a settlement of the Miami, a Native American people, located at Pickawillany in western Ohio. The village had remained a base for agitation against French influence in the region after the Miami and British signed a treaty of friendship at Lancaster, Pennsylvania on July 23, 1748.[8] French-Canadian administrators took pains to carry out new instructions from Paris to “[d]rive from the Beautiful River any European foreigners, and in a manner of expulsion which should make them lose all taste for trying to return.”[9] A delegation sent to the village demanding that all trade with the British cease was ineffective. A follow-up expedition was not diplomatic, but punitive. Under French leadership, allied Iroquois destroyed the village at Pickawillany in 1752. If not technically at war, the two European powers maintained a tense coexistence as they both sought to exploit the military and economic potential of the disputed region.
Coterminous French and British claims could not coexist peacefully once migration of British colonists into the region accelerated. The Ohio Company’s expanding commercial activity in the region inspired renewed French efforts to secure the territory. In 1752, the French naval officer Michel-Ange Du Quesne de Menneville was appointed Governor-General of New France. His written instructions included a specific charge to remove British traders encroaching on the Upper Country. Upon arriving in Quebec in July 1752, he immediately began planning a military expedition pursuant to that goal. Early the following spring, French forces began construction of a series of military outposts intended to stretch from Lake Erie to the head of the Ohio River.
Inevitable escalation continued. In 1753, Virginia Governor Robert Dinwiddie — now with his own fiduciary interests after purchasing a share of the Ohio Company in 1750 — commissioned a young surveyor as a major in the Virginia Colonial Militia.[10] By October, 21-year-old George Washington was charged with personally delivering an ultimatum to French forces, still in the process of moving south, demanding they cease and depart. Washington’s trek took him to the head of the Ohio River which he described as “extremely well situated for a Fort, as it has the absolut Command of both Rivers.”[11] Continuing north, on December 11, 1753, he dutifully delivered his message to the French commander at the newly constructed Fort Le Boeuf, just south of Lake Erie. The British ultimatum was, unsurprisingly, rebuffed. “I do not think myself obliged to obey it,” wrote the French Commander Legardeur de St. Pierre, in his formal reply hand-carried by Washington back to Governor Dinwiddie at the colonial capital in Williamsburg.
Even before Washington arrived back in Williamsburg, Governor Dinwiddie had begun preparations to counter French military incursions into the Ohio Country. He had received instructions from London to construct a series of military outposts in the region should there be similar French intentions, activity Washington’s expedition confirmed. As he was completing his return, Washington passed a pack train of supplies heading to the forks of the Ohio River.[12] Virginians began construction of a military redoubt, named Fort Prince George, on the strategic location identified by Washington at the head of the Ohio River. Anticipating active French opposition, Governor Dinwiddie simultaneously created a new military formation, the Virginia Regiment. By early April, Washington was appointed a lieutenant colonel and the regiment’s deputy commander. Washington personally led an advance party sent to defend the ongoing construction efforts at Fort Prince George. Before they arrived, French military forces had made it down the Allegheny River and evicted the small British force from the unfinished Fort Prince George, and immediately began construction of far more extensive fortifications which they renamed Fort Duquesne.
With the French in firm control of their objective, Washington faced a choice: return without fulfilling his primary mission or risk conflict with French and allied Native American forces encamped at Fort Duquesne. Washington proceeded, and on May 28, 1754, ambushed a detachment of French Canadians shadowing the Virginians as they traversed the Laurel Highlands. Known as the Battle of Jumonville Glen, near present-day Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the battle, and the death under uncertain circumstances of French Ensign Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, has been blamed for igniting the ensuing French and Indian Wars in North America. In retaliation Jumonville’s brother, Louis Coulon de Villiers led a larger French force out of Fort Duquesne. Washington was forced to surrender at the Battle of Fort Necessity on July 4, 1754.[13] Technically, France and Britain were not belligerents in any declared conflict, and so Washington and his militia troops were released and allowed to retreat back to coastal Virginia. The frontier skirmishes that summer not only cascaded into a broader conflict between France and Britain in North America but morphed into the global Seven Years War that eventually involved every major European power and extended as far as Asia.
Escalating conflict between France and Britain prompted ever larger deployments of British military forces to North America. In 1755, Major General Edward Braddock was sent from Britain to serve as military Commander in Chief for North America. Arriving with him were two regiments, over 1,000 troops — then the largest military force to have ever been deployed to North America. Braddock’s explicit mission was to expel French forces from the Ohio Country and, in particular, their base at Fort Duquesne. Braddock did not survive the campaign after his ill-fated expedition was ambushed 10 miles southeast of its objective. Though only accompanying the expedition as a volunteer aide, Washington was one of the few senior officers to survive the battle and was credited with reforming British forces during their disorderly retreat.
It was not until a subsequent 1758 British expedition led by British General John Forbes that French forces permanently abandoned the Ohio Country and their military outpost at the head of the Ohio River. Mustering over 6,000 combined regular and militia troops, Forbes’ expedition relied on methodical logistical planning, including the construction a series of forts along their approach from the east, a path later known as the Forbes Road. Forbes gave the fortification and its future settlement its permanent name in honor of William Pitt, then serving as the British Secretary of State. The expulsion of French troops from Fort Duquesne — who abandoned the site without a fight as Forbes’ expedition was approaching — reopened a lingering conflict between British colonies for control of the Ohio Country. Still unresolved was whether the frontier area and the new settlement of Pittsburgh rested within Pennsylvania or Virginia.
