Published by The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright © 2010 by Len Barcousky

All rights reserved

Front cover images: Pittsburgh at dawn, Darrell Sapp of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Union Depot, Senator John Heinz History Center. Back cover images: statue, Robin Rombach of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; balloon, Pittsburgh Press; and Roosevelt rally, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

First published 2010

e-book edition 2012

ISBN 978.1.61423.272.8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barcousky, Len.

Remembering Pittsburgh : an eyewitness history of the Steel City / Len Barcousky.

p. cm.

Collection of author’s historical columns from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

print edition ISBN 978-1-60949-008-9

1. Pittsburgh (Pa.)--History. I. Title.

F159.P657B37 2010

974.8’86--dc22

2010020921

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For my wife Barbara, who keeps me on an even keel.

CONTENTS

Foreword: Stories That “Travel,” by David M. Shribman

Preface: Finding the First Drafts of Pittsburgh History

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Real Gateway to the West

1. The Great and the Good

1753: Washington Gets to the Point

1825: Pittsburgh Honors Lafayette, “the Nation’s Guest”

1861: Lincoln Looks South

1919: H.J. Heinz: A Giant Passes

1927: Silent Cal Speaks—Briefly

1936: Roosevelt Versus Landon, Knox and Coughlin

2. Bad Guys—and One Gal

1818: No Jail Could Hold This Pittsburgh Thief

1858: Woman Who Killed Faces the Hangman

1869: A Shady Stranger on a Train

3. Wars, Revolutions and Rebellions

1755: Life and Sudden Death at Fort Duquesne

1763: Bouquet’s Victory

1763: Fort Pitt Survives Flood, Siege

1794: The Whiskey Rebellion Fails; Hugh Henry Brackenridge Survives

1863: As Lee Moves North, Pittsburgh Digs In

1941: Saddened Mother Learns the Dual Meaning of “Aloha”

4. Pittsburgh’s Progress

1758: The City Gets a Name

1786: First Newspaper West of the Alleghenies

1800: Jeffersonians Speak Loudly

1804: Pittsburgh Almanack Mixes Practical, Poetic

1811: Twenty-one Hundred Miles by Steamboat to New Orleans

1845: “Fearful Calamity”—a Great Fire—Burns Itself Out

1854: Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in—Gulp—a Day

1856: Republicans Get Their Act Together Downtown

1908: “Ceremonies, Pleasant Rioting” Mark City’s 150th Birthday

5. Pittsburgh Makes…

1862: No Exaggerating Horrors of Arsenal Explosion

1877: Rumors, Ruins Remain After Rail Strike

1881: Gompers Helps Workers of the U.S. Unite

1891: Dark, Deadly Days Underground

1894: Mr. Coxey Goes to Washington

6. City with a Conscience

1859: Split Decision on Slavery

1864: Civil War Relief Effort More Than “Fair”

1869: Pittsburgh “Marriage” Heals Presbyterian Split

1889: Canute on the Little Conemaugh

1914: When Billy Sunday Preached, 1.6 Million Listened

1920: Election Marks Firsts for Women, Radio

1927: Symphony Out of Tune with Blue Laws

7. Now, That’s Entertainment

1823: Frontier Pittsburgh Pursues Culture

1851: Jenny Lind Leaves Pittsburgh Wanting More

1860: A Runaway Balloon Means “Pittsburgh, We Have a Problem”

1867: No Joy in Pittsburgh When Rower Claims a Foul

1890: Nellie Bly Comes Home

1903: Something Dangerous to Do in the Dark

1912: Miss Russell, a New Bride, Advises

1927: Stunt Driver Inclined to Test Himself

Bibliography and Further Reading

About the Author

FOREWORD

STORIES THAT “TRAVEL”

We print the present, or what just happened. Many social and literary critics believe that the daily newspaper is history, but history is what we seldom offer. More often we write about what happened yesterday—or, on the Web, a few minutes ago—and on rare occasions we look back at an event or a trend to write about how it developed. But in almost no case can modern American newspapers be regarded as deep explorers of history.

The presence of the word almost in the last sentence was no accident, because one of the most endearing aspects of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is its respect for, and exploration of, history even as the newspaper and its Website strive to produce a lively, contemporary news report, focusing on what happened yesterday, an hour ago or a few minutes ago. Here at the Post-Gazette, we look backward and forward at the same time. It’s more than our niche; it’s part of our character.

And it’s a result of the characters we have on this remarkable staff. One of them is Len Barcousky, who by day is one of the sharpest, shrewdest reporters on any newspaper—anywhere. He believes deeply in news—on finding out what just happened. But he believes, too, in going deeper—in understanding why things happened. He searches for what is coming next, to be sure. But he also searches for what came before.

Len Barcousky is an unusual newspaper reporter, which is in part why the Post-Gazette is an unusual newspaper. We believe we have a role in the future, but we also believe the past has a role in our lives. Not a week goes by in the Post-Gazette without an important story about something that didn’t happen yesterday. I insist on it. More important, our readers insist on it.

Let me say something about what we normally produce in the course of every day: stories with a short shelf life. Because if there is one truth about newspapering it is this: newspaper stories don’t travel. Sure, you can cut them out and send them across the country in an envelope. (Memo to college students: Your parents can explain how that works.) Or you can zap them across town on your computer or portable device. But when I say newspaper stories don’t travel, I mean that they don’t travel in time. The only thing staler than yesterday’s politician is news about yesterday’s politician. Pick up an old newspaper at an estate sale or an antique store and you will be captivated—by the ads, not the stories. Our stories are like fresh bread from one of Pittsburgh’s signature bakeries: No preservatives. Stale after a short while.

That’s another reason why Len Barcousky stands out. He writes stories that stick around. You don’t have to read them on Sunday morning in their reliable spot on the second page of the paper. You can read them the next day, the next week or the next year. The past doesn’t change, which is why Len is probably the only member of our staff whose stories would fit comfortably between covers of a book. Yesterday’s kerfuffle over property tax rates or last week’s contretemps in city council are soon forgotten—in many cases for good reason. Not so the stories in this book. They hang around with us, in large measure because their effects hang with us for decades, even centuries.

So open this book and hang with it for a while. You might put it down for a bit, but you’ll pick it up again. Guaranteed. These are not the stories of your life. They are the stories that created the stories of your life. In this case, the past is a great present—to us all, from one of Pittsburgh’s great storytellers. But then again, he had great material.

David M. Shribman is executive editor of the Post-Gazette.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for his coverage of Washington.

PREFACE

FINDING THE FIRST DRAFTS OF PITTSBURGH HISTORY

For the past several years, I have been squinting at often-fuzzy microfilm in search of firsthand reports on life in Pittsburgh over the past two centuries.

These old news stories, rich in human interest tales and almost always written by anonymous reporters, have provided material for the “Eyewitness” series that appears every other week in the A section of the Sunday Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. This feature began in 2007 as part of the paper’s commemoration of the city’s 250th birthday and has continued as a regular feature.

Journalism often is called the first rough draft of history. What struck me as I’ve browsed through the microfilm is how well so many of those rough drafts have held up.

From their earliest days, the Pittsburgh Gazette and its many local competitors have offered a buffet to readers. Each edition would mix political dispatches with poetry and business briefs with book news.

Many of the old advertisements dealt with still-familiar problems. In June 1825, hair-restoration potions and stomach elixirs—think Rogaine and Nexium—competed for space with a report listing the more than two thousand prizes to be offered in the next drawing of the Maryland State Lottery. “Every prize, payable in cash” was “subject to a deduction of 15 percent,” the newspaper reminded readers. For me the constant danger in trawling through microfilm is getting caught up in reading lottery stories or nineteenth-century dialect jokes that have nothing to do with the subjects I’m researching.

I’ve found next-day stories that describe the ghastly, the whimsical and the enchanting.

The former included reports on disasters like the Johnstown flood of 1889 and the 1862 Allegheny Arsenal explosion, which happened in what was then the Pittsburgh suburb of Lawrenceville. Much of the coverage of the arsenal carnage would not seem out of place in a twenty-first-century blog. An indefatigable on-the-scene reporter described the devastation in graphic detail. He then sought to talk to as many eyewitnesses as he could find, trying to ferret out the cause of the explosions that killed almost eighty people.

Pittsburgh newspapers did not ignore the lighter sides of life at the Forks of the Ohio.

Once the Civil War ended, residents could get back to two of their real passions: sports and wagering.

In May 1867, gamblers from across the country converged on the city to watch a championship single-scull race on the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers. When out-of-towner Walter Brown was declared the winner of the five-mile contest, his Pittsburgh competitor, James Hamill, claimed he had been fouled. Brown left hurriedly by train for the east, fearing “personal violence,” the Gazette reported.

Jenny Lind, the singer known as the Swedish nightingale, visited Pittsburgh in 1851 for what promoter P.T. Barnum hoped would be at least two performances. Her fans filled the theater, and thousands clogged neighboring streets. According to the next-day story on the concert, the size and energy of the crowd so unnerved the singer that she was unable to collect herself enough to give a second recital.

Reading through dozens of these old stories was a reminder to me that because my colleagues and I work for a newspaper, we contribute each day to the written record of our community.

The Pittsburgh Gazette, the direct ancestor of the modern-day Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was founded in 1786 and is the oldest newspaper west of the Alleghenies. I came to the paper in 1986, its 200th anniversary, and have spent twenty-four years here as an editor and reporter. That’s a mere 10 percent of its history.

Here’s a personally unnerving statistic I’ve pondered as I adapt to the idea of having a president younger than me: I’m fifty-nine as I write this. My life now encompasses a full 25 percent of the 234-year history of the independent United States. No wonder my hip joint aches sometimes.

I like to think that I am honoring some of the hard work of my long-gone colleagues as I select from among both their front-page and inside-the-paper stories. While the microfilm room at the Carnegie Library in Oakland is a busy place—genealogy being another Pittsburgh passion—I suspect that many of the pages I’ve been skimming haven’t been read for a century or more.

That’s the nature of newspaper work.

Still, it’s too bad. I’ve found that just about every old edition has a story—or sometimes just a paragraph—that still can amuse, uplift, inform or open a window into everyday life: “We saw the other day some remarkably fine cucumbers, seven and eight inches long,” the Pittsburgh Gazette reported on April 28, 1851. “This novelty in the market at this early season, led us to inquire who was the successful cultivator.” The gardener’s name was Mr. Plines. “If all his vegetables are as fine and as early as his cucumbers, he is a cultivator worth having.”

Enjoy just a sampling of the bounty of the Post-Gazette’s garden.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A book—like victory—has many fathers and mothers. This one became possible with the support of many parents. I am grateful to the top editors at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, especially publisher and editor in chief John Robinson Block and executive editor David M. Shribman. They both are committed to running stories that examine and seek to explain our past. I also am grateful to my immediate supervisors. They have included several north bureau chiefs and suburban editors who gave me time and encouragement to work on these pieces. Thanks also to the editors who have overseen the Post-Gazette’s Page 2 features—David Michelmore, John Allison and Gary Rotstein—where most of these stories originally appeared. I appreciate the good work of the newspaper’s copy editors. They have challenged me and improved these accounts. Allison Alexander, the newspaper’s marketing services manager, helped to work out the terms of the contract that turned columns into a book.

No good work on Pittsburgh history could be done without aid from excellent local libraries and their skilled librarians. Their ranks include Angelika Kane and Steve Karlinchak at the Post-Gazette and head librarian Art Louderback and chief archivist David Grinnell at the Senator John Heinz History Center. Reference staff members in the Pennsylvania Room at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh also have been helpful on my many trips to that institution.

Post-Gazette photography is an important part of this book. I have gotten excellent cooperation from Andy Starnes, John Heller, Robin Rombach and Jim Mendenhall.

I am grateful to my wife, Barbara, and my children, Peter and Sarah, who have listened patiently—mostly—when I returned from the Carnegie Library, eager to talk about my latest discoveries among the rolls of microfilm.

My greatest debt, however, is to the mostly anonymous reporters who have covered Pittsburgh for more than two centuries. Their first impressions of events great and small provide glimpses into the lives of those of us who have been lucky enough to live near the Forks of the Ohio.

INTRODUCTION

THE REAL GATEWAY TO THE WEST

A visit in November 1753 to Pittsburgh’s Point gave George Washington another “first” to add to his list of accomplishments. Upon his death in 1799, the Revolutionary War general and first president of the United States was eulogized as being “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” Add “first” to write about the military importance of the spot where the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers join to form the Ohio.

“I spent some time in viewing the Rivers, and the Land in the Fork, which I think extremely well situated for a Fort, as it has the absolute Command for both Rivers,” Washington wrote in his journal.

The history of Pittsburgh involves interconnected stories about making things—glass, iron, petroleum products, steel, aluminum, packaged food—in new and more efficient ways. It also is a story of struggles. The first fights were for physical possession of an area rich in natural resources and the waterways to transport them. The later struggles, which continue today, involve the often-conflicting interests of workers and employers over how to share the region’s wealth.

Indian chief Guyasuta and young George Washington meet again atop Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington neighborhood. Guyasuta, once a scout for the British, later was one of the leaders of Pontiac’s rebellion against them. Courtesy Robin Rombach of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Washington was just twenty-one when he first saw the Forks of the Ohio, and he would make several more journeys to the Pittsburgh area over the next few years. This was the time when the French, British and Native American empires battled to control the interior of North America.

“It was a spur of land that everybody wanted. Control it and you could control the flow of goods—and of settlers—in the Ohio valley. It was the original gateway to the west,” said Dr. Holly Mayer, associate professor and chair of the History Department at Duquesne University.

While the English were the first to set up a military outpost at the Point in 1754, a larger French force, coming down from Canada, soon sent them packing. The building of Fort Duquesne was followed by a four-year effort by the British and the colonial governments in Virginia and Pennsylvania to dislodge the French and gain control of the Point. While politicians in Williamsburg, Virginia’s capital, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s capital, continued to feud over which colony should control the Ohio country, both agreed that the region definitely was not French.

Washington came back in 1754 and 1755 as part of military expeditions that failed to evict the French. British and colonial forces had better luck in 1758. General John Forbes, with Washington serving as an aide, led the army that occupied the smoking ruins of Fort Duquesne. Facing a much larger enemy force, the French had burned their fort and fled down the Ohio.

The British built Fort Pitt, one of their most elaborate fortifications in North America. It proved its worth during Pontiac’s rebellion in 1763, when it held out against a Native American siege. During the Revolutionary War, Fort Pitt served as headquarters for American forces, who sought, with limited success, to protect frontier settlers from attacks by natives allied with the British. The Fort Pitt Blockhouse, built in 1764, is all that is left standing of Fort Pitt. The brick and stone redoubt is the oldest building in the region.

After the Revolution, the area around Fort Pitt had another brief period of martial importance. In the summer and fall of 1792, Major General Anthony Wayne began to train the Legion of the United States—the first United States Army—at Fort Fayette, built along the Allegheny River side of the Point.