Geographic ambiguity was compounded by vague territorial definitions in the charters of the early colonies, and the lack of scientific surveys across the wilderness. Virginia once defined its boundaries as a vast wedge of land that extended from modern South Carolina to New Jersey and stretching westward, according to its 1609 charter, from “sea to sea” — a mandate theoretically extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean.[14] Pennsylvania’s later charter, granted to William Penn in 1680, assigned the commonwealth an area extending westward five degrees longitude from the Delaware River. Pennsylvania’s southern border remained in dispute into the 18th century due to conflicting claims of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Only a 1732 royal decree ended the debate by declaring the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland as a line of latitude extending westward from a fixed point 15 miles south of the southernmost house in Philadelphia.
Astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon began physically demarking Pennsylvania’s southern boundary in November 1763. Over the next 58 months, Mason and Dixon surveyed the long parallel of latitude separating Pennsylvania from Maryland in the east, but could not extend the line far enough to complete the division between Pennsylvania and Virginia in the west. The Native American guides leading them through the wilderness were members of the Six Nations. When they reached a boundary known as the Catawba Warpath, what lay beyond was territory of the Delaware and Shawnee tribes. The guides refused to go any farther, effectively halting the expedition short of fully demarking the Pennsylvania border. The terminal point for what would be known as the Mason and Dixon line was set down near what is now Pentress, West Virginia, barely westward, but over 50 miles south through dense and unsurveyed forest from Pittsburgh. Whether Pittsburgh rested within the boundaries of Pennsylvania or Virginia remained uncertain.
Still contested was how far Pennsylvania stretched westward. In 1774, commissioners from Pennsylvania and Virginia agreed that Pennsylvania’s western border traced precisely the course of the Delaware River, but displaced five degrees of longitude. By that definition, Pennsylvania’s western frontier zigzagged through the forest mirroring the course of the Delaware River over 280 miles to the east. Beyond that, Virginia’s territorial claim again took precedence. With uncertainty over where Pittsburgh rested, Virginians moving into the region believed, much as George Washington did when he first passed through the region, that the settlement at the head of the Ohio River rested on the Virginia side of the undemarcated wilderness border. Migrants arriving from eastern Pennsylvania believed otherwise.
Formalizing its territorial claims on Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania created Westmoreland County in 1773. The new county stretched from the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains to the Commonwealth’s western border and explicitly encompassed Pittsburgh. A new county seat was declared in Hannastown, 30 miles east of Pittsburgh. Virginia soon counterclaimed that Pittsburgh fell within a new District of West Augusta, first defined in 1774. Across what is western Pennsylvania today, settlers of conflated colonial loyalties came into open conflict just as the Revolutionary War was breaking out.
In the decade leading up to the Revolutionary War, Britain had attempted to limit colonial expansion in the Ohio Country to avoid antagonism with Native American tribes throughout the region. The royal policy had been prompted by frontier conflicts generated by the continuing expansion of colonists from Virginia into the Ohio Country. British decrees could not stop migration flows from accelerating and beginning in the fall of 1773, the Shawnee and Mingo had risen up in what the British called Lord Dunmore’s War opposing settlers continuing to move into areas south of the Ohio River. Fort Pitt had been mostly abandoned as a military outpost years earlier but was briefly reoccupied by elements of the Virginia militia as they staged their fight against Native Americans.
Later in 1774, Virginian John Connolly appeared in Pittsburgh and posted a notice of his appointment as Captain-Commandant of Virginia militia for the region. After a brief arrest, he returned to the Augusta, Virginia county seat of government in Staunton. Returning to Pittsburgh in July of that year, he raised a detachment of the Virginia militia, which attacked and captured Fort Lee defending Pennsylvania’s Westmoreland County seat at Hannastown. Three Westmoreland County justices who refused to acknowledge Virginia’s jurisdiction were arrested and detained in Staunton for three weeks before being released.[15] In 1776, Virginia subdivided its Augusta territory into three counties. Pittsburgh rested within the new Virginia county of Yohogania. Only escalating conflict with Britain shifted focus away from the inter-commonwealth conflict, but the border dispute did not go away. For a period:
…there were, west of the Alleghanies, not only two different sets of magistrates, with their subordinate officers, constables, assessors, and organized companies of militia, over the same people in the Monongahela valley, but within a few miles of each other had been established two different courts regularly (or irregularly) administering justice under the laws of two different governments.”[16]
Throughout the Revolutionary War, the territorial dispute between Virginia and Pennsylvania was held in abeyance, while conflicting legal claims continued to complicate land acquisition. Land titles for the same property were often issued by both Pennsylvania and Virginia colonial administrators, an ambiguity that inhibited land sales and growth. So little development was emerging in proximity to Pittsburgh that a Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress visiting the settlement in 1784 said that “this place, I believe, will never be very considerable.”[17] By the end of the decade, it is unlikely the comment would be repeated.
Deconfliction of competing territorial claims only began in 1783 when Pennsylvania and Virginia agreed on a new definition for Pennsylvania’s western border. No longer tracing the path of the distant Delaware River, the two commonwealths agreed that Pennsylvania extended to a fixed line of longitude exactly five degrees east of an agreed geographic point in Philadelphia. Demarking where that border fell was completed in 1786.[18] In 1784 a survey team led by surveyor Andrew Ellicott, astronomer David Rittenhouse, and Bishop James Madison, completed the earlier work of Mason and Dixon in marking Pennsylvania’s southern border. A subsequent expedition two years later mapped Pennsylvania’s agreed-upon western border. Their authoritative cartography definitively placed Pittsburgh and its immediate environs within the borders of Pennsylvania. Once the border was clarified — and the draining conflict with Great Britain over — growth across western Pennsylvania accelerated. Over 30 years between 1760 and 1790, Pittsburgh’s population had only increased from 169 residents to 376 as enumerated in the first national census of 1790. Over the following decade, Pittsburgh’s population grew more than four-fold with 1,565 residents recorded in 1800. Economic activity grew even faster as increasing westward flows of migrants and commerce funneled through the borough, and later city, of Pittsburgh.
Early settlers found the inland Appalachian plateau ideal for many crops, but difficult transportation over the Allegheny Mountains limited access to the major markets still clustered along the coast. Farmers distilled crops of rye into alcohol, which proved to be the only product they could profitably transport to cash markets. So valuable was the flow of grain alcohol coming from northern Appalachia that the cash-starved federal government looked to it as an early source of revenue. A federal duty on all distilled alcohols was passed in 1791, a tax that bore down hard on the Appalachian farmers. Opposition to the new tax spurred one of the young nation’s first major crises when the Whiskey Rebellion erupted just south of Pittsburgh. Outright insurrection and violence targeted at federal excise collectors spurred President Washington and his treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton to lead federal forces into the region in 1794. The uprising quickly faded in the face of the overwhelming federal response.
As the young nation expanded, migration conferred economic benefits on Pittsburgh. The Ohio River proved to be an early superhighway for ever-increasing flows of settlers moving inward on the American continent. Early commerce was dependent on river-borne transportation, and Pittsburgh was a natural incubator for the industries supplying the nation’s westward expansion. Envisioning Pittsburgh as a transportation node for the westward flow of goods, Benjamin Franklin accurately predicted in 1770 that Fort Pitt would become a center of shipbuilding.
Economic growth made Pittsburgh a magnet for both skilled and unskilled laborers. By the end of the 1780s, multiple Pittsburgh boatyards were advertising to bring carpenters and craftsmen from Philadelphia. In 1793, Pittsburgh boatbuilder Jacob Meyer began a regular packet service along the river between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, Ohio, 300 miles down the Ohio River. Meriwether Lewis came to Pittsburgh in 1803 to have a keelboat or barge built for his famous transcontinental trek. Meyer most likely built the boat for Lewis, whose trip across the continent paved the way for a century of westward-flowing commerce originating from the same Pittsburgh riverbanks.[19]
Pittsburgh was not the only new city growing west of the Alleghenies, and the pre-industrial city faced competition for new investment from nearby Wheeling in western Virginia. Founded 87 miles downriver from Pittsburgh, Wheeling claimed to be the effective head of navigation for the mighty Ohio River. While Pittsburgh rested where the river formed, hazardous river navigation posed difficulties for river traffic in the approaches to Pittsburgh. The potential that Wheeling could wrest future investment from Pittsburgh was heightened in 1806 when Congress authorized funding for construction of the National Pike — first national road to connect eastern coastal cities with Ohio. The new road was planned to intersect the Ohio River at Wheeling, generating fears that the Virginia municipality would “threaten to rival Pittsburgh in prosperity, wealth and greatness.”[20] Pennsylvania’s state government responded by funding the clearance of navigational hazards along the upper Ohio River and later sponsoring the creation of the Pennsylvania main line, an alternative system of interconnected canals and railroads which connected Pittsburgh with Philadelphia.[21]
Early in the 19th century, Pittsburgh and its environs began to benefit from an economic engine below the surface. The first known map of the northern Appalachian coal was prepared in 1749 by Joshua Fry, who would briefly command George Washington in the Virginia militia four years in the future, and Peter Jefferson, father of the future president.[22] Pittsburgh fortuitously rested atop a thick seam of bituminous coal created from organic remains first deposited there 300 million years earlier when western Pennsylvania sat atop a vast coastal plain. Epochal time and immense pressure had first transformed the rich sediment into peat and then into lignite, also known as brown coal. Eventually, the process created bituminous or black coal, which was put to use by the first settlers at Pittsburgh. By 1760, a mine on Coal Hill — later named Mount Washington and directly across the Monongahela River from Fort Pitt — was providing fuel to heat the garrison stationed there. Little effort was needed to mine the coal as outcrops of the sedimentary rock were exposed on the hillside. Extracted coal was merely rolled down the hill and ported over the river for use. Not limited to local uses, Pittsburgh seam coal was soon exported from the region and became the primary fuel of the industrial revolution in North America.