As the Point lost military importance, the adjoining community of Pittsburgh gained in importance as a trading center and home to small “manufactories.” The Pittsburgh Gazette, the direct ancestor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, began publication in 1786. Seeking to serve its audience of farmers and entrepreneurs, its pages included real estate offerings, business news, political stories and classified advertising.

Few events were more important to the development of Pittsburgh than the decision by President Thomas Jefferson to acquire the Louisiana territory, including New Orleans, from France in 1803. While the rugged Allegheny Mountains had limited Pittsburgh’s commercial ties to the East Coast, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers provided an inexpensive way to transport Pittsburgh goods and agricultural products as far as the Gulf of Mexico.

The early sophistication of local manufacturing is indicated by the decision of Nicholas Roosevelt, a partner of steamboat pioneer Robert Fulton, to build the nineteenth-century equivalent of a Boeing 747 here.

Workers and rioters focused their anger on Union Depot on Liberty Avenue during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

“With pleasure we announced that the Steam Boat lately built at this place by Mr. Roosevelt…fully answers the most sanguine expectations that were formed of her sailing,” the Gazette told its readers on October 18, 1811. The vessel was built at a shipyard on the banks of the Monongahela River, below the bluff now occupied by Duquesne University.

Abundant natural resources, especially coal and lumber, helped Pittsburgh develop its early industries, including glass making, iron production and shipbuilding. The growth of manufacturing attracted new residents, who wanted to make their fortunes and were willing to overlook some of the early environmental problems: smoke-filled skies and polluted water. “The chief distinction of Pittsburgh is not smoke, and it never was,” Franklin Toker, professor of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, wrote in his 1986 history of the community, Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait. “Instead, the chief distinction of Pittsburgh is work.”

Add to that an ability to overcome adversity, like periodic flooding, which continued into the 1930s, and other disasters. Like nineteenth-century Chicago, Pittsburgh suffered from a devastating fire that, amazingly, appeared to have set the community back only a matter of months. As much as a third of the city was destroyed on a single day, April 10, 1845. Four days after the fire, the newspaper—then known as the Daily Gazette and Advertiser—reported that rebuilding had begun. Within a month, several stores and warehouses had reopened and hundreds of others were under construction in the “Burnt District.”

The construction of the Allegheny Portage Railroad, which carried canalboats between the eastern and western portions of the Pennsylvania Canal, and, more importantly, the completion in 1854 of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s line through the Alleghenies linked Pittsburgh to eastern markets. During the Civil War, the Pittsburgh area supplied both troops and critical supplies for the Union army, including artillery and ammunition.

The Allegheny Arsenal, located in what was then the separate community of Lawrenceville, had been producing munitions since 1814. In September 1862, it was the site of a horrible explosion that killed seventy-nine workers, mostly young women.

In the years after the war, heavy industry—led by steelmaking—went through cycles of boom and bust. The rise of big business, like Andrew Carnegie’s giant steel company, eventually was accompanied by the rise of large labor organizations. “Production and struggle were two major themes in Pittsburgh history,” said Charles McCollester, retired professor of industrial and labor relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

During much of the seventy-year period between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, industrial violence was common. While the best-known fight is probably the pitched battle in 1892 between Carnegie workers and Pinkerton detectives at the steel company’s Homestead Works, a much bloodier confrontation took place in the city’s Strip District in July 1877. Engineers, conductors and brakemen employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad had walked off their jobs to protest new work rules and pay cuts. After the strikers stopped replacement workers from operating trains, the governor called out Philadelphia militia units to secure train yards. Faced by a stone-throwing crowd numbering in the thousands, the out-of-town soldiers opened fire. About twenty civilians and five soldiers were killed before the troops withdrew. For several days, mobs controlled city neighborhoods and destroyed millions of dollars in property, most of it belonging to the railroad.

Pittsburgh also played a role in peaceful union organizing. In November 1881, Samuel Gompers was among delegates from twelve states who gathered here to form the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, the direct predecessor of the American Federation of Labor. At its historic meeting in Pittsburgh, the union alliance passed resolutions that eventually became cornerstones of modern labor policy. The federation sought a standard eight-hour day and bans on the use of convict and child labor. Delegates also pushed for laws requiring employers to care for workers hurt on the job—the idea behind workers’ compensation.

The twentieth century saw Pittsburgh reach its peak as an industrial center and magnet for immigrants. Tens of thousands of European workers came to the region in the period before World War I. They were followed by large numbers of African Americans, fleeing poverty in the South and seeking new opportunities in southwestern Pennsylvania’s factories and mines. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal aided the cause of union organizing, while World War II and the prosperity that followed stoked the demand for the range of products made in Pittsburgh.

During the last decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, however, many large manufacturing companies and big labor unions declined. Finance, education and healthcare all began to play more prominent roles in the region’s economy. Brownfield sites once occupied by industrial giants—including the site of Carnegie’s Homestead Works—became home to shopping and entertainment complexes, office buildings and laboratories.

One visual indicator of the changing face of the region can be seen downtown on the city’s tallest skyscraper, the sixty-four-story U.S. Steel Tower. The building had long stood as a symbol of the city’s industrial economy and heritage. In 2008, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center—which had long passed manufacturing to become the region’s largest employer—attached its UPMC logo on all three sides of the triangular landmark.

CHAPTER 1

THE GREAT AND THE GOOD

1753: WASHINGTON GETS TO THE POINT

Heavy rains and a “vast Quantity of Snow” made travel difficult for George Washington in the late fall of 1753.

Major Washington, age twenty-one, was leading a small expedition through what would become western Pennsylvania on orders from Robert Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie, the lieutenant governor of Washington’s home state of Virginia, had given the young man a delicate and dangerous diplomatic task on October 31. Washington was to take messages to the commander of newly built French outposts in the Ohio country, telling him to withdraw from lands claimed by Great Britain. He was also to foster alliances with local Indian tribes and to bring back intelligence on French economic and military intentions.

Dull words describe an eleven-week journey that took him and Christopher Gist through a thousand miles of mostly wilderness. As he traveled by horse, canoe and on foot, Washington kept a journal. When that journal was published in 1754, just weeks after his return to Williamsburg, then Virginia’s capital, it gave Washington his first taste of fame. Shot at and almost drowned, he came close to death twice during his trip. Trained as a surveyor, he paid close attention to topography, keeping his eye out for both fertile farmlands and places of military importance.

A statue of young George Washington stands on guard in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Washington made his first visit to what became Pittsburgh in 1753. Courtesy Carol Morton of the Pittsburgh Press.

While Washington was not the first European to visit what became Pittsburgh’s Point—where the Monongahela and the Allegheny join to form the Ohio River—he was the first to describe it. He arrived on November 22, 1753. “I spent some Time in viewing the Rivers, and the Land in the Fork, which I think extremely well situated for a Fort, as it has the absolute Command of both Rivers,” he wrote. “The Land at the Point is 20 or 25 Feet above the common Surface of the Water, and a considerable bottom of flat, well-timbered Land all around it, very convenient for Building. The Rivers are each a Quarter of a Mile, or more, across, and run here very near at right Angles: Alligany bearing N.E. and Monogahela [sic] S.E…. the former of these two is very rapid and swift running Water, the other deep and still without any perceptible Fall.”

Washington’s diplomatic party of seven white men and a varying number of Indian companions included Gist, an experienced woodsman, and a Dutchman named Jacob VanBraam, who spoke some French, to serve as interpreter. The best-known Native American to accompany Washington was Tanacharison. Known as the Half-King, he represented the powerful Iroquois Confederacy in the area around what became Pittsburgh.

The French commander at Fort LeBoeuf, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, was not impressed. In a reply Washington carried back to Dinwiddie, Saint-Pierre wrote to Dinwiddie that while he received Washington “with a distinction suitable to your Dignity, and his Quality and great Merit,” the French had no plans to leave.

Deep snow made Washington’s trip back even more difficult and slower. Washington and Gist set out alone and on foot on December 26, leaving their horses and the rest of their party behind. The next few days presented danger from humans and nature. On December 27, Washington and Gist had reached what is now Butler County. Washington wrote that he and Gist “fell in with a Party of French Indians, who had lain in Wait for us; one of them fired at Mr. Gist or me not 15 Steps [away], but fortunately missed.” Worried about another attack, Washington and Gist “walked all the remaining Part of the Night without making any Stop.”

George Washington made many visits to southwestern Pennsylvania, and he is remembered with several monuments. This equestrian statue is in West Park, on Pittsburgh’s North Side. Courtesy Robin Rombach of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The next morning they reached the ice-filled Allegheny River and, still without sleep, spent most of the day building a crude raft “with one poor Hatchet.” They were using long poles to push themselves across when Washington was thrown into the freezing water. He grabbed onto the raft as Gist maneuvered it to an island in the middle of the river. By the next morning it had frozen over, and they walked across to the south shore. Washington hurried back to Williamsburg to report to Dinwiddie after a quick diplomatic meeting, near present-day McKeesport, with the Indian queen Aliquippa.

His journal was published in both Virginia and Great Britain, pretty much as he wrote it. “I think I can do no less than apologize, in some measure, for the numberless Imperfections of it,” he wrote.

1825: PITTSBURGH HONORS LAFAYETTE, “THE NATION’S GUEST”

Readers of southwestern Pennsylvania newspapers received regular reports on the progress of the Marquis de Lafayette as he traveled up the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys toward Pittsburgh in the spring of 1825. The hero of both the American and French Revolutions, accompanied by his son, George Washington Lafayette, undertook a thirteen-month visit to the United States between August 1824 and September 1825. His journey covered more than three thousand miles and included stops in all twenty-four states that were then part of the union. He was no longer a young man, celebrating both his sixty-seventh and sixty-eighth birthdays during his national tour.

“The Nation’s Guest arrived at Wheeling on Tuesday last (May 24, 1825) and at Washington (Pa.) on Wednesday,” according to the May 27, 1825 edition of what was called the Pittsburgh Gazette and Manufacturing & Mercantile Advertiser. “At each of these places he was received with the usual demonstrations of respect and gratitude.” The “demonstrations” included parades, dinners, public receptions and balls.

Traveling by stagecoach, horseback, canal barge and steamboat, Lafayette’s party faced delays and dangers. In the same edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette that reported on Lafayette’s approach to the city was reprinted a story from the Washington Reporter. It described a May 8 accident involving the general and his traveling companions. “The steam boat Mechanic…bound to Louisville, accidentally ran upon a large snag, which pierced her forecastle, wounding a man materially [and] shocking the vessel and the passengers in an alarming manner.

“The boat began to sink and all grew into confusion, but the cool and collected conduct of Capt. Hall, and his crew, enabled them to save all the persons on board from drowning. The ‘Nation’s Guest,’ the esteemed Lafayette, was put on board [a] yawl, and taken to shore.” The boat sank, taking all of Lafayette’s baggage with it, including a carriage presented to him years earlier by George Washington. “The above [story] we collected from a gentleman who was on board the steam boat Mechanic at the time she met with the perilous accident,” the newspaper said.

By May 29, Lafayette was just outside Pittsburgh at Braddock’s Field. His party spent the night “at the hospitable mansion of George Wallace, Esq,” according to the June 3 edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette. The next morning, he traveled the last few miles into Pittsburgh in a carriage pulled by four white horses.

The progress of the General through the city to his lodgings was marked with abundant manifestations of the hearty welcome with which he was received. The streets, through which he passed, were filled to overflowing, as also were the doors, windows and every place where a view could be obtained. Every countenance beamed with pleasure and every eye sparkled with delight. It was the grateful homage of a free people, flowing from the heart, towards the early, distinguished and unwearied champion of freedom.

Other events during Lafayette’s two-day visit to Pittsburgh included dinners and a ball. “But a scene not less interesting than any which had preceded it took place on Tuesday morning,” the newspaper reported. “The children of the city, headed by their respective teachers, were arranged along Wood Street in front of the general’s lodgings. The general saluted them in passing along the lane…and he appeared greatly pleased at this testimony of affection.”

Lafayette also had a chance to meet with old military comrades.

Perhaps the most interesting incident attending the General’s visit to our city, was the introduction to him, at Darlington’s Hotel, of the Revolutionary veterans, who, with Captain Peterson, had occupied the three carriages next to his during the procession… Old Alexander Gray and Galbreath Wilson seem to grow young again.

The latter asked the General if he remembered the young man who assisted him over the fence, immediately after he had received the wound in his leg at the battle of Brandywine, which caused his lameness. The General instantly recognized in Wilson the gallant young soldier who had performed that service. The old soldiers dined with the General at Darlington’s on Monday and at Ramsay’s on Tuesday.

1861: LINCOLN LOOKS SOUTH

Abraham Lincoln’s new beard had filled in pretty well by the time he arrived in Pittsburgh on February 14, 1861. The president-elect’s train was almost three hours late pulling into the Federal Street depot on what is now Pittsburgh’s North Side. That neighborhood was then in the separate municipality of Allegheny City. The long delay was caused by a freight train derailment that blocked the rail line between Rochester and Baden in Beaver County.

“So anxious were the assembled thousands to get a glimpse of the most prominent man now in the American Union that they esteemed the delay of an hour or two as a matter not intolerable under the circumstances,” the Pittsburgh Gazette reported in its February 15 edition.

While a heavy shower discouraged some spectators, thousands remained to cheer and call for a speech when his train arrived around 8:00 p.m. Accompanied by his wife, Mary, and sons, Robert, Willie and Tad, Lincoln was following a circuitous nineteen-hundred-mile journey from his home in Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C. He had turned fifty-two on February 12, two days before his arrival in Pittsburgh.

Abraham Lincoln stayed overnight in and spoke from the balcony of the Monongahela House when he visited Pittsburgh in 1861. The hotel stood on Smithfield Street, between what is now First Avenue and Boulevard of the Allies. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

It was altogether fitting and proper that Lincoln should have made Pittsburgh one of the stops on the way to his inauguration, according to Andrew Masich, president of the Senator John Heinz History Center. The city had played a critical role in the founding of the Republican Party, he noted. For two days in February 1856, delegates met in Lafayette Hall on Wood Street to hash out resolutions opposing the spread of slavery and admission of Kansas to the union as a free state.

During his fourteen hours here, Lincoln greeted dozens of local politicians, including members of the Pittsburgh and Allegheny Councils, and he was seen by thousands of noisy supporters. He would give three brief extemporaneous talks and make one longer speech. In that address he urged Americans north and south of the Mason-Dixon line “to keep cool” during the secession crisis that followed his election in November 1860.

“The rain was falling in torrents” as Lincoln left his train for carriages that would take him and his family from the depot to the Monongahela House, Pittsburgh’s fanciest hotel. “His appearance set the people wild with excitement, and cries of ‘speech,’ ‘speech,’ intermingled with continuous cheering, indicated that they were not to be put off without a word or two,” the Gazette reported. “When Mr. Lincoln reached the carriage, he stepped in and stood up, acknowledging the honor paid to him in a few remarks.” He promised to address them the next morning at greater length. “When he concluded, cheer after cheer was given for ‘Old Abe.’”