The Pittsburgh Coal Seam stretches over 11,000 square miles across three states. The effectively limitless fuel proved to be the catalyst for an alternate vector of economic growth. Abundant and accessible fuel made Pittsburgh into a very different type of frontier town with industry growing side by side with commerce. Economist and early U.S. Treasury official Tench Coxe recognized the economic advantages coal gave to western Pennsylvania. “The plenty of pit-coal in Pennsylvania will very soon give it an immense advantage over all the interior country north and east of it.”[23] In 1796 the French engineer Victor Collot, surveying the Ohio and Mississippi rivers for the French government, went further noting that Pittsburgh “will certainly become one of the first inland cities of the United States” because “[a] rich vein of coal is found on the summit of one of the mountains which bounds the Ohio on the left.[24]
Coal sourced from western Pennsylvania became ever more important once coal-fueled steamboats became the dominant mode of transportation on the western rivers, creating demand for Appalachian coal all along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. With undisputed advantages in coal production and transportation, iron and glass production all but spontaneously erupted in the valleys of western Pennsylvania. By 1797, James O’Hara — who had been appointed Quartermaster General of the U.S. Army by President Washington — and Isaac Craig had established the O’Hara-Craig Glassworks along the Ohio River within eyesight of Fort Pitt. The first Pittsburgh iron forge dates at least as far back as Joseph McClurg’s foundry along the Monongahela River in 1804. The region’s first rolling mill was built by Englishman Christopher Cowan in 1811.[25] Pittsburgh’s industrial fate was sealed before the first decades of the 19th century had elapsed.[26]
Early economic growth was not limited to metalworking industries. Fulfilling Benjamin Franklin’s early prediction, Pittsburgh became a center of steamboat production. A total of 196 steam-powered vessels were constructed in Pittsburgh between 1811 and 1835.[27] In 1804, Peter Eltonhead of Manchester, England came to Pittsburgh to open the city’s first cotton mill.[28] Seven cotton mills were operating in the city by 1850, making it one of the region’s largest industries. The energy-intensive glass industry grew in the city through most of the 19th century, much of the output needed for the shipment of goods westward. In 1880, Allegheny County produced nearly 27% of the nation’s output of glass, a staggering concentration that put it far ahead of Philadelphia, the nation’s second largest supplier, which produced ‘merely’ 7.7% of the national total.[29]
Yet another natural resource reshaped the economy of western Pennsylvania just before the advent of the Civil War. On April 27, 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil less than 70 feet below the surface while digging a well 100 miles north of Pittsburgh. An entirely new industry was created by the new fuel. Oil began arriving by steamboat in Pittsburgh by 1860, and soon extensive pipeline networks were built out that increased the flow of oil coming into the city. Pittsburgh became a center for both refining and transshipment of the fuel. By 1862, over 35 oil refineries were in operation across western Pennsylvania. In 1864, Pittsburgh opened its first oil exchange where contracts for future oil production were bought and sold. [30]
Still, Pittsburgh’s true competitive advantage showed itself in the growth of ironworks and foundries that increased in number through the first half of the 19th century. By the 1850s, over 113 different owners of rolling mills were operating in Pittsburgh.[31] Not dominated by any one firm, the iron industry across southwestern Pennsylvania was made up of a myriad of small and medium-sized producers. At mid-century much of the region’s iron output was concentrated along the riverbanks. The Jones and Lauth Company established its ironworks along the Monongahela River in 1853 — less than three miles from Fort Pitt. In 1861, the firm expanded to include both a blast furnace and foundry, making it the city’s first fully integrated wrought-iron works. Through the end of the century, Pittsburgh small metalworks continued consolidating into the largest of industrial operations.
The concentration of industry was a unique sight for visitors to the city. Travel writer James Parton arrived in Pittsburgh in 1866. His travelogue about the city, published in The Atlantic Magazine in 1868, includes one of the most repeated descriptions of industrial Pittsburgh since. Looking down from a nearby hill he described the expansive industry clustered in the river valley below as akin to “Hell with the lid off.”[32] Parton’s description has long been interpreted as a pejorative it was never intended to be. His article on Pittsburgh was a travelogue, an elaborate hagiography extolling Pittsburgh as a destination. Parton’s opening paragraph did not impugn the growing city, but rather implored: “Here all is curious and wonderful; site, environs, history, geology, business, aspect, atmosphere, customs, everything … To know Pittsburg thoroughly is a ‘liberal education in the kind of culture demanded by modern times.’”[33]
The partial sentence most often quoted from Parton’s long-form work is almost always clipped from its original context. Parton had ascended Cliff Street, part of what would far later be known as the city of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Looking down from the heights were not the massive iron or steel works that would be built in subsequent decades, but innumerable smaller manufacturers clinging to the riverbanks. Parton’s full passage was far more one of awe than criticism:
There is one evening scene in Pittsburg which no visitor should miss. Owing to the abruptness of the hill behind the town, there is a street along the edge of the bluff, from which you can look directly down upon the part of the city which lies low, near the level of the rivers. On the evening of this dark day, we were conducted to the edge of the abyss, and looked over the iron railing upon the most striking spectacle we ever beheld. It is an unprofitable business, view-hunting; but if anyone would enjoy a spectacle as striking as Niagara, he may do so by simply walking up a long hill to Cliff Street in Pittsburg, and looking over into — hell with the lid taken off.[34]
As amazing as the industrial landscape was to Parton in 1866, Pittsburgh’s mid-19th century agglomeration of manufacturing would be magnified many times over in the steel revolution just beginning. Catalyzed by access to river and rail networks and more than anything else the nearby concentration of metallurgic coal, that steel production erupted from the valleys of southwestern Pennsylvania was an almost inevitable geographic destiny.
Heated to as much as 3,600 degrees but prevented from combusting in a low oxygen environment, coal becomes industrial coke. Transformation required forcing impurities, including volatile gases and moisture, out of the organic rock. The desiccated and clarified coal burns cleaner and at the higher temperatures essential to industrial-scale production of iron and steel. The first use of coke in small iron furnaces dates back at least to Isaac Meason’s Plumsock puddling furnace in Fayette County, built southwest of Pittsburgh in 1817. When the Clinton Furnace in Pittsburgh proved in 1859 that coal from the Connellsville coalfield could be used in blast furnaces for the smelting of iron ore, the engineered fuel became central to both iron and steel production. The low sulfur content of Connellsville-sourced coke made it the ideal metallurgical coal. Even coal from other veins of the Pittsburgh coal seam proved impractical as a feedstock for blast furnace coke. Reflecting the unique advantages of Connellsville coal, and the dominance of southwestern Pennsylvania as a center for iron and steel production, by 1880, over 82% of all coking coal in the United States came from western Pennsylvania.
Both iron and steel production were limited to small batch production well into the 19th century. From antiquity, iron was smelted from iron ore in charcoal-fueled bloomeries. The heavy use of wood-charcoal is blamed for the deforestation across much of northern Europe in the 16th century. Early metal furnaces were forced to remain small in both Europe and the United States as they often moved once they had denuded local supplies of wood. Bloomeries produced a sponge-iron, or directly reduced iron (DRI), a concoction of iron and slag that could then be further refined into wrought iron, but only in very limited batches. Steel was not a new product but had been a niche product since mankind’s Iron Age which began in parts of the world more than three millennia earlier. Iron with precise additions of carbon forms the harder, stronger and lighter steel. Too little carbon and iron remained soft and malleable, ideal for blacksmiths who could form the iron after heating in their own furnaces, but not strong enough for more demanding uses. Too much carbon and the pig iron that resulted could be cast into shapes when molten but was too hard and brittle for most uses. Carbon steel, with 0.1% to 2% carbon, was stronger and lighter than either wrought or cast iron. Despite the clear advantages of steel for most uses, the difficult task of precisely adding carbon to iron inhibited production and limited steel to only niche uses.
For more than a millennium extending into the beginning of the 19th century, the most common methods of steel production were variations of a cementation process. Small batches of low-carbon wrought iron were packed in layers with charcoal and heated for periods stretching from days to weeks. Once the iron had absorbed sufficient carbon, the output was reheated by similar means and then worked under a forge to distribute the carbon. It was a fuel-, time- and manpower-intensive process that did not produce a homogeneous product and could not be scaled up to produce industrial-scale levels of output.
At the onset of the Industrial Revolution, a process was developed to refine pig iron in much larger batches not requiring charcoal. Large vats of molten pig iron, or puddle, were exposed to air to force the oxidation of impurities including carbon from the metal. The molten metal begins forming into spongy balls of wrought iron weighing as much as 90 pounds. Only the strongest men could manually stir the hot mixture using iron rods weighing as much as 70 pounds — rods that were consumed in the process. With oversized tongs workers then removed the ‘puddle balls’ that formed. Puddlers needed not only rare strength and endurance, but hard to acquire skills to complete their tasks. Their specialized skills were the epitome of tacit knowledge only acquired from those who had previously mastered the alchemic art of manually distilling steel from liquid iron.[35] It could take up to two years of training as an apprentice to become a skilled puddler. Because iron and steel production relied entirely on these specialized workers, puddlers were the best paid of all the mid-19th-century industrial workers. So vital were puddlers to iron and steel production that the Sons of Vulcan became one of the earliest and most powerful American labor unions after they formed in Pittsburgh in 1858.
Carnegie exploited Pittsburgh’s advantages as only a serial entrepreneur could. Steel was not his first business, and he had learned how to build and manage ever larger enterprises. Having already made respectable fortunes first in the railroad industry, and then in the oil and gas discoveries of northwest Pennsylvania, Carnegie entered the ironmaking business. In 1863, he fronted the investment making his brother Thomas a partner at a small Pittsburgh iron works. Carnegie and business partners then founded an independent Cyclops Iron Mills in 1864 which was merged the following year with Thomas’ earlier iron works to form the Union Iron Mills, just one of many successful iron producers concentrated in Pittsburgh.