The Monongahela House faced Smithfield Street between what is now First Avenue and Boulevard of the Allies. “So dense was the gathering [in front of the hotel], that the military had to clear a passage with their bayonets, when the President-elect stepped from the carriage and entered the hotel.” Once inside, Lincoln climbed on a chair and spoke briefly to the people assembled in the lobby, while “the crowd outside still clamored for a speech with extraordinary vehemence,” the Gazette said. Lincoln then stepped out on the hotel balcony to speak and be seen for the third time that evening. “Tomorrow morning I will address you in broad daylight…from this balcony when you will have an opportunity of seeing my handsome physiognomy,” he joked. Then he wished the crowd a good night.

“A thundering ‘good night’ was echoed from the immense jam that blocked up the street below, and they then commenced retiring gradually, apparently satisfied that they had both heard and seen the great object of their curiosity.”

The schedule for Friday morning, February 15, called for Lincoln to make a grand procession through both Pittsburgh and Allegheny, but the length of his speech required that plan be cut short. Lincoln devoted equal time in his morning address to the looming threat of southern states to leave the union and to his support for strong tariffs that would tax imports and protect American industries. That second topic would have been of great interest to Pittsburgh business owners and workers. Despite the decision of South Carolina to withdraw from the United States—an action soon copied by several other states in the South—Lincoln told the crowd he remained hopeful bloodshed could be avoided. “Notwithstanding the troubles across the river,” Lincoln said, gesturing south toward the Monongahela River, “there is really no crisis except an artificial one.” The February 16 Gazette reported that this remark was greeted by laughter and applause. “What is there now to warrant the condition of affairs presented by our friends ‘over the river?’” he asked. “I repeat it then, there is no crisis, excepting such a one as may be gotten up at any time by designing politicians. My advice then under such circumstances, is to keep cool.”

His thirty-minute speech was interrupted more than a dozen times by “applause,” “immense cheering,” “tumultuous applause” and “laughter,” the Gazette reported. When Lincoln said, “But I am trespassing upon your patience, and must bring my remarks to a close,” the crowd shouted “no,” “no” and “Go on—We’ll listen.” After he finished his speech, soldiers once again had to clear a path for the president-elect to leave the hotel and get into a carriage that took him back to the Federal Street depot. There another crowd estimated in the thousands waited to see him off. The local militia units guarding Lincoln “made no effort here to press back the crowd, as it seemed next to impossible to obtain a passageway.”

“Gen. [James S.] Negley, however, upon appealing to the people, succeeded in getting Mr. Lincoln from the carriage, and the party reached the platform one by one in Indian style.” A few minutes later, Lincoln’s train departed for Cleveland, his next stop on his journey to Washington, D.C., via Buffalo, Albany, New York City, Philadelphia, Harrisburg and Baltimore.

During his passage through upstate New York, he made a brief stop in Westfield, New York, outside Buffalo. There he met Grace Bedell, the young girl who had written to him before the election, urging him to grow a beard. Lincoln shook her hand and kissed her on the cheek, Grace recalled in a letter she wrote after Lincoln’s assassination.

A bronze plaque marks the 1861 visit by Abraham Lincoln to Pittsburgh and Allegheny City, which is now North Side. The plaque is at Federal Street and South Commons. Courtesy Robin Rombach of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Lincoln’s optimism in his Pittsburgh speech about a peaceful solution to the dispute between North and South was misplaced. On February 18—while Lincoln was still on his way to Washington—Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4. A month later, on April 12, Confederate forces fired on U.S. Fort Sumter, near Charleston, South Carolina. The Civil War was on.

1919: H.J. HEINZ: A GIANT PASSES

H.J. Heinz never forgot his Sharpsburg roots and friends.

Although he was born in 1844 in Pittsburgh, his family moved to Sharpsburg when he was five, and he grew up along the Allegheny River. As a young man, he had served as Sunday school superintendent at what was then called Grace Methodist Protestant Church in the borough. He later became involved with national and international Sunday school programs, traveling as far as Japan in support of the effort.

“It had been his habit for a number of years to visit one or more Sunday schools each Sunday, wherever he might happen to be,” the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times reported on May 15, 1919. On May 4, “the last Sunday he was able to get out of the house, he made a visit to his old school at Grace Church…and was very cordially greeted by the older members as well as by the children.”

The anecdote about Heinz’s final visit to Sharpsburg was included in the newspaper’s front-page story the day after his death on May 14. He was seventy-four, and the Gazette-Times reported the cause of death as pneumonia. Heinz passed away at Greenlawn, his mansion in Homewood, after a four-day illness. In the days before antibiotics, pneumonia vied with tuberculosis as a leading killer. He became ill on Sunday, May 11. “On Monday and Tuesday his condition seemed a little improved and Tuesday evening was the source of much encouragement,” his obituary stated. “The following morning about 10 o’clock he suffered a setback and became unconscious.” He died shortly before 4:00 p.m.

One of Heinz’s sons, Howard Heinz, was absent from the bedside, the newspaper stated. He was in Constantinople—now Istanbul, Turkey—serving on a U.S. government commission overseeing distribution of food in the war-ravaged country.

A born entrepreneur, H.J. Heinz had been his father’s bookkeeper by age sixteen. The following year he sold produce that was raised on the family’s four-acre Sharpsburg garden plot and had begun to bottle horseradish. He delivered his products via horse and buggy, making $2,400 that season, according to the newspaper. That is the equivalent of about $53,000 in modern currency. By 1919, his product line had extended well beyond horseradish. The newspaper said he headed “the Largest Pickling and Preserving Corporation in the World.” The main plant of the family-owned business was on Pittsburgh’s North Side, and it had sixteen branch factories.

In an editorial two days after his death, the newspaper praised Heinz’s successful efforts to nurture an unrelated business in a Pittsburgh economy that was centered on steel. “There was no talk of diversification of industries when he laid the very modest foundation of his manufacturing and commercial house, yet what he has done stands as a demonstration that diversification is altogether practicable,” the newspaper opined. The editorial also praised his community work.

The same sagacity and enterprise which he brought to the upbuilding of his business, Mr. Heinz contributed unselfishly in the promotion of civic welfare work and the development of altruistic and religious endeavors. In Sunday school work he was so active not only at home but throughout the world that it is not exaggeration to say that no other man could be so much missed from this important educational field. He was so useful in so many ways…that a whole company will have to be called to fill the void left by his going away.

Heinz is buried in Homewood Cemetery.

Two other Pittsburgh giants might have felt a chill when they read about the passing of their fellow industrial baron, especially if either put any credence in the superstition that prominent deaths come in threes. Andrew Carnegie, Pittsburgh’s King of Steel, died at eighty-three on August 11, 1919, at his home in Lenox, Massachusetts. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York. His longtime partner turned enemy, Henry Clay Frick, the King of Coke, died December 2, 1919, at his home in New York City. He was sixty-nine. Like Heinz, he was buried in Homewood Cemetery.

H.J. Heinz was one of three Pittsburgh giants to die in 1919. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

1927: SILENT CAL SPEAKS—BRIEFLY

An often-repeated story about President Calvin Coolidge has him at a banquet, seated next to a Washington socialite. She tells the famously laconic Vermont native that she has made a bet that she could persuade him to speak at least three words to her. “You lose,” Coolidge is said to have replied before continuing with his dinner.

Students attending Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, would have had strong reason to believe that story. President Coolidge made a one-day visit to Pittsburgh to commemorate the Carnegie Institute’s thirty-first Founders Day on October 13, 1927. The Carnegie Institute was the original name for Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museums. His traveling companions included his wife, Grace, and Pittsburgh native Andrew W. Mellon, the longtime secretary of the Treasury. Mellon had been named to that post by Warren G. Harding, Coolidge’s predecessor, and would continue to serve under Coolidge’s successor, Herbert Hoover.

“President Coolidge saw Pittsburgh in several ways in the tour of the city,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported the day after his visit. “He saw the material evidence of industrial supremacy in the mills, factories and business houses and the product of prosperity in the beautiful homes in the residential districts. All along the route he was greeted by school children, many of them waving small American flags.” The president’s stops included a visit to the Fort Pitt Blockhouse at Pittsburgh’s Point. The neighborhood around the oldest building in the city was very different more than eighty years ago. What is now green and open Point State Park was the center of a crowded, noisy and dirty industrial quarter in 1927.

Arriving in Pittsburgh by train around 7:30 a.m., Coolidge and his wife, Grace, had breakfast and a brief rest at the Fifth Avenue mansion of Andrew Mellon’s brother, R.B. Mellon. “Police, under the direction of Superintendent of Police Peter P. Walsh and Assistant Superintendent Lou Coleman, patrolled the Mellon estate,” the newspaper reported. Coolidge met with visiting diplomats in a sunken garden on the property, “where they were photographed by news photographers and motion picture men.”

“Reporters were not permitted within many feet of the President, for he had issued orders that he did not wish to be interviewed on any subject,” according to the Post-Gazette. “The newspapermen were instructed by secret service heads not to speak to the President.”

While he was mum with reporters, Coolidge did agree to honor a request made by Samuel Harden Church, president of the Carnegie Institute. Carnegie Tech students had gathered in Carnegie Music Hall, a few blocks down Forbes Avenue from their campus. There they greeted Coolidge with “applause and a ‘Skibo’ yell.” “The ‘Hoot Mon’ yell was given for Mrs. Coolidge,” according to the Post-Gazette. “Colonel Church explained to the students that he had promised the President that he would be asked to speak only once in Pittsburgh, but that under the circumstances the President might say a few words.” His response was classic Coolidge.

“I shall not break Colonel Church’s promise to you,” he said. “He retired amid applause,” according to the newspaper, after speaking just nine words.

Coolidge was the main speaker at the Carnegie Institute Founders Day luncheon, where he predicted, just two years before the start of the Great Depression, a continuing era of industrial peace and economic advances. “It has brought a great harvest of contentment and a great increase in effort and efficiency in production,” he said.

About 10:30 p.m. that evening, Coolidge departed as he had arrived—silently. “A tired figure stood on the observation platform of a special train in the East Liberty railroad yards, in a drizzle of rain, and waved a faint goodby to scores of police and detectives….As the train pulled out, the President glanced up at a few workmen…and to their shout of ‘goodby’ he waved again. He stood there until the darkness hid him.”

1936: ROOSEVELT VERSUS LANDON, KNOX AND COUGHLIN

As Allegheny County Republicans saw it, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had challenged them.

Colonel Frank Knox, their vice presidential candidate, already had scheduled a speech at Duquesne Garden in Oakland for October 1, 1936. Then FDR’s reelection campaign announced the president would address Democrats that same night at Forbes Field, about a half-mile away. Many GOP leaders seated “on the mourners bench…dolorously said there wouldn’t be a crowd [to hear Knox], and attempted to have the meeting called off until a later date,” Post-Gazette reporter C.W. Dressler wrote on October 3, 1936.

President Franklin Roosevelt waves to the crowd gathered at Forbes Field for a 1936 campaign stop in Pittsburgh. The next day’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette estimated he drew a crowd of fifty thousand. Courtesy the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Campaign chairman James H. Duff, who went on to become Pennsylvania’s governor and a U.S. senator, was undeterred. “We were perfectly willing to rely on the enthusiasm and loyalty of a revitalized Republican Party,” he told Dressler. “The Democrats gave us a challenge, and we were willing to accept it.”

Knox drew more than nine thousand people to the ice rink–sports arena, the newspaper reported the day after the event. “It turned out to be the biggest indoor rally the Republican Party ever held here.”

That record didn’t last long. Knox’s running mate, Kansas governor Alf Landon, made an appearance at the same location on October 27, one week before the election. “Pittsburgh gave Alfred M. Landon the greatest ovation of his presidential campaign last night as he entered Duquesne Garden to deliver an aggressive assault upon the New Deal’s ‘mismanagement,’” the Post-Gazette reported the next day. The newspaper estimated twenty thousand people “jammed and milled around the auditorium to stage one of the wildest demonstrations ever seen here. Members of the Landon party said the reception overshadowed in spontaneity and enthusiasm any they had seen, including those in Los Angeles and in Chicago.”

The Landon-Knox team was riding high that fall. Former New York governor Alfred Smith, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1928, had endorsed Landon for president. The Literary Digest’s national poll, which had correctly predicted the outcome of the five previous elections, showed Landon with a comfortable lead over FDR. When Father Charles E. Coughlin, known as the Detroit radio priest, came to Pittsburgh, he blasted Roosevelt’s New Deal programs.

“I do not say that President Roosevelt is a Communist,” he told a crowd of forty-five hundred at the Syria Mosque on October 8, 1936. “I do say that he has adopted Communistic activities.” Coughlin, however, turned out to be an equal-opportunity scold. “Do not think I would stultify myself by asking you to go back to Landon,” he said. “I’d no more ask you to vote Republican than I’d ask you to vote Communist.”

And as for the media: “How long must we put up with a reportorial staff of morons?” Coughlin asked his audience.

While Landon, Knox and Coughlin piled up impressive numbers during their Pittsburgh visits, FDR outdid them all by far. A crowd of five thousand met him at Pittsburgh’s Baltimore & Ohio freight station when he arrived by private railroad car on October 1. The anonymous reporter made an indirect reference to Roosevelt’s inability to walk, the result of a bout with polio fifteen years earlier. “The President seemed a trifle weary,” the Post-Gazette said the next day. “Secret service men assisted him into the tonneau [open rear seat] of the car and helped him into an overcoat.”

“Thousands of hat and hand-waving Pittsburghers, who cheered him along the path to Forbes Field, gave President Franklin Delano Roosevelt a tumultuous welcome last night,” the newspaper reported. “Men, women and children lined the presidential route four and five deep.”

Roosevelt spoke to an estimated fifty thousand people at Forbes Field. Sounding like almost every presidential candidate since, FDR promised to balance the federal budget “without additional taxes…within a year or two.”

A month later, Roosevelt beat Landon in a landslide, carrying forty-six of forty-eight states, including Pennsylvania. FDR went on to win reelection two more times. He died on April 12, 1945, less than three months after he was sworn into office for his fourth term.

CHAPTER 2

BAD GUYS—AND ONE GAL

1818: NO JAIL COULD HOLD THIS PITTSBURGH THIEF

Catching Pittsburgh bank robber Joseph Pluymart wasn’t that hard. Authorities did it several times.

Keeping him in jail was.

Joseph Pluymart and Herman Emmons were identified as prime suspects soon after the Farmers and Mechanics Bank of Pittsburgh was burglarized on April 6, 1818. The loot included about $100,000 in bank notes and $3,000 worth of gold and silver, according to an April 24 report in the Pittsburgh Gazette. The stolen items included coins and a gold medal presented in 1790 by Congress to General Daniel Morgan, hero of the Battle of Cowpens during the American Revolution. Morgan died in 1802, and the medal passed to his grandson, Morgan Neville, who was a bank cashier.

The thieves who entered the bank during the night somehow had obtained copies of the vault keys, according to the April 10 edition of the newspaper. “The persons suspected of having committed the robbery are two gamblers of the names of Pluymart and Emmons,” the paper reported. “They are supposed to be Yankees.”