Carnegie then became a builder of bridges as the industry shifted from wood to iron construction. He helped found the Keystone Bridge Company in 1865, reorganized from the Piper-Shiffler Bridge Building Company operating at 29th Street in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania.[36] Keystone Bridge supplied the material for the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, and later constructed 13 spans along the lower Ohio River. To supply the business with iron, in 1871, Carnegie invested in a new Lucy Furnace set up alongside the Keystone Bridge Company in Lawrenceville. It was Carnegie’s experience as a subcontractor for the great bridge in St. Louis that motivated him to enter the steel industry directly. The bridge’s designer and later namesake, James Eads, insisted on using steel for parts of the bridge’s superstructure. The Keystone Bridge Company was the principal subcontractor for the bridge’s superstructure, but the company was not yet capable of producing the steel trusses Eads’ design called for, forcing Carnegie to subcontract fabrication to the Butcher Steel Company in Philadelphia.[37]
In 1871, William Coleman, the father in law of Andrew Carnegie’s brother Thomas, began visiting existing American steel producers throughout the nation. Coleman and Carnegie became partners in efforts to build a new steel plant near Pittsburgh. Land was purchased alongside the Monongahela River near where General Braddock met his demise over a century. The site not only offered direct river access but was also alongside two separate rail lines: the Pennsylvania Railroad and also the Baltimore and Ohio. The Pittsburgh region provided the optimal location for both the vast quantities of coal and coke needed by the new plant while rail and water access were critical to the importation of iron ore from the Great Lakes and the delivery of final products. Carnegie and Coleman became partners in a new firm: Carnegie, McCandless, and Company which began construction of a new dedicated steelworks at Braddock in 1873. While the plant was still in construction, the company was reorganized in 1874 as the Edgar Thomson Steel Company, one of the first limited liability companies (LLCs) in Pennsylvania, a legal form that had only been created by the state earlier that year. Fatefully, it was decided the new plant would be built around a new Bessemer furnace.
Bessemer technology was revolutionizing steel production in the late 19th century, transforming it from small-scale, virtually artisan, production to industrial scale mass production worldwide. The new process forced air through large vats of molten pig iron to catalyze the removal of carbon. Impurities that do not burn off form solid slag which is removed after smelting. The elimination of puddlers, and the larger scale output of the Bessemer furnaces, dramatically lowered the cost of steel production. The Bessemer process was far from new. Neither Coleman nor Carnegie had invented the technology, nor were they the first to implement it in the United States. The process was first patented in 1855 by British inventor Henry Bessemer. Pittsburgh native William Kelly had independently developed a variant of the same process in Cambria County, just 60 miles east of Pittsburgh in the 1850s, although he was never able to successfully develop his ideas as far as Bessemer did. Bessemer based steel plants had operated in the United States at least as far back as Eber Brook Ward’s Eureka Iron Works in Wyandotte, Michigan in 1864. Eventually, the Cambria Iron Works also licensed the Bessemer process for steelmaking in 1871, and for a brief period Johnstown, Pennsylvania was the center of American steel production.
Carnegie observed Bessemer furnaces himself on a visit to a plant in Sheffield, England. Carnegie’s obsession, and the key to his commercial success, was lowering the cost of production in each of his previous industries, and the Bessemer process was an ideal tool to pursue the same goal in the manufacture of steel. The new plant in Braddock dwarfed the smaller size of the typical iron and steel producers previously clustered in Pittsburgh and proved to be an immediate commercial success. Initially, the relationship between Carnegie’s new plant and Pittsburgh’s existing mills was symbiotic. As it began the market demand for steel was insufficient to meet the outsized production of the Edgar Thomson Works. Excess steel ingots were sold to other local crucible steel producers that used Carnegie’s Bessemer-made steel as an input to produce higher quality products.
Within a few years, increasing demand for steel rail eliminated the excess supply of steel ingots Carnegie had been selling to other Pittsburgh-based mills. To compete, many of the older traditional steel producers banded together to construct a similar Bessemer-based steel plant on par with Carnegie’s. In 1881, the Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Company — designed from the beginning to use the same Bessemer technology — came online. The owners quickly faced repeated financial and labor difficulties. When they were forced to sell, Carnegie acquired the Homestead Steelworks in 1879 for just $350,000 in a deal that did not even require any cash up front. The former owners received only promissory notes to be paid on future profit. A new consortium of Pittsburgh iron producers incorporated the Duquesne Steel Company to build a Bessemer-based plant just three miles from Braddock. Internal squabbles and a need for additional capital inhibited construction of the new plant. Facing bankruptcy, the firm was reorganized, and the unfinished plant was completed by the reformed Allegheny Bessemer Company with many of the same principals. With additional capital, the plant was completed and began production in 1889. Within a year, Carnegie acquired the new plant in Duquesne as well, cementing his dominance in the steel industry just as the demand for the commodity was rapidly expanding. Consolidation of the plants under a reorganized Carnegie Steel Company occurred in 1891.