Among the loot stolen in a bank burglary in 1818 was a gold medal presented by Congress to Revolutionary War general Daniel Morgan. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

“Pluymart goes by the title of Doctor, and is a professed gambler. Emmons is said to have formerly kept a store in New York.”

The two men had told acquaintances they were leaving Pittsburgh for Virginia, but the newspaper reported they had instead traveled up the Monongahela River to Elizabeth. There “they purchased a skiff, in which they secured a false bottom to be made.” At least one of the men was seen in Pittsburgh on the night the bank was broken into.

On April 17, the bank ran an ad offering a $1,000 reward for the capture of the robbers and return of its notes and precious medal. The amount of the reward was only $500 for the capture of the suspects alone. The Gazette reported April 24 that the bank had raised the reward amounts to $3,000 for the return of the stolen items and $1,000 for the capture of the robbers.

While word did not reach Pittsburgh until April 28, Pluymart and Emmons had been captured in Ohio two weeks earlier and been taken to the nearest jail in Cincinnati. Their return to Pittsburgh for trial, however, was delayed for almost two months by an extradition battle between Pennsylvania and Ohio. Before the issue was resolved, both men broke out of jail. “Pluymart escaped, but Emmons was brought back, badly wounded,” the Gazette reported on June 9.

After Emmons recovered from his injuries, he was returned to Pittsburgh. “He was at first quite obstinate, but when he understood that public opinion and evidence was so powerful against him, he…agreed to confess, on certain conditions,” according to the newspaper. Those conditions appear to have included an agreement whereby he would not do jail time if he showed bank officers where he and Pluymart had hidden the loot. The bankers, “taking into view the importance of a confession and discovery, agreed to those conditions.”

“Emmons was then placed into a boat at night, and accompanied by a number of our most respectable citizens, was taken 37 miles down the river, where he pointed out the place of concealment….Here the whole amount, except for about $2,700 was found. The notes were much injured by the damp.” General Morgan’s gold medal also remained missing.

After breaking jail in Ohio, Pluymart had remained on the loose for several weeks but was recaptured near the Canadian border in Ogdensburg, New York. “About $5,000 in gold and bills were found with him, which are in the hands of the magistrates,” the Gazette reported on June 19. Two days after his latest arrest, “Pluymart, with two other prisoners, broke the jail and effected their escape,” the newspaper said. “Immediately pursuit was made and an additional reward of 50 dollars was offered for [his] apprehension.”

“He was re-taken about 15 miles from [Ogdensburg], and today has been lodged in jail, where we hope to retain him,” according to a June 3 letter sent by three New York justices of the peace to the newspaper. The magistrates wrote of Pluymart, “He appears to be a consummate villain.”

Brought back to Pennsylvania, Pluymart was convicted of the bank break-in and sentenced to three years in prison. It’s unclear how long he served. Once again he escaped, according to Allegheny County’s Hundred Years, a community history by George H. Thurston published in 1888. While still a fugitive, Pluymart was pardoned by Governor John Andrew Schulze.

1858: WOMAN WHO KILLED FACES THE HANGMAN

The double-murder case that led Charlotte Jones to the gallows has as many twists and turns as a legal thriller by John Grisham.

Jones was the first woman executed in Allegheny County when she and her lover, Henry Fife, were hanged on February 12, 1858, in the courtyard of the county’s second courthouse. Ruined by fire in 1882, it stood on the site of the current courthouse. The pair had confessed to murdering Jones’s elderly uncle and aunt, George Wilson and sister Elizabeth McMasters, on April 30, 1857. The victims lived in a log cabin across the river from McKeesport. Wilson was stabbed, and his sister was beaten to death with a poker.

“The reason why I did this was the great love I have for Henry Fife, and in order to get money to go to housekeeping with him,” Jones dictated in what the Pittsburgh Gazette called her dying declaration. Jones was illiterate, and her statement was read by Mr. Williamson, described in the February 13 edition of the newspaper as “an English gentleman who has taken a great interest in Fife.”

Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing Room Companion, a magazine published in Boston, featured an engraving of Allegheny County’s second courthouse as it appeared in 1851. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

The competing Pittsburgh Post in that same day’s edition had words of praise for county sheriff Rody Patterson, who “in the performance yesterday of his most painful duty…followed strictly both the letter and the spirit of the law.”

The sheriff had issued attendance cards to twenty-four witnesses—twelve for each prisoner—to observe the execution. Allegheny County commissioners, however, had more ambitious plans. They had issued “a large number of tickets” admitting people to the courthouse, where “many of the windows… overlook the sides of the jailyard where the execution took place,” the Post said. “These tickets, however, were refused at the avenues of entrance and considerable disturbance arose of this accord.”

One of Patterson’s deputies quickly got an order from county judge Charles Shaler, confirming the sheriff’s decision to exclude gawkers. “The Commissioners had no authority over the public grounds and premises on this occasion, and hence the tickets of that board were rejected and the holders of them excluded.”

The second county courthouse, a Pittsburgh landmark, was destroyed by fire on May 7, 1882. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper published an artist’s rendering of the scene. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

While reporters were to have been among those excluded, both the Post and the Gazette had what read like eyewitness accounts in their next-day editions. “And, oh, how often I have wished I could restore George Wilson and his sister back to life,” Fife said in the statement he read from the gallows, according to the Gazette. “Maddened by a thirst for gold and stimulated by drink I gave them the fatal blow that robbed them of life and sent their souls, without warning, to the bar of God.”

Fife and Jones said they had planned their crime together, and they both swore that a third suspect, Monroe Stewart, was innocent. Stewart had been convicted and sentenced to death in the case. In her gallows statement, Jones said she had sought to implicate Stewart out of malice, because he had sought to persuade Fife to leave her.

The Reverend John Brown “then offered up a feeling and appropriate prayer, during which Charlotte and Fife both knelt and seemed to be fervently repeating every world that was uttered by the minister,” the Post reported. “Two glasses containing liquor were then brought to the prisoners. Fife drank all out of the glass given to him; Charlotte merely tasted hers, and then handed it to Fife, who swallowed the remainder….Fife then kissed Charlotte affectionately.

“The last words of Fife were: ‘Remember, gentlemen, I die game.’

“The last words of Charlotte were a prayer to God for her salvation and a declaration of her love for Fife.”

When Sheriff Patterson stepped upon a lever that activated the gallows, “the drop fell and the two unfortunate creatures were suspended in the air.” It was not a clean execution. When the bodies of the two were taken down thirty minutes later, doctors found that their necks hadn’t been broken by their initial falls, meaning both had strangled.

The final twist in the story came twenty-two years later, according to a New York Times story published June 19, 1880. Wilson and McMasters had been killed for the gold and silver coins they had kept at their cabin, according to the Times. When two McKeesport youths found coins buried on the banks of the Youghiogheny River, the Times reported that “the treasure uncovered by the two boys is believed to be a portion of the wealth the possession of which was so fatal” to its elderly owners.

The boys, however, did not benefit from their find. They told police their newly found cache was taken from them by a menacing red-bearded, red-haired stranger. “No trace of him has yet been found,” the Times said.

1869: A SHADY STRANGER ON A TRAIN

While serious news from Harrisburg and Washington, D.C., dominated the front page of the Pittsburgh Gazette on April 15, 1869, inside pages featured lighter fare. Tales of a financial scam, purloined cash and a rocky romance were among the local stories competing for readers’ attention that morning.

“Mr. Perry C. Dean, a farmer, was swindled out of four hundred dollars yesterday,” the Gazette reported. Dean and his wife, on their way home to Wisconsin, had boarded a cross-state train in Philadelphia.

Just before the train started[,] a genteel looking young man stepped into the car and took a seat directly in front of the pair. The train moved on and the young man’s tongue commenced to move also….Being an exceedingly agreeable conversationalist, he succeeded in winning the confidence of his two auditors long before the train reached Pittsburgh.

The man called himself J.B. Austin.

When the trio arrived at Pittsburgh’s Union Depot,

stranger No. 2, merchant of Pittsburgh, stepped up and politely requested Mr. Austin to pay a little bill.

Austin pulled out his pocket book, but found himself short of ready cash, having only a draft for three thousand four hundred dollars and six twenty dollar gold pieces.

After some consultation, Dean, the farmer, was prevailed upon to loan his friend four hundred dollars to pay the bill, taking in exchange the draft and the gold pieces as security, both of which the supposed Pittsburgh merchant pronounced all right.

Austin and the merchant then disappeared “for the purpose of getting the account perfectly squared.”

Dean and his wife “waited for some time” before contacting the authorities, who “pronounced the affair a swindle.” The draft, which gave the bearer the right to collect the $4,300 at a bank in New York City, was a fake. “The supposed gold pieces were composed of a good quality of brass.”

“The victim was swindled thus out of all his money, except twenty dollars….He has, now, a…disregard for affable strangers,” the story concluded.

Following a pattern that would be repeated by future generations of journalists, Gazette reporters made regular stops at courts and police stations in Pittsburgh and in Allegheny, now the city’s North Side.

In one case, rooming house operator Patrick Kearney found himself answering a theft charge before Allegheny mayor Simon Drum. Kearney was accused of taking $ 10 from a letter sent to one of his former boarders. The amount in dispute was equal to about $ 160 today. The unidentified tenant had disappeared, leaving an unpaid bill, the paper reported. “Soon after a letter was left at the boarding house for the missing man, which Kearney opened and found to contain thirty dollars.” After Kearney removed $10 and sent on the rest, his former tenant complained to police. Kearney explained at the hearing that he had been told that the letter would be sent with the money. “As he appeared to have no evil intent and expressed himself willing to refund the money, the Mayor dismissed the case.”

Allegheny County district attorney Alfred L. Pearson, whose gravestone is in Allegheny Cemetery, let a defendant choose marriage over jail in 1869. Courtesy Lake Fong of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Another report on the first marriage in Allegheny County Criminal Court relieved “the dull monotony of trials and sentences.”

Charles Burgess was accused of seducing Mary Jane Bagshaw. Both lived in Temperanceville, now part of Pittsburgh’s West End.

The indictment in the case set forth, with other alleged facts, that in the pursuance of the intimacy which had existed between them, a child, now living, was born.

They had affection enough for each other, but Charles, like many other young men, felt that he could not well afford to make the honorable reparations due the fair and blushing Mary. But the law is a stubborn thing, and rather than go to jail, Charles agreed to…enter into matrimony.

District Attorney Alfred L. Pearson dropped a charge of fornication and bastardy, and a city alderman, E.S. Morrow, immediately performed the wedding. “This was the first case of a wedding in open court in this County,” according to the newspaper. “And Charles has received the first sentence for life ever imposed on any poor criminal by that Court.”

CHAPTER 3

WARS, REVOLUTIONS AND REBELLIONS

1755: LIFE AND SUDDEN DEATH AT FORT DUQUESNE

Death came quickly—and sometimes violently—on the Pennsylvania frontier in the 1750s.

Babies born at the French settlement of Fort Duquesne often died within days of birth. Healthy young men were carried off by fevers. A stroll in the forest could end with a gunshot and the flash of a sharp knife. Father Denys Baron, chaplain at Fort Duquesne, presided over “the customary ceremonies” following the death on July 5, 1755, of Pierre Simard. He had been killed and scalped, the priest wrote. His assailants were most likely Indian allies of the British, whose army was bearing down on the French fort. His death was soon avenged.

On July 9, the British commander, Edward Braddock, was fatally wounded and his army was destroyed. Braddock’s defeat, in the area east of Pittsburgh that now bears his name, meant the Forks of the Ohio remained in French hands for another three years. One source of information about that period is the Register of Fort Duquesne. In that document, which was discovered in Montreal archives in the mid-nineteenth century, Father Baron and other priests recorded births, marriages and burials at French outposts in western Pennsylvania. A translation of the register by the Reverend Andrew Arnold Lambing was published in Pittsburgh in 1885. The pamphlet was reprinted in 2004 to mark the 250th anniversary of the first Catholic Mass celebrated at the Point.

Fort Duquesne, built by the French in 1754, was burned by them in 1758. Architect and architectural historian Charles Morse Stotz offered his vision of how the outpost would have appeared. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

Braddock was not the only distinguished casualty in what is often called the battle of the Monongahela. The French commander of Fort Duquesne, Leonard Daniel de Beaujeu, also was killed in early fighting.

Beaujeu had led fewer than three hundred French and Canadian soldiers, supported by about six hundred Indian allies, to face Braddock’s fifteen hundred regulars and militia. “At the third volley from the English, de Beaujeu fell, pierced through the forehead, it is said, with a ball,” according to one of the notes that accompanies Lambing’s translation. Despite the loss of their commander, the French and Indians, firing from the woods, killed or wounded more than half of Braddock’s force, including almost all the officers. The remainder fled in panic. George Washington, who served on Braddock’s staff, was in the thick of the fighting but escaped injury. French losses were estimated at fewer than fifty.

Father Baron wrote in the register that Beaujeu had “been at confession and performed his devotions”—preparing himself for possible death—on the morning of the battle. “His remains were interred on the twelfth of the same month, in the cemetery of Fort Duquesne under the title of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin at the Beautiful River…with the customary ceremonies by us,” he wrote. In the coming days, Father Baron recorded the burials of other French casualties.

The register makes no mention of the deaths of British prisoners, just outside Fort Duquesne, as described by James Smith. Smith, who was just eighteen, had been captured a few days earlier by Indians loyal to the French.

“About sun down I beheld a small party [of Indians] coming in with about a dozen prisoners, stripped naked, with their hands tied behind their backs, and their faces and part of their bodies blacked—these prisoners they burned to death on the bank of the Alegheny [sic] River opposite to the fort,” he wrote in a memoir first published in 1799 and reprinted several times. “As this scene appeared too shocking for me to behold, I retired to my lodgings both sore and sorry.”

The French claimed they came to North America as much to convert Native Americans to the Catholic faith as to trade for furs. The Register contains reports of Indian baptisms, including that of Jean Christiguay on December 17, 1756. Father Baron calls him “Great Chief of the Iroquois, aged ninety-five years, or thereabout, who being dangerously sick, earnestly desired Holy Baptism.”

Too often baptism was followed by interment. Jean Daniel Norment was baptized on September 18, 1755, the day he was born to Jean Gaspar Norment, a trader at the fort, and his wife, Marie Joseph Chanier. Six days later, Father Baron buried little Jean Daniel.

The following spring, the priest baptized two-month-old Ellen Candon, daughter of John and Sarah Choisy Candon. Ellen’s parents, he wrote, were “Irish Catholics, who were captured by the Shawnees in coming here to join the Catholics.” Ellen’s godmother at the ceremony on May 15, 1756, was Marie Norment, who had lost her little boy eight months earlier.

All that remains of the French Fort Duquesne is a stone outline showing its approximate location in Point State Park. The French controlled what is now Pittsburgh’s Point from 1754 to 1758. Courtesy Darrell Sapp of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

1763: BOUQUET’S VICTORY

What little news arrived in the summer of 1763 at Fort Pitt, at the western edge of the Pennsylvania wilderness, was all bad.

The Ottawa chief Pontiac had British troops and settlers at Fort Detroit under siege. His successes in the Great Lakes area had encouraged a loose alliance of Delaware, Shawnee and Seneca warriors to attack and destroy British outposts in northwestern Pennsylvania at Fort Presque Isle, Fort LeBoeuf and Fort Venango. The few survivors of those attacks fled south to Fort Pitt, the keystone to British control of southwestern Pennsylvania and the Ohio valley.

Why were the Indians angry? Despite the promises made to them five years earlier in the Treaty of Easton that the British would not establish permanent settlements west of the Alleghenies, the Indians saw land-hungry farmers continuing to flood into the area.

The brick-by-brick construction of Fort Pitt into the largest outpost on the frontier was another sure sign that the British weren’t going away anytime soon. Just outside the fort, the town of Pittsburgh was developing into what historian David Dixon, of Slippery Rock University, has described as a “substantial community of traders, merchants, tavern keepers, prostitutes, speculators and laborers.” Both the fort and the town were threatened with extinction after Native American warriors surrounded the settlement.

At the other end of the state, Colonel Henry Bouquet, a veteran of frontier fighting, was given the task of organizing a relief expedition. But as he moved farther and farther westward in the summer of 1763, he found that the Indians were aware of his every move.

“The Indians had better intelligence, and no sooner were they informed of the march of our Army, than they broke up the siege of Fort Pitt,” wrote an anonymous “lover of his country” in 1765. The “lover” was identified a century later as William Smith, the first provost of the College of Philadelphia, now the University of Pennsylvania. A partial copy of his work—An Historical Account of the Expedition against the Ohio Indians, in the year 1764—is in the archives of the Senator John Heinz History Center.

Dr. Smith’s language, full of references to “savages” and “barbarians,” reflects colonial-era attitudes.

Colonel Bouquet’s relief column was near Bushy Run in Westmoreland County, about twenty-five miles from Fort Pitt, when it was attacked by a Native American force on August 5, 1763. The first day’s battle was a draw.

“At the first dawn of light [the next day] the savages began to declare themselves, all about the camp, at the distance of about 500 yards,” Dr. Smith wrote. “And by shouting and yelling in the most horrid manner, quite round that extensive circumference, endeavoured to strike terror by an ostentation of their numbers, and their ferocity.

“[Colonel Bouquet’s soldiers] saw before them the most melancholy prospect of crumbling away by degrees, and entirely perishing without revenge or honour, in the midst of those dreadful deserts.”

Their commander realized that he needed to trick the Indians into thinking he was retreating.

For that purpose he contrived the following stratagem….Col. Bouquet gave directions that two companies of his troops, who had been posted in the most advanced situations, should fall within the circle; the troops on the right and left immediately opened their files, and filled up the vacant space, that they might seem to cover their retreat. Another company of light infantry, with one of grenadiers, were ordered to “lie in ambuscade,” to support the two first companies of grenadiers, who moved on the feigned retreat, and were intended to begin the real attack. The dispositions were well made, and the plan executed without the least confusion.

The savages gave in entirely into the snare….The barbarians mistook those motions for a retreat, abandoned the woods which covered them, hurried headlong on, and advancing with the most daring intrepidity galled the English troops with their heavy fire.

A statue of British Colonel Henry Bouquet is on display at Bushy Run Battlefield museum. Bouquet’s victory lifted the 1763 siege of Fort Pitt. Courtesy Peter Diana of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Within minutes, however, the Indians found themselves outgunned and began to retreat. Dr. Smith reports that they soon disappeared into the woods.

After their loss at Bushy Run, the Native Americans also gave up their siege of Fort Pitt. That opened the way for Colonel Bouquet to use the outpost as headquarters for his successful campaign the following year against the tribes in the Ohio country. The Indians agreed to a peace treaty that called for the return of several hundred white captives they had taken prisoner during the French and Indian War and what came to be known as Pontiac’s war.

1763: FORT PITT SURVIVES FLOOD, SIEGE

Captain Simeon Ecuyer, the Swiss-born commander of Fort Pitt, may have thought he had overcome the worst of his problems in March 1763.

Death and destruction caused by natural forces, however, soon would be followed by man-made mayhem.

Three days of heavy rain began March 6. The next day, as the “river continued to swell,” he had soldiers remove provisions and ammunition from the ground floor of all buildings within the fort. “Worked all day closing the drains, preparing everything against inundation as best I could,” Ecuyer wrote his commander, British colonel Henry Bouquet, in an after-the-event letter dated March 11. By 10:00 p.m. the rising Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers turned the land on which the fort stood into an island, he wrote.

By 4:00 a.m. the next morning, March 8, the interior of the outpost was covered with six inches of water. That afternoon he “detached two officers and thirty men to [occupy] the upper town with fifteen days’ provision for all the garrison.” The “upper town” referred to the small commercial settlement built on higher ground along the Monongahela River. It began a few hundred yards upstream from the fort.

At midnight, Ecuyer ordered all available boats and barges be brought into the fort in case the fort had to be evacuated by water. Since wagon access had been cut off by the rising rivers, his plan was to load artillery, arms and other supplies into watercraft and float them out. Fort Pitt would be abandoned until the floodwater receded.

“But happily on the 9th, at 8 o’clock in the morning, the water was at its greatest height and at midday it fell two inches,” he wrote. “All the provisions and ammunition are saved and in good condition.” Physical damage was minor.

“The shop of the blacksmith entirely gone,” he wrote. “The little wood gathered for the construction of [new] boats has followed several houses of the lower town [into the Ohio]. All the fences of the garden carried off by the ice.” While no lives were lost at Fort Pitt, the flooding claimed at least two victims nearby. “Thomson the tanner, and Shepherd the carpenter, are drowned, the first at Turtle Creek and the other at Two Mile Run,” he wrote.

Less than two months later, Ecuyer had much more to worry about than lost fences. “Yesterday evening the Indians massacred the two men we had at the sawmill,” he wrote to Bouquet on May 3. “They scalped them and left a head breaker or Tomahawk, which signifies I believe a declaration of war.”

He was right. No sooner had the French and Indian War ended than Pontiac’s rebellion began. Native Americans had returned to the warpath as land-hungry farmers from eastern Pennsylvania and Virginia continued to cross the Allegheny mountains to settle in what was known as the Ohio country. Delaware, Shawnee and Seneca warriors concluded that the British government was not going to keep its promise that the area around Pittsburgh would be left to them.

Ecuyer’s letters to Bouquet and a 1763 journal kept by Captain William Trent, another officer at Fort Pitt, described the violence of the next few months. Both documents are included in Fort Pitt and Letters from the Frontier, a book published in 1892 by J.R. Weldin &Co. Its editor was Mary Carson Darlington.

Once the Indians began their siege in late June, anyone venturing outside of the walls of Fort Pitt was in danger. “About 5 o’clock one James Thompson, who it was supposed [had] gone after a horse, was killed and scalped in sight of the fort,” Trent wrote in his journal on June 22. Two days later, two chiefs, Turtle’s Heart and Mamaltee, offered safe conduct to the garrison if soldiers and civilians agreed to leave immediately. Ecuyer replied “that we could defend it against all the Indians in the woods,” Trent wrote.

Trent’s journal also describes an early attempt at biological warfare against their Native American foes. “Out of our regard for them, we gave them two blankets and a handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital,” he wrote. “I hope it will have the desired effect.” There is no evidence that this early attempt at using disease germs as weapons was effective.

The Indians did not withdraw from around Fort Pitt until late August after a relief expedition, commanded by Bouquet, defeated them in the two-day battle of Bushy Run. The Pennsylvania frontier, however, remained a dangerous place. On October 19, a highlander guarding cattle was shot and killed along the banks of the Monongahela. “There were but two or three Indians,” Trent wrote in his journal. “They scalped him.”

1794: THE WHISKEY REBELLION FAILS; HUGH HENRY BRACKENRIDGE SURVIVES

By August 1794, western Pennsylvania’s whiskey rebels had their own flags, their own army and their own martyr: Captain James McFarlane.

A veteran of the Revolutionary War, Captain McFarlane had become a leader of what was an increasingly violent opposition to a federal excise tax on whiskey. He had been shot to death a few weeks earlier outside the home of tax collector John Neville. Angry frontiersmen then burned Neville’s house on Bower Hill in what is now Scott Township in Allegheny County.

As many as seven thousand armed men mustered at Braddock’s Field, about eight miles east of what is now downtown Pittsburgh, on August 1–2, 1794, for what a state historical marker at the site calls “the high tide of the Whiskey Rebellion.” Rather than French, British or Native American enemies, it was probably that ad-hoc army that represented the greatest threat to the still small settlement at the Forks of the Ohio.

The rebels viewed Fort Pitt, and the cluster of houses, taverns and businesses nearby known as Pittsburgh, as a stronghold of support for the federal revenue agents—like John Neville—who licensed stills and collected the whiskey tax. Led by David Bradford, a Washington County lawyer turned general, the rebels marched to Pittsburgh’s Point. Once there, they couldn’t decide whether to burn down Pittsburgh or simply intimidate its residents into disavowing their loyalty to the federal government in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital. Lobbied by a teacher-turned-chaplain-turned-lawyer named Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Bradford and his army chose the less violent course. It was a wise decision.

Pittsburgh residents offered the rebels free whiskey, food and boat rides across the Monongahela River. Brackenridge then ordered all the ferryboats to return to the Pittsburgh side, according to author William Hogeland’s 2006 history The Whiskey Rebellion. The week after the rebels’ march on Pittsburgh, President George Washington declared martial law and began calling up state militias. He assembled and personally led a thirteen-thousand-man army as far west as Bedford. Facing overwhelming force, the rebellion collapsed, with Bradford escaping down the Ohio River to Spanish territory.

Brackenridge, who had tried to keep a foot in both the rebel and federal camps, managed to convince Alexander Hamilton that he had not committed treason. Hamilton had been given command of the American army that occupied Pittsburgh after Washington returned to Philadelphia.

While he avoided prison or a rope, Brackenridge couldn’t escape public censure from his neighbors on both sides of the rebellion.

Isaac Craig was the son-in-law of John Neville, whose home had been burned by rebels. In the October 11, 1794 edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette, Craig disputed Brackenridge’s claim that he had saved Craig from banishment when the rebels briefly took control of Pittsburgh. Craig called on the rebel leader, David Bradford, to identify the “scoundrel” who had lied about Craig’s role. Bradford fingered Brackenridge. “I must inform you that Mr. Brackenridge has either a very treacherous memory, or a strong disposition to assert falsehoods if he asserted as you state,” Bradford wrote in reply. “The first day at Braddock’s Field Mr. Brackenridge told me the people of Pittsburgh were well pleased, that the country were [sic] about to banish the persons whose names had been mentioned….He added that they ought to go further—that little Craig ought to be punished, for he was one of the damned junto.”

Hugh Henry Brackenridge avoided both the anger of the whiskey rebels and Alexander Hamilton, who came to Pittsburgh to put down the revolt. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

Brackenridge recognized his position was perilous, but he went on the offense. In that same issue of the Pittsburgh Gazette, he informed voters in Washington and Allegheny Counties that he was still a candidate for Congress. To withdraw, he wrote, “would imply a fear of submitting my conduct to investigation….I may at present have less popularity than I had, but the time will come when I shall be considered as having deserved well of the country, in all the delicate conjunctures in which we have been situated.”

He was, however, unable to win elective office for himself after 1794. Still, he was not without political influence. Brackenridge later campaigned for Thomas McKean in his successful race for governor, and Governor McKean then appointed him to the state supreme court.

1863: As LEE MOVES NORTH, PITTSBURGH DIGS IN

Pittsburgh appeared to be a logical target when General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia invaded Pennsylvania in June 1863. The city of more than fifty thousand was a rail hub, site of a cannon foundry and home to hundreds of factories and warehouses. The federal government’s Allegheny Arsenal was nearby in what was then the separate borough of Lawrenceville.

“Pittsburgh is not only a point where an immense store of supplies to our army could be cut off or destroyed, but [it] would offer abundant means of subsistence and most needed articles to the famished rebels, so long cut off from the requisites of comfort and civilization,” an anonymous author calling himself Soldier warned in the June 20 edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette.

Federal officials, business owners and local residents worked together for the next three weeks to make sure the Confederates wouldn’t get near any of those supplies without a struggle. That same day’s edition of the Gazette listed Pittsburgh companies that had released more than sixty-eight hundred of their workers to dig fortifications on Mount Washington, Squirrel Hill and more than two dozen other locations around the city.

Not everybody was sharing the load, however. An executive committee, formed to oversee the region’s defense, announced it would seek to pull the liquor licenses of “drinking houses, saloons and restaurants” that had remained open despite orders from the local military commander, Major General William Brooks, to close. The committee also requested that retail stores shut their doors “until the fortifications and rifle-pits, required for the defense of this city, be completed.”

This bronze casting of Robert E. Lee is by sculptor Michael Kraus. Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863 sent Pittsburgh into a panic. Courtesy Tony Tye of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Residents grew more nervous as the Confederates occupied more Pennsylvania towns. The Gazette’s headlines on June 25 told of “15,000 Rebels in the Cumberland Valley,” “Chambersburg Taken and Gutted” and “The Enemy Moving Toward Harrisburg!” The same newspaper reported that “a party of men, with a martial band, started up Liberty street, for the purpose of compelling certain shop keepers to close up their stores….The crowd visited a number of stores nearby, all of which were soon afterwards closed.” Another “committee went around among the butchers in the Diamond [in Allegheny City in what is now Pittsburgh’s North Side]…to ascertain what they would do by way of furnishing men or going to work themselves upon the entrenchments.

“To the credit of the butchers, let it be said, that every man save two either agreed to go or to pay for the employment of others.” The Gazette went on to name names of shirkers. “The two niggards who informed the committee that they would neither go themselves nor pay for employing others were John Mussler and Fred Werner.”

Work on the ring of fortifications around the city continued through the first days of July, even as residents read first reports that Lee’s army was battling Union forces near the small town of Gettysburg. As the Independence Day weekend approached, Major General Brooks had ordered bars and saloons to close on Friday and Saturday, July 3 and 4. His proclamation, published in the July 3 Gazette, banned both “the selling or giving away” of alcohol. “The carrying of beer, ale or any kind of liquor to the working parties also is forbidden.”

“The Fourth passed off very quietly and pleasantly in this vicinity,” the Gazette reported on Monday, July 6. “There was a very general response to the call to work upon the fortifications, and thousands were thus employed.” Plans for the city’s defense, however, soon were overtaken by what the Gazette referred to as the “GLORIOUS VICTORY” in the “Great Battle near Gettysburg.” Lee’s army was forced to retreat south of the Potomac River, and the danger to Pennsylvania had passed.