Steel rail was in demand across the country because of the nation’s exponentially growing network of rail lines and the demands of ever-heavier rolling stock. Early iron rails had distinct limitations compared to steel. Iron-forged rail was able to support only a fraction of the weight of steel rail and wore out much faster, requiring continuous and expensive replacement. So important was steel rail in his initial business plan, Carnegie named the plant at Braddock for Edgar Thomson, then the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Thomson had once been Carnegie’s boss, but Carnegie hoped that Pennsylvania Railroad would be the new plant’s biggest customer. By the end of the 19th century, over 30,000 miles of steel rail were being laid every year with much of the nation’s industrial growth attributed to the ready availability of steel rail, the vast bulk being produced in Pittsburgh.[38]
The Jones and Laughlin Company converted to produce Bessemer steel in 1886. Legacy production of crucible steel continued in Pittsburgh into the beginning of the 20th century, and Pittsburgh’s very last puddling furnace only shut down in 1961, but Bessemer-based production dominated the steel industry until supplanted by open hearth based production.[39] Carnegie and his competitors made Pittsburgh the greatest concentration of steel production in the nation. In 1874, just under 10% of the nation’s steel ingot production came from within Allegheny County, primarily from plants in the city of Pittsburgh and its immediate environs. By 1894, a remarkable 43% of the nation’s steel ingots were sourced from the same county.[40]
Carnegie Steel quickly set a new standard for integrating all stages of steel production. In 1881 he joined forces with coal-magnate Henry Clay Frick to ensure supplies of the industrial coke his steel works depended on. When the steel industry’s demand for iron ore outstripped supply from Pennsylvania, Carnegie took advantage of new iron ore discoveries in the Mesabi Range of Minnesota after 1892. Carnegie began acquiring ore supplies from the Mesabi Range in 1894 and then partnered with John D. Rockefeller — considered the richest individual in American history due to profit from the Standard Oil Company — to acquire not just a single mine, but most of the output of the entire region. Increasing ore supplies from Minnesota dramatically dropped the price of ore in American markets by 50%, giving Americans an advantage in international markets.[41] Even though the new source of iron ore was geographically distant from his southwestern Pennsylvania steel plants, Carnegie minimized costs by shipping ore via lake steamers operated by Carnegie subsidiaries to a port owned by Carnegie at Conneaut, Ohio and then transported by rail to his Mon Valley-based operations.
Alongside Carnegie through the last three decades of the century, George Westinghouse created an equally impressive string of successful businesses all based in Pittsburgh. Building upon his invention of an effective air brake for railroads, Westinghouse had gone on to build a natural gas business and then founded his biggest enterprise, the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Industry in 1885. Pittsburgh was central to the creation of the modern aluminum industry when the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, later Alcoa, was formed in the city in 1888. By 1886, the original oil exchange formed in Pittsburgh had evolved into the broad Pittsburgh Stock Exchange. Few regions anywhere could claim such a concentration of industrial output, entrepreneurism, and financing at the height of the Industrial Revolution. In the penultimate decade of the 19th century, The New York Times could fairly claim that “No part of America holds out more golden promises to the enterprising manufacturer than Pittsburgh.”[42]
By the end of the century, Pittsburgh’s entrepreneurial milieu was being transformed into the largest of industrial enterprises. Carnegie Steel in 1900 only trailed Standard Oil as the single most valuable industrial firm in the world. If Carnegie’s operations had been the only manufacturers to be located in proximity to Pittsburgh, it would have been enough to define the city as an industrial center without rival within the United States. But Carnegie’s largest competitors added to the region’s industrial dominance. At the time, the Pittsburgh Works of the Jones and Laughlin Company was itself one of nation’s largest factories with over 8,000 employees, comparable in size to Carnegie’s operations at Homestead. Regional steel producers were interconnected in a mature network including coal and coking operations stretching out from Pittsburgh in all directions.[43]
When Andrew Carnegie sold his steel businesses to J. P. Morgan in 1901, the Duquesne Works, along with Homestead Works and the Edgar Thomson plant at Braddock, became the core of the behemoth U.S. Steel trust. Morgan not only acquired Carnegie’s profitable steel operations but 30 other companies in an unprecedented amalgam of production. With an initial market capitalization valued at over $1.4 billion, the new corporation was larger than any other private business ever conceived. What emerged was not merely a company proficient at producing steel, but one that entirely dominated the market for steel in North America, a market that explicitly defined Pittsburgh as its geographic and economic center.
[1] “Founders Online: [Diary Entry: 18 September 1784],” accessed July 11, 2018, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/01-04-02-0001-0001-0017.
[2] Alfred Creigh, History of Washington County: From Its First Settlement to the Present Time : First Under Virginia as Yohogania, Ohio, Or Augusta County Until 1781 : And Subsequently Under Pennsylvania; with Sketches of All the Townships, Boroughs, and Villages, Etc. : And to Which Is Added a Full Account of the Celebrated Mason and Dixon’s Line, the Whiskey Insurrection, Indian Warfare, Traditional and Local Historical Events (B. Singerly, 1871), 22.
[3] George Washington and Archer Butler Hulbert, Washington and the West: Being George Washington’s Diary of September, 1784, 1911, 20.
[4] Dan Guzy, Navigation on the Upper Potomac River and Its Tributaries (Glen Echo, Md.: Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Association, 2008), 5.
[5] Washington and Hulbert, Washington and the West, 7.
[6] Boyd Crumrine, “XX Boundary Controversy Between Pennsylvania and Virginia: 1748–1785,” in Minute Book of the Virginia Court Held at Ford Dunmore (Pittsburgh for the District of West Augusta, 1775–1776, Reprinted in the Annals of the Carnegie Museum, Volume 1, 1902, http://historicpittsburgh.org/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735056290582/from_search/-33.