As it wound down its affairs, the city’s executive committee passed a resolution to halt all paid labor on the redoubts, forts and trenches. Members also offered a tribute to those who labored on the defenses: “Whereas, During the last three weeks many skilled workmen and mechanics, suspending their usual avocations, have devoted their time and labor to the construction of the fortifications around the city, either without compensation or at a rate of daily pay far below their ordinary earnings…this committee acknowledges the services of these patriotic fellow citizens who have thus nobly sacrificed their individual advantage for the public benefit.”

1941: SADDENED MOTHER LEARNS THE DUAL MEANING OF “ALOHA”

Ellen Good was among the first Allegheny County mothers to get a soon-to-be-dreaded notice from the U.S. government.

Her twenty-five-year-old son, Staff Sergeant Joseph K. Good, had been one of the more than twenty-four hundred Americans killed December 7, 1941, during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. “In the mellifluous language of Hawaii, the word ‘aloha’ means both ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye,’” the Post-Gazette reported on December 10. “But yesterday it had no sweet sound and only one awful meaning.

“‘Aloha’ was the last word Mrs. Good had received from her soldier son…when the War Department informed her that he had been killed in Sunday’s surprise Japanese raid.”

A graduate of Oliver High School and a resident of Pittsburgh’s North Side, Staff Sergeant Good had enlisted in the Army Air Corps in June 1939 and hadn’t been home since. In a letter written on Thanksgiving Day, he told his mother he expected a long stay in Hawaii. He assured her the military was taking precautions to protect the giant naval base against air raids.

He closed with this paragraph, according to the Post-Gazette: “‘I hear the blackout signal is going to sound soon,’ he wrote in a hurried finish to the letter Mrs. Good received a week ago, ‘so I must say aloha.’”

“Sunday I had a feeling something was wrong,” Mrs. Good told a reporter shortly after getting word that her son had been killed. “And yesterday I saw his face before me all day long.”

By the time World War II ended almost four years later, about four thousand Allegheny County families would receive the sad news that a loved one had been killed or died while in the armed services.

While the Japanese attack meant immediate heartache for people like Mrs. Good, the Post-Gazette found that many Pittsburghers reacted stoically. “Calm Pervades City On War’s Outbreak,” the newspaper reported the day after the Japanese attack. “For all the clash of men and steel far off in the Pacific, it was just like another pre-Christmas Sunday in Pittsburgh,” reporter Charles H. Allard wrote. “Automobiles streamed through the streets, crowds alighted from street cars and packed about the windows of the stores, so the children could better see the marionettes.”

While the United States remained at peace with Nazi Germany for several days after the Japanese attack, one young resident realized his country was likely to face foes both in Asia and in Europe. “A girl of about 20 mentions ‘Japs’ to her brother, a lad of about 12 in long pants,” Allard wrote. “With a smirk on his face, he did an imitation goose step up Fifth Avenue as she laughed beside him.” Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States on December 11.

“Over in the Pennsylvania railroad station a youngster of 4 walked up and down the aisles, shaking hands with uniformed soldiers waiting for their trains. Five carefree young men came walking along together. The fair-skinned blond kid of 20 said to his companions: What will we do—enlist tomorrow?”

They may have.

“Local Offices Are Swamped by Applicants for Armed Forces,” the paper reported December 9. A total of 1,255 Pittsburgh-area men sought to enlist in the army, navy, marines or air corps the day after the Japanese attack. Another 1,190 signed up on December 9, and 1,365 more joined the ranks on December 10.

‘“I quit a good job to fight for my country,’ said a young Marine Corps applicant, putting the whole thing just as concisely as anyone could.” Reporter Charles H. Brown wrote that the recruit was “smiling somewhat self-consciously because he was afraid he might be accused of over-dramatizing himself.” The would-be marine hoped to become one of about 900,000 men and more than 20,000 women from Pennsylvania who served in the armed forces during the war.

“The job has to be done, and we’re going to get it over with,” another young man, seeking to join the naval reserve, told Brown. “That’s why we’re here.”

CHAPTER 4

PITTSBURGH’S PROGRESS

1758: THE CITY GETS A NAME

When General John Forbes gave Pittsburgh its name in November 1758, newspapers, magazines and pamphlets quickly brought the news to English speakers from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Edinburgh, Scotland.

The years between 1754 and 1758 had been among the hardest times ever on the Pennsylvania frontier. Control of the Forks of the Ohio—the place now known as Pittsburgh’s Point—was one of the main goals in the French and Indian War, which was the North American portion of the worldwide Seven Years’ War.

For that reason, many of the opening battles of that long and bloody conflict had taken place in southwestern Pennsylvania. Most had ended in defeats for the British side, including George Washington’s surrender at Fort Necessity in July 1754 and the destruction of General Edward Braddock’s British and Colonial army a year later. A new British government in London, however, led by William Pitt, had decided to follow an eighteenth-century version of the Colin Powell doctrine: maximize the odds of success by sending forces in overwhelming numbers.

An eighteenth-century painting of General John Forbes—the man who named Pittsburgh—is attributed to artist John Watson. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

Unlike the unsuccessful General Braddock, the new British commander, General Forbes, sought alliances with Native Americans. He was eager to use them as scouts and to keep them from joining the ranks of French and French-Canadian fighters. The British also had demography on their side. By the 1750s, historians estimate, more than a million people were residing in their colonies, although many in Pennsylvania spoke German rather than English. In New France, which included all of eastern Canada and much of the Midwest along the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys, there were only about fifty thousand.

By mid-1758, the tide of war clearly was going against the French and their remaining Indian allies.

“The accounts from America begin now to be more favourable than formerly,” begins a report in the January 1759 edition of the Gentleman’s Magazine. The magazine, printed in London “by D. Henry and R. Cave at St. John’s Gate,” goes on to print excerpts from a dispatch sent by General Forbes on his arrival in the smoking ruins of what had been the French-built Fort Duquesne.

Starting from Philadelphia, General Forbes—born like Andrew Carnegie in Dunfermline, Scotland—had slowly maneuvered his army across Pennsylvania during the late summer and fall of 1758. Aided by colonial officers, including the ambitious George Washington, he and his underlings built a series of fortifications and supply depots across the wilderness. Each was located about a day’s march apart. They included Fort Bedford and Fort Ligonier, now modern-day Bedford and Ligonier.

Here is some of the text of the General Forbes letter, as excerpted in the Gentleman’s Magazine. A copy of the periodical, bound into book form, is in the collection of the Senator John Heinz History Center.

I have the pleasure of acquainting you with the signal success of his majesty’s arms over all his enemies on the Ohio, by having obliged them to burn, and abandon their Fort duQuesne, which they effectuated up on the 24th instant [November 24, 1758], and of which I took possession with my light troops the same evening, and with my little army the next day. The enemy made their escape down the river, part in boats and part by land, to their forts and settlements upon the Missisippi [sic], having been abandoned, or, at least, not seconded by their friends the Indians, whom we had previously engaged to act a neutral part, after thoroughly convincing them, in several skirmishes, that all their attempts upon our advanced posts, in order to cut off our communications, were vain, and to no purpose; so now they seem all willing, and well disposed to embrace his majesty’s most gracious protection.

Give me leave, therefore, to congratulate you upon this important event, of having expelled the French from Fort duQuesne and this prodigious tract of fine rich country, and of having, in a manner, reconciled the various tribes and nations of the Indians, inhabiting it, to his majesty’s government.

British general John Forbes watches from a litter as his troops march into the burning remains of Fort Duquesne in 1758. The painting was done by artist Nat Youngblood. Courtesy Fort Pitt Museum.

Before he left the Forks of the Ohio, General Forbes took one other important action, describing it in a November 27 letter to William Pitt, whom he saw as architect of the British victory. “I have used the freedom of giving your name to Fort Duquesne,” he wrote, “as I hope it was in some measure the being actuated by your spirits that now makes us Masters of the place.”

After a difficult winter journey, General Forbes made it back to Philadelphia, where he died on March 11, 1759. He was buried in that city’s Christ Church.

1786: FIRST NEWSPAPER WEST OF THE ALLEGHENIES

The Pittsburgh Gazette began publishing on July 29, 1786. By September 3, the paper had printed its first reader complaint about the lack of fresh information in the newspaper and had run its first lawyer joke.

John Scull was the first editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette. A rival editor made fun of his name in a satiric poem in 1800. Courtesy Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The early editions of the weekly Gazette included a mix of short local and longer national stories, the latter often reprinted from other newspapers, and months-old foreign news. Advertising categories covered real estate, runaway servants and slaves. Publishers John Scull and Joseph Hall even found room for sports.

“I see by your last paper that you have not been crammed with news,” wrote Gilbert Gichen, of Peter’s Creek. He complained about a Latin phrase, left untranslated, that appeared in a previous issue of the paper. That “scrap of Latin about the lawyers, I confess it is as dark to me as all their proceedings in general are,” Gichen wrote, setting up the premise for his dig at lawyers. “One of our elders, who knows a little Latin, has given me an interpretation of it, but I think he may be wrong.”

“He says it means ‘They labour to put themselves in a terrible rage to fill their pockets.’”

Gichen advised Scull and Hall to rethink their policy on foreign phrases. “If you write any more of this kind still be so good as to explain it,” he suggested. Gichen also asked whether the Gazette planned to publish “essays from one, two or three authors, or is your plan more general.”

The weekly paper’s four pages were open to a variety of opinions, the editors replied. “They will thankfully receive [from any person] essays which may tend to the entertainment or improvement of the readers of this paper.” Space, however, was tight and standards were high. “They are sorry to add, that many pieces have already been received for insert on which, if complied with, would have tended greatly to the injury of the Pittsburgh Gazette.”

While the cover price of the Gazette was quite high—6 pence is equal to a minimum of $1.38 in modern currency—its owners needed lots of advertising to stay in the black. “To Be Sold (For Ready Money Only)” is the first line of a September 30 offer to sell the contract of an indentured laborer. In the eighteenth century, both men and women agreed to work for food and lodging, but without salary, for several years, most often in return for the cost of their passage to America. “A German woman servant, she has near 3 years to serve, and is well qualified for all household work,” the ad states. “Would recommend her to her own country people [meaning German immigrants], particularly as her present master has found great inconvenience from his not being acquainted with their manners, customs and language. For further particulars, enquire at Mr. Ormsby’s in Pittsburgh.”

Even when servants spoke the same tongue as their masters, problems were common. John Wilson, living in Fayette County, offered a fifteen-dollar reward for the return of “an Irish servant named Charles Jordan, 25 years of age, five feet six or eight inches high, short black hair, round face, knock-kneed, large flat feet, has an old sore on the sole of one foot.”

While Pennsylvania had passed a law in 1780 prohibiting future enslavement of blacks, it did not liberate anyone who was a slave at the time the measure took effect. Colonel John Gibson, a former commander of Fort Pitt, was within his rights to advertise on June 2, 1787, “to be sold, to any person residing in the country, A Negro Wench.” The anonymous woman was “an excellent cook, and can do any kind of work in or out of doors.” Since cash was often short on the frontier, Colonel Gibson was willing to accept a barter deal: “produce will be taken, or cattle of any kind.”

From south of the Mason-Dixon line, Samuel Magruder and Daniel Dingle on September 30, 1786, offered a forty-dollar reward for the return to Maryland of a pair of slaves named Sam and Sue. “The negro man is about 27 years of age…a spare, thin fellow, he talks but bad English, the middle finger of the right hand is off at the tip end, occasioned by the frost.” Sue was about twenty-two and “has a large scar upon the back of one of her legs, just above her ankle.”

Lacking professional sports teams for which to root, nineteenth-century Pittsburgh residents could seek diversion—and wagering opportunities—in horse racing. The jockey club announced September 9 that races would “start precisely at one of the Clock” on October 19, 20 and 21. Daily purses would total as much as $120, equal to at least $2,800 today. Potential participants were warned that appropriate attire would be required. “No Jocky will be permitted to ride unless he has some genteel Jocky Habit.”

1800: JEFFERSONIANS SPEAK LOUDLY

Historians describe the presidential race of 1800 as one of the nastiest ever. Pittsburgh’s competing newspapers reflected that era of bad feeling with their owners launching personal and political attacks on each other.

The election of 1796 had resulted in Federalist John Adams becoming president and his chief rival, Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, becoming vice president. (Despite its confusing name, Jefferson’s party was the predecessor to the modern Democratic Party and has no link to present-day Republicans.) The result of divided leadership was four years of feuding over foreign and domestic policy and a rematch between the two men in 1800.

John Israel’s newspaper, the Tree of Liberty, began publication in Pittsburgh in August of that year as a pro-Jefferson newspaper backed by lawyer and politician Hugh Henry Brackenridge. Its long-established rival was John Scull’s the Pittsburgh Gazette. Colonial newspapers made no pretense of objectivity and made no distinctions between news and opinion columns.

Israel, most likely with the aid of Brackenridge, a novelist and poet, took particular pleasure in crafting puns that made use of his rival’s last name. When the Gazette introduced a new nameplate, Israel greeted its appearance on September 20 in the Tree of Liberty with almost-rhyming couplets:

Pray Sap-Skull John, Why did you get

That handsome head for your Gazette;

Adorned with flourishes and flashes,

And other such outlandish dashes?

When your own head wants alteration,

As much as any in the nation—

Your thickish, sappy, dunder skull,

As hard as any ten year bull,

Demanded that it should be shaven,

As neat at least, as that engraving

In its September 13 issue, the Tree of Liberty provided minimal information on the “federal ticket” for the upcoming U.S. congressional and state senate races. For Congress, “NO BODY!!!” the paper reported. For state senate, “NO BODY worth mentioning.”

“The REPUBLICAN Ticket Which will be supported in opposition to the above, by the great bulk of the honest and independent yeomanry of the county is for Congress ALBERT GALLATIN [and for] Senator JOHN HAMILTON of Washington cty.”

The Federalists had given up on the national and state races, according to the Tree of Liberty, but hoped to hold on to country offices, including coroner and commissioner.

They failed.

“This year the Republicans will carry every candidate from the Coroner to the Congressman,” the Tree of Liberty crowed on October 18 after the ballots were counted. “This election gives the final stroke to the aristocratic party here.”

Pennsylvania’s representatives to the Electoral College—which selects the president—were chosen by the state legislature in 1800 and included both Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. As a result, Jefferson and Adams split the state’s electoral vote eight to seven. Jefferson, however, won the overall vote in the Electoral College, seventy-three to sixty-five.

Here’s where it gets really complicated. Jefferson and his vice presidential running mate, Aaron Burr, received identical numbers of electoral votes. That threw the race into the U.S. House of Representatives, which took thirty-six ballots before selecting Jefferson as president on February 17, 1801. He was inaugurated March 4.

Following years of partisan feuding, Pittsburgh politicians from both parties came together, at least for one evening, according to the March 14 edition of the Tree of Liberty.

“On the evening of the 4th of March a large body of Republican Citizens of Allegheny and Washington counties, joined by a number of the most respectable Federal characters in that neighborhood, met at the house of Capt. Andrew M’Farlane, near the Monongahela river, to celebrate the election and induction of Thomas Jefferson, Esq. into the Presidency of the United States.”