[7] Mary C. Darlington, Fort Pitt and Letters from the Frontier (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: J.R. Weldin & Co., 1892), 35.
[8] R. David Edmunds, “Pickawillani: French Military vs. British Economic Power,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Review, April 1975, 173.
[9] Walter O’Meara, Guns at the Fork (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979), 15.
[10] James A. Procter, The Ohio River: It’s Inner History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1959), 35.
[11] George Washington, “The Journal of Major George Washington (1754),” ed. Paul Royster, Electronic Texts in American Studies 33 (1754): 4.
[12] David A. Clary, George Washington’s First War: His Early Military Adventures, 1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 69.
[13] Alfred Procter James, Charles Morse Stotz, and Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Drums in the Forest. (Pittsburgh: Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), 31.
[14] James, Stotz, and Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, Drums in the Forest., 22.
[15] Edgar W. Hassler, Old Westmoreland: A History of Western Pennsylvania During the Revolution (Heritage Books, 2009), 24–25.
[16] Boyd Crumrine, The County Court for the District of West Augusta, Va., Held at Augusta Town, Near Washington, Pa., 1776–1777: An Historical Sketch, with an Account of the County Courts for Ohio, Yohogania and Monongalia Counties, Va., Held 1777–1780 (Washington, Pennsylvania: Washington County Historical Society, 1905), 17.
[17] “Journal of Arthur Lee,” The Olden Time 2, no. 8 (August 1847): 385.
[18] For more on the geographic challenges faced in marking Pennsylvania’s boundaries see Andro Linklater, The Fabric of America: How Our Borders and Boundaries Shaped the Country and Forged Our National Identity (New York: Walker and Company, 2008).
[19] William K. Brunot, “The Building of the Lewis and Clark Boat in Pittsburgh,” Western Pennsylvania History, Winter 2009, 37.
[20] L. Diane Barnes, “Urban Rivalry in the Upper Ohio Valley: Wheeling and Pittsburgh in the Nineteenth Century,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography CXXIII, no. 3 (July 1999): 211.
[21] Elizabeth Brand Monroe, The Wheeling Bridge Case: Its Significance in American Law and Technology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992), 35.
[22] H. N. Eavenson, “The Pittsburgh Coal Bed; Its Early History and Development,” American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers Transaction 130 (1938): 6.
[23] Eavenson, 13.
[24] Eavenson, n. 14.
[25] George Thornton Fleming, History of Pittsburgh and Environs: From Prehistoric Days to the Beginning of the American Revolution (American Historical Society, 1922), 490.
[26] The view of Pittsburgh as cast as manufacturing center is defined by Richard C. Wade’s Urban Frontier. A contrary view to a degree is from Muller (2009) is that Pittsburgh retained its role as a commerce center through the first half of the 19th century. See: Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of the Western Cities, 1790–1830 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996).; Edward K. Muller, “Was Pittsburgh’s Economic Destiny Set in 1815,” Indiana Magazine of History 105, no. 3 (September 2009): 203–18.
[27] “Pittsburgh — It’s Influence on the Navigation of the Ohio,” Magazine of Western History 2 (1885): 264.
[28] Weston Arthur Goodspeed, Standard History of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania (Pittsburg: H.R. Cornell & Company, 1898), 200.
[29] Francis G. Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City 1877–1919 (State University of New York Press, 1984), 10.
[30] A. Michael Sulman, “The Short Happy Life of Petroleum in Pittsburgh: A Paradox in Industrial History,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 33, no. 1 (1966): 50–69.
[31] John N. Ingham, Making of Iron and Steel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 28.
[32] Parton, “Pittsburg,” 21.
[33] Parton, 17.
[34] Parton, 21.
[35] For more on puddling as it was practiced at the end of the 19th century see James J. Davis, The Iron Puddler: My Life in the Roling Mills and What Came of It (Bobb-Merrill Company Publishers, 1922). Reprinted by Cosimos Books, New York, 2005.
[36] Lawrenceville had yet to be incorporated into the city of Pittsburgh in 1862. The plant continued operating, later as part of U.S. Steel’s American Bridge subsidiary, until permanently closed in 1984.
[37] National Park Service, “The Eads Bridge,” Historical American Engineering Record, April 1984, 14, Library of Commerce, http://lcweb2.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/mo/mo0300/mo0361/data/mo0361data.pdf.
[38] Bruce Bramfitt, “A Metallurgical Perspective of the Role of Rail Steel in the Growth of America,” Iron and Steel Technology, 2012, 158.
[39] Pittsburgh’s last puddling furnace was at Lockhart and Company, which operated in McKees Rocks, just west of Pittsburgh, until 1961.
[40] Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association, Region in Transition, vol. 1, Economic Study of the Pittsburgh Region (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), 271.
[41] Douglas A. Irwin, “Explaining America’s Surge in Manufactured Exports, 1880–1913,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 85, no. 2 (May 1, 2003): 370, https://doi.org/10.1162/003465303765299873.
[42] “Value of Natural Gas, Its Use Clarifies the Atmosphere at Pittsburg,” New York Times, October 18, 1885, 6.
[43] Joshua Benjamin Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018), 93.