Following what the newspaper called “an “elegant entertainment,” participants raised their glasses in tributes to Jefferson, Burr, Adams, the Constitution and the memory of George Washington. “At each toast a volley of small arms were fired.”

“Afterwards the Citizens with lighted Tapers, marched to the Monongahela river, and returned in the same order to the house, where they spent the remainder of the evening with the greatest hilarity.”

1804: PITTSBURGH ALMANACK MIXES PRACTICAL, POETIC

Pittsburgh had a population of less than sixteen hundred when the community got its second newspaper.

The Pittsburgh Almanack for 1804 was printed for bookseller Zadok Cramer by John Israel, the editor of Pittsburgh’s second newspaper, the Tree of Liberty. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

In August 1800, John Israel’s Tree of Liberty began publication. It was a pro-Jefferson newspaper supported by Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and it served as a Democratic-Republican counterweight to John Scull’s the Pittsburgh Gazette, which backed the Federalists. Like Scull, Israel was a busy printer, publishing, among other works, annual editions of the Pittsburgh Almanack for bookseller Zadok Cramer.

Cramer’s version was in the style of Benjamin Franklin’s very popular Poor Richard’s Almanack, produced between 1732 and 1758 in Philadelphia and widely copied. In addition to providing weather forecasts, planting tips and information on lunar and solar cycles, the 1804 edition of the Almanack contained poetry, health advice, travel information and a plea to women to save old clothes for paper making:

To enable us to publish an Almanack yearly, our good housewives, and their pretty little daughters, will not forget to save all the rags they can possibly spare—remembering the old maxim—“Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost.” Save them from the ash heap, the wood pile, or the nursery—wash them clean and pack them in an old barrel or a rag-bag made for the purpose—lose nothing that is made of hemp, flax or cotton.

Copies of several Pittsburgh almanacs from the early years of the nineteenth century, including the 1804 edition, are in the archives of the Senator John Heinz History Center.

Pittsburgh produced goods worth “near 350,000 dollars” the previous year, the Almanack reported. That number could be expected to rise dramatically in the coming decades, in part because of President Thomas Jefferson’s purchase in 1803 from France of New Orleans and the Louisiana territory. Goods and passengers starting from Pittsburgh, located at the head of the Ohio, could travel all the way to the Gulf of Mexico without leaving U.S. territory. “We think the object obtained is great and important. In a commercial point of view it has given to us a second Alexandria; [and] in an agricultural, a vast tract of country, where rich and fertile soil abounds with all the luxuries and elegancies of life.”

Those luxuries could be dangerous, the Almanack warned, quoting an anonymous verse:

“Is health your care, or luxury your aim?

“Be temperate still, and when nature bids, obey.”

Readers were warned of the dangers of whiskey, spices and sauces.

Fermented liquors, which are too strong, hurt digestion; and the body is so far from being strengthened by them, [instead] is wrecked and relaxed.

All high seasonings, pickles, etc. are only incentives to luxury and never fail to hurt the stomach. It were well for mankind if cookery, as an art, were entirely prohibited.

Garlic, however, had virtues for the stout of frame. “Fat people should not eat freely of [an] oily…diet; they ought freely to use horse-radish, garlic and such things as promote perspiration and urine. Their drink should be water, coffee, tea, or the like, and they ought to take much exercise and little sleep.”

Despite growth in the number of “manufactories,” southwestern Pennsylvania’s economy in 1804 was based on agriculture, and the Almanack included advice from “Alexander Burns of Buffaloe, in Washington County” on avoiding fly infestation in wheat. His fields have “been entirely free from the destructive insect for these four years past, while his neighbors joining lines with him have generally had but thin and small crops.” What was his secret? “Never to sow new wheat, but to sow that which has remained a year at least in the granary.”

Miscellaneous Almanack information included a statistic for the average daily wage of a laborer in 1802: seventy-five cents. Based on estimated changes in the consumer price index over more than two centuries, that number is equivalent to about fifteen dollars in modern currency.

A final Almanack chart provided distances for travel from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia (308 miles, via a route through Greensburg and Lancaster) and from Pittsburgh to the Federal City, as Washington, D.C., was called (233 miles, via Bedford and Hagerstown).

1811: TWENTY-ONE HUNDRED MILES BY STEAMBOAT TO NEW ORLEANS

In October 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt was making an official visit to cities along the Mississippi River.

Roosevelt’s trip jogged the memory of New Yorker Henry Mann. He wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times recalling a historic visit to the Mississippi valley by another Roosevelt almost one hundred years earlier. “It may be worthy of note, in connection with President Roosevelt’s journey on the Mississippi, that the first steam-boat voyage on that river was made by a Roosevelt—Nicholas J. Roosevelt—of New York, one of [Robert] Fulton’s most useful and gifted associates,” Mann wrote.

“The steamboat was built at Pittsburg under Mr. Roosevelt’s directions, and was ready for its journey in September, 1811,” he wrote in a letter published October 7, 1907. Mann used the official federal spelling for the city that was in effect between 1890 and 1911.

The actual date that the vessel left Pittsburgh was October 20, 1811. “The steam boat sailed from this place, on Sunday last, for the Natchez,” was the Pittsburgh Gazette’s single-line report on its departure. “The Natchez” to which the newspaper referred was a small riverbank settlement in what was then called the Mississippi territory. From there, Roosevelt’s vessel pushed on to the city for which it was named: New Orleans.

The journey down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers took twelve weeks. While the steamboat passed scattered communities on its more than twenty-one-hundred-mile inaugural trip, most of the territory through which it traveled was wilderness.

The steamboat was built at a shipyard on the banks of the Monongahela River, below the bluff on which Duquesne University has been built. Nicholas Roosevelt, the man who oversaw construction of the New Orleans, was a member of the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family. That was the side that three generations later produced Theodore Roosevelt. Born in New York in 1767, Nicholas Roosevelt was a sometimes competitor–sometimes partner of Robert Fulton. Fulton, a Lancaster County native, and Robert Livingston are credited with constructing the Claremont, the first commercial steamboat, in 1807.

Forming a partnership with Fulton and Livingston, who stayed back east, Roosevelt came to Pittsburgh to build a similar boat. It was to serve the expanding western territories.

Roosevelt’s 1811 trip down the Ohio and Mississippi was his second journey to New Orleans. In 1809, he and his new bride, the former Lydia Latrobe, had made a honeymoon voyage by flatboat from Pittsburgh to the mouth of the Mississippi. That voyage gave Roosevelt a chance to spy out the dangers and navigation problems his steamboat would face two years later.

“With pleasure we announce, that the Steam Boat lately built at this place by Mr. Roosevelt…fully answers the most sanguine expectations that were formed of her sailing,” the Gazette reported on Friday, October 18, 1811. The watercraft had finished a successful trial run the previous Tuesday, the newspaper said. Although built in Pittsburgh, once the boat left, it would never return. “We are told that she is intended as a regular packet between Natchez and New Orleans,” readers were advised. A “packet” is the term for a regularly scheduled boat carrying mail, passengers and cargo.

“Mr. Roosevelt was accompanied on the journey by his wife, to whom he had been recently married,” Mann wrote. Mann was incorrect in believing that Nicholas and Lydia were newlyweds. When they left Pittsburgh aboard the New Orleans, they were accompanied by their toddler daughter, who had been born shortly after the end of their 1809 flatboat trip.

Mary Helen Dohan, the author of Mr. Roosevelt’s Steamboat, a 1981 history of the voyage, wrote that some Pittsburghers were scandalized that Roosevelt was risking the lives of his again-pregnant wife and their child on such a perilous trip.

Over the next three months, the travelers faced danger from both human enemies and nature. They were attacked by Indians and felt the effects of the New Madrid earthquakes. Those earthquakes were so powerful they changed the course of the Mississippi overnight.

The voyage, however, was successful. The Roosevelts and their crew made it safely to New Orleans, arriving in January 1812.

1845: “FEARFUL CALAMITY”—A GREAT FIRE—BURNS ITSELF OUT

April in Pittsburgh had been unusually dry but typically breezy in 1845. “Between the weather, the wind and the dust, the city was excessively unpleasant,” according to the April 14 edition of the Daily Gazette and Advertiser.

About five minutes after noon on April 10, what had been unpleasant became catastrophic. A woman had been building an outdoor fire next to a home on Ferry Street—just west of present-day Market Street—when it got out of control and engulfed the adjoining house. “The fire originated in the centre of a nest of wooden buildings, and fed by the breeze, [it] cracked, leaped and fairly licked the dry wood,” the April 14 Gazette said. “After enveloping the frames, it took across the street in different directions.”

News of the Great Fire of Pittsburgh reached Europe within a few weeks of the disaster. An engraving showing the blaze was published in the May 17, 1845 edition of the Illustrated London News. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

By the time the fire was brought under control about eight hours later, it had burned between a quarter and a third of the city. Almost one thousand buildings were destroyed in an area of about fifty acres. The hardest-hit area faced the Monongahela River, lying roughly between Market and Ross Streets, but extending farther east along the river into a neighborhood then called Pipetown.

“At 6 o’clock, p.m., Thursday evening, we sat down to our desk with a sad heart to record the most fearful calamity which ever befell any city the size of Pittsburgh,” editor David Wright wrote in the Friday, April 11 edition of the Gazette. “While we now write, an awful fire is raging, consuming the fairest portion of our city, and no human being can tell where it will stay its ravages.”

Alerted to the danger by the ringing of the steeple bell of the Third Presbyterian Church, firemen had responded quickly, the paper said. “The engines at this time began to play, and had there been a sufficiency of water, would have subdued the fire. But from want of water, and high wind, the fire extended across Second Street to the Globe Cotton Factory, which, together with a dwelling adjoining, was consumed.” Although damaged, Third Presbyterian was one of only three buildings on its block to survive the blaze.

Loss of life was low. “We regret to learn that Samuel Kingston, Esq. has been missing since the fire was raging on Thursday afternoon,” the Gazette reported two days after the blaze. “He was last seen going into his burning office! It is feared he is lost.”

What may be most surprising in the contemporary newspaper reports describing the great fire is how quickly residents and business began to rebuild. “BUILDING BEGUN TODAY,” the April 14 edition of the newspaper reported. “As many of our indomitable citizens are able to build…and could get contracts made, [they] have done so, and new buildings are begun today. This is the right kind of spirit.”

The Daily Gazette and Advertiser had a reputation as the businessman’s paper, and it warned against “imposition” by uppity workers. “Some laborers are already asking exorbitant wages,” it warned. “Don’t give them. There will be plenty [of workmen] here in a short time, and then those who would take advantage of the necessities of the contractors and the Merchants can be marked and refused work altogether.”

By May 10, “J.W. Burbridge & Co.—wholesale grocers and commission merchants” advertised that it was back in business in the middle of the “Burnt District” on Front Street, between Wood and Smithfield. Warehouse storage remained tight in the city, and Burbridge shared space with “Wm. Wilson Jr., Wholesale Grocer.”

“Nearly half a hundred houses are already wholly or partly up—several hundred are under contract, but as they are mostly large Warehouses and Stores intended to be substantial and well-furnished, they proceed more slowly,” according to the May 13 newspaper.

By mid-May, the newspaper’s concern was that outsiders would believe Pittsburgh worse off than it was, and that perception would hurt business. “While Madame Rumor, with her busy tongue, was spreading the most dismal reports all over the country—‘stocks all burnt up;’ ‘prices 100 per cent higher,’ &c [sic], trade quietly accommodated itself to the circumstances; and in a few days moved along as usual,” the paper reported.

One more sign that things were getting back to normal: In that same edition, editor White revealed that he would be absent for a few weeks, “in obedience to the claims of humanity, and urgent business. He trusts his readers will grant him this furlough with cheerfulness.”

1854: PITTSBURGH TO PHILADELPHIA IN—GULP—A DAY

When stockholders of the Pennsylvania Railroad gathered in Philadelphia on February 6, 1854, that meeting was big news in Pittsburgh.

The railroad’s mountain division, which had been digging tunnels and laying track through the Alleghenies, had finished its work, the Pittsburgh Gazette reported February 10. “A locomotive passed through the Allegheny tunnel and the division will be placed in a condition for use during the present month,” according to the newspaper. “An express train will then be run through Philadelphia to Pittsburgh in 15 hours,” the paper said. That “time will be further reduced during the coming summer, when a double track is expected across the mountains, and the line is placed in a condition for high velocities.”

When Pittsburgh was founded almost one hundred years earlier, the journey between Philadelphia and the Forks of the Ohio could take several weeks. As canals and rail lines were constructed out from both the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh ends of the cross-state route, travel time dropped to less than a week. But the three-thousand-foot elevations of the ancient Alleghenies remained a big barrier to moving goods and people quickly and cheaply between the Atlantic coast and the Ohio valley.

The 1834 completion of the Allegheny Portage Railroad had further speeded up travel by linking the eastern and western portions of the Pennsylvania Canal. Barges and rail cars could be carried up and down the Allegheny ridge on a series of inclines similar to those still used to transport passengers to the top of Pittsburgh’s Mount Washington. The system was called a railroad because the vehicles moved on rails.

Completion of Horseshoe Curve, west of Altoona, and the Summit Tunnel, now known as the Allegheny Tunnel, opened the way in 1854 for a continuous, all-rail route across the state. Not only would the trip be faster, but it also would be less expensive. With the Pennsylvania Railroad no longer having to pay a fee to the portage railroad for use of its thirty-six-mile-long system, “the fare between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh will be reduced from $9.50 to $8,” the Gazette said. The one-way fare still wasn’t cheap. It is equivalent to about $200 in modern currency.

The formal date for the start of rail service on the Pennsylvania’s mountain division was February 15. The Gazette took note of that landmark date in the previous day’s edition: “This evening the first passenger train on the eastern road through the tunnel, avoiding all the inclined planes, will leave this city at half past 9 o’clock. No doubt many of our citizens will embrace this opportunity of visiting the East.”

“It will be something to think of and talk about to be on the first passenger train through and over the Allegheny Mountains,” the newspaper said. “It is, indeed, a great event and ought to have a fitting celebration.”

The completion of cross-state service meant changes for railroads that provided service to communities west of Pittsburgh. The Ohio and Pennsylvania Railroad, which linked Allegheny City—now Pittsburgh’s North Side—to central Ohio, quickly amended its schedule. At Crestline, which straddles Ohio’s Crawford and Richland Counties, passengers could connect with trains providing service to Chicago and Cincinnati. Travel from Cincinnati to Philadelphia, the Gazette noted on February 18, had been trimmed to thirty hours.

The Ohio and Pennsylvania Railroad also began offering a commuter service. Starting February 23, businesspeople from as far away as Wooster—about 120 miles west of Pittsburgh—could catch an early morning mail train that would get them to the city before noon. They would be able to remain “here several hours in the business part of the day, and [return] home before bed time,” according to the Gazette. The new service would be “a great convenience to our friends in Ohio, and an important advantage to the trade of the city,” the newspaper said. “The route through Pittsburgh is now…the most speedy and the most pleasant, between the East and the West; and we are glad to perceive that the traveling public are becoming aware to the fact.”

1856: REPUBLICANS GET THEIR ACT TOGETHER DOWNTOWN

Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, is often credited with offering the advice, “Go West, young man.”

In 1856—years before he used that line in an editorial—Greeley crossed the Alleghenies and traveled to Pittsburgh. He was one of the best-known delegates at the national organizing convention for the new Republican Party. While those attending included a handful of southerners, most were from northern, western and border states.

The two-day session began February 22 in Lafayette Hall, which was on Wood Street, between what are now Third and Fourth Avenues. “The hall, it is estimated, will hold comfortably eight or nine hundred,” the Pittsburgh Post reported in its February 25 convention wrap-up story. “Yet there was room enough for all the delegates, all the sympathizers and all those who looked in from curiosity.”

In 1856, the Republican Party organized itself in Lafayette Hall on Wood Street. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

Greeley’s address to the delegates was one of the first-day highlights. “Loud cries were now made for Greeley! Greeley!” the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette reported on February 23. “The white coat and broad, bald head of the Tribune editor was seen moving toward the Speaker’s stand, and, as he mounted it, he was greeted by a perfect whirlwind of applause.”

Bringing together former Whigs, some anti-immigrant Know-Nothings and antislavery Democrats, the Republicans sought to form a shaky coalition united in opposition to the expansion of slavery. Their cause had been invigorated two years earlier when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed residents to decide whether their territory should enter the union as a slave or free state. It effectively overturned the Missouri Compromise, which had forbidden slavery in the northern portion of the Louisiana territory. The result was Bleeding Kansas, a mini–civil war in which slavery supporters and opponents poured in from neighboring territories, shooting and stabbing each other.

Greeley began his talk urging conciliation. “Not only our acts but our words should indicate an absence of ill-mind toward the South,” he told the delegates. But he warned of the potential for future violence. “My apprehensions are dark,” the Gazette quoted Greeley in its February 23 edition. “I know that Jefferson Davis, an implacable hater of the free State policy, is at the head of the War Department.”

Slaveholding Missourians controlled the new Kansas legislature and had made it a felony to oppose slavery. “Unless those laws are abrogated, our brothers will fall,” Greeley told the Republicans. “If the people of Kansas come together to make their own laws, they are treated as rebels.” Greeley proposed sending GOP counselors to help antislavery supporters “maintain their rights and yet not throw themselves into the jaws of rebellion.”

The resolutions adopted by the new party in its closing session on February 23 offered support for free-soil Kansas and opposition to Democrat Franklin Pierce’s administration.

We will support by every lawful means our brethren in Kansas in their constitutional and manly resistance to the usurped authority of their lawless invaders; and will give the full weight of our political power in favor of the immediate admission of Kansas to the union as a free, sovereign and independent state.

Believing the present National Administration has shown itself to be weak and faithless, and that its continuance in power is identified with the progress of the slave power to national supremacy, with the exclusion of freedom from the territories and with increasing civil discord—it is a leading purpose of our organization to oppose and overthrow it.

Judge Rufus Spalding, of Ohio, asked for the unanimous adoption of the resolutions “without discussion, and that being done, we give nine cheers for our party,” according to the February 25 Gazette. It being a political rally, there was brief discussion before the vote. “It was unanimously carried,” the Gazette reported. “The whole assemblage then rose to its feet and nine thunderous cheers were given amidst intense enthusiasm.”

In its final bit of business in Pittsburgh, the Republicans agreed to meet June 17 in Philadelphia to select their first-ever candidate for president. Delegates there picked soldier-explorer John C. Fremont. On November 3, 1856, he and Know-Nothing candidate Millard Fillmore lost a three-man race to Democrat James Buchanan, Pennsylvania’s only president.

1908: “CEREMONIES, PLEASANT RIOTING” MARK CITY’S 150TH BIRTHDAY

Organizers of Pittsburgh’s sesquicentennial celebration on October 2, 1908, took on projects big enough to match the polysyllabic name of the city’s 150th birthday.

Pittsburgh marked its 150th anniversary in 1908 with a parade and the groundbreaking for what is now called Soldiers & Sailors Military Museum and Memorial. Courtesy Darrell Sapp of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Keynote events included the laying of cornerstones for the long-planned Soldiers Memorial Hall and for the School of Mines at the newly renamed University of Pittsburgh. Founded in 1787 as the Pittsburgh Academy, the institution had been known for many years as the Western University of Pennsylvania.

The dual ceremonies in the city’s Oakland neighborhood drew “the vice president of the United States, the governor of Pennsylvania and many men who rank high in national state and local affairs,” according to the October 3 edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times. Founded in 1786, the newspaper described itself as “the Oldest Work of Man in Pittsburgh, the Blockhouse Alone Excluded.”

Soldiers Memorial Hall, now known as Soldiers & Sailors Military Museum and Memorial, still faces Fifth Avenue. The School of Mines, the first structure built on Pitt’s Oakland campus, was demolished years ago. “HOPES OF VETERANS REALIZED,” one Gazette-Times headline proclaimed. “PROUD DAY FOR UNIVERSITY,” said a second. “The two buildings will rise almost side by side and both will stand as monuments to the causes to which they are to be devoted,” the newspaper said.

“On the hillside above Memorial Hall, where Pittsburghers threw up fortifications when they feared the Confederates would invade the city, [an artillery] battery was yesterday planted,” the newspaper said. “It roared a salute.”

One of the main speakers was General Horace Porter, a Medal of Honor winner. “If any county deserves to have a [Civil War] memorial, it is Allegheny,” he told the crowd. “No soldier was ever allowed to pass your border without a word of cheer and a good meal.”

Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks spoke at both ceremonies. In his remarks at the School of Mines event, he called Pittsburgh a perfect location for an institution dedicated to industrial training and research.

“The vast industrial development which you witness upon every hand hereabout, the tremendous furnaces and factories which have given to Pittsburgh primacy among the industrial centers of America and the world…render it quite appropriate that you should lead in the important work of developing the science of mines and mining,” he said. “Indeed, this is essential if you would retain the position of leadership which you have long held in the mechanical area.”

In addition to his official duties, Fairbanks had a personal reason for being in Pittsburgh. He attended the christening of his first grandson and namesake, Charles Warren Fairbanks III. “Yesterday was the first time the two met,” the Gazette-Times reported. The eight-week-old baby “had no appreciation of the honor done him and refused to smile, even when it was said he was as perfect an image of his grandfather as a baby could be of a bearded man.”

“The vice president, however, smiled and declared he had never seen so fine a boy,” the newspaper concluded.

While serious ceremonies were taking place in Oakland, residents of the city’s South Side were holding a birthday carnival. “They turned loose quite early and kept it up till late,” the paper said. “From Tenth to Twentieth Street, along Carson, was a scene of merriment. Along here old and young promenaded, throwing confetti to the winds together, shoving feather ticklers into the faces of passers-by—rioting pleasantly, in a neighborly way.”

The anonymous reporter was struck by the variety of outfits worn by South Siders. One young woman wore “an immense green Merry Widow hat. This really looked to be larger than an umbrella….Off the main thoroughfare there were side shows galore…[including a] Ferris wheel that wafted you in the air fully as high as the third story.”

One show, admission ten cents, featured a female performer named “Aimee.” The newspaper raised the question of who she was and what she did but ultimately declined to provide an answer. “Why that would be giving away the information that it takes a dime to get,” the story said. “And also it wouldn’t be kind to the man at the door.”

CHAPTER 5

PITTSBURGH MAKES…

1862: NO EXAGGERATING HORRORS OF ARSENAL EXPLOSION

What were believed to be exaggerated reports of deaths and injuries at the United States Arsenal in Lawrenceville turned out to have underestimated the ghastliness of the event.

“As soon as the cause of the explosion, which was distinctly heard in various parts of the city, became known, there was a general rush for the scene,” the Pittsburgh Daily Post reported on September 18, 1862, the morning after the disaster. “We went with the crowd, and found that reality for once exceeded the report.” An estimated seventy-nine people, all but a few women or young girls, died in the disaster, “the most terrible calamity which has ever befallen our city,” the Post said.

The arsenal had been founded in 1814, and government workers made and stored munitions there for the next hundred years. During the Civil War, its mostly female workforce produced many kinds of artillery shells and cartridges for the Union army.

One large structure, known as the laboratory, “was laid in ruins—having been heaved up by the force of the explosion and then fallen in fragments, after which it caught fire and was consumed,” according to the September 18 edition of the competing Pittsburgh Gazette. “The building was of frame, and in a few minutes the dead bodies were seen lying in heaps, just as they had fallen when the explosion took place.” Both papers included graphic detail on the appearance of the victims. “In some parts, where the heat was intense, nothing but whitened bones could be seen,” the Gazette said. “A few bones and the steel bands used to stiffen their hoop skirts were all that was left of some victims.”

Arsenal Park is now a leafy refuge in Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville neighborhood. In 1862, however, an estimated seventy-nine people died in a horrific explosion at the munitions works for which the park is named. Courtesy Bill Wade of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Efforts by local physicians to treat victims and by firefighters from nearby Pittsburgh to put out the flames drew praise from the newspapers. Not everyone, however, had come to help.

Exploding munitions had left many victims with shrapnel and gunshot wounds. “In the side of another girl, seven Minie balls were discovered,” the Gazette reported. “These balls…were all picked out and carried off by curiosity seekers….A small brass tube, supposed to be a cannon primer, was picked from the heart of one of the victims.”

The next day’s papers speculated on possible causes. “One account says it was occasioned by the explosion of a shell, a number of which, being sent off for shipment, fell and caused a concussion,” the Post reported. “Others allege that it was occasioned by friction of some powder from one of three barrels unloaded upon the porch of the laboratory.”

“A young lady, with whom we conversed, and who was employed in the building, states that the explosion was caused by a boy, who let fall a shell which he was carrying,” the Gazette said.

An Allegheny County coroner’s jury was convened two days after the explosion to look into what happened. Witness J.R. Frick had been delivering different types of powder to the various workrooms in the laboratory where armaments were assembled that afternoon. “I saw a fire [in the] powder on the ground between the wheels of the wagon and the [laboratory] porch,” he said, according to the September 20 edition of the Gazette. “The powder in the roadway…evidently ignited from the fore wheel of my wagon.”

He also said he recalled seeing several barrels of powder that had been left uncovered. The fire from the loose powder spread to one of the open barrels, Mr. Frick said. When it blew up, “the action of the air cast me out of the wagon against the palings of the fence,” but he was unburned and uninjured by debris. “I was covered to a depth of 2 feet with the ruins,” he said. “I removed myself as hastily as possible, when I was again covered with a portion of the roof of the laboratory.”

The bodies of many of the victims could not be identified. Most were buried a few blocks away in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery.

The arsenal continued to operate through the Civil War and remained a government facility into the early years of the twentieth century. Located between Thirty-ninth and Fortieth Streets, it is now the site of Arsenal Park. A commemorative plaque installed in 1965 by the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania recalls the tragedy.

1877: RUMORS, RUINS REMAIN AFTER RAIL STRIKE

The Great Railroad Strike began with “a stupendous blunder,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported on July 23, 1877. It ended “in outrageous crime.”

The country had been in recession since the Panic of 1873, brought on in part by overbuilding of railroads. As many companies went bankrupt, they dragged down the banks that had invested heavily in them.

As part of its cost-cutting effort, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced a 10 percent wage reduction in June 1877. That was followed in July with a plan to reduce employment by doubling from eighteen to thirty-six the number of cars on some of its Pittsburgh freight trains. On July 19, Pennsylvania engineers, conductors and brakemen walked away from the proposed “doubleheader” trains. When the railroad found other workers willing to man them, strikers stopped them from operating the equipment.

Union Depot on Liberty Avenue was the focus of angry workers and rioters during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

Pennsylvania governor John Hartranft called out Western Pennsylvania National Guard troops, but officials realized local citizen soldiers would not be reliable. Philadelphia militia units were ordered to Pittsburgh. Even 131 years ago—before the birth of professional football and hockey leagues—there was bad blood between the state’s two largest cities.

When approximately six hundred soldiers from Philadelphia arrived around 1:00 p.m. on July 21, they faced a crowd already in the thousands and growing each hour. “The delay in the arrival of troops caused the hope to be entertained among the strikers that the attempt to clear the track was not to be made that afternoon,” the Gazette reported July 23.

It wasn’t until about 5:00 p.m. that about half the soldiers in the Philadelphia units moved out, walking down the tracks from Twenty-eighth Street toward downtown, with strikers blocking their way. “Someone in the rear [of the crowd] commenced throwing stones,” according to the Gazette. “Some accounts also state that a shot was fired from the mob into the troops… statements also conflict as to whether any order was given to fire or not.”

According to the newspaper, the panicky soldiers shot both into the crowd and at the spectators on the hill above the tracks. “The hillside was black with people, and the bullets took fearful effect among them,” the paper said. “Mrs. E. Keener, who was standing on the hillside with a baby in her arms, was struck by a bullet, which killed her child and inflicted a severe wound upon her….A laborer on his way home from work was, while walking up the hill with his tin bucket in his hand, shot in the back of the head.” About twenty people were killed.

“While the crowd was momentarily panic-struck and scattered by this calamity, its real effect was to inflame the passions of the strikers and their friends to the highest pitch of frenzy.”

At around 7:00 p.m., the soldiers gave up their efforts to get downtown and withdrew into a Pennsylvania Railroad roundhouse near Twenty-sixth Street and Liberty. By that time strikers had broken into several of the city’s armories and stolen weapons. The besieged soldiers were under rifle and musket fire from early evening into the middle of the night. Then the mob got more serious, unsuccessfully sending several burning railroad cars down toward the roundhouse, trying to set it ablaze. Just before daylight, the rioters ignited an oil car and were able to get it close enough to the roundhouse to set the building on fire.

The soldiers withdrew, retreating east on what was then Penn Street to Butler Street, headed for the Allegheny Arsenal in Lawrenceville. Both sides exchanged fire as the crowd pursued the troops. “On this march five soldiers were killed and one of the Gatling guns was twice fired into the pursuing rioters,” the Gazette reported. “General [Robert M.] Brinton told our reporters that he could have killed hundreds of men, but his heart grew sick at contemplation of the slaughter he could cause, and he refrained.”

The troops faced more problems when they arrived at the federal arsenal. “On arriving there, [General Brinton] knocked at the gate but was refused admittance.” The soldiers retreated farther east. “Upon reaching the bridge that crosses the Allegheny river at Sharpsburg, the mob stopped pursuing, and the troops were molested no further.”

With the Philadelphia soldiers gone and the local militia having stacked its arms, rioters took control of the city.

What happened next was what the Gazette called “The Reign of Anarchy in the Smoky City.”

The Pennsylvania Railroad’s Strip District roundhouse was one of many properties burned during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

Somewhere around a dozen people were killed during the Homestead steel strike of 1892, which is probably the best-known labor dispute in western Pennsylvania. More than twice that number died during the railroad strike.

The bloody events in Pittsburgh were part of a nationwide labor uprising directed in large part against railroads, which were among the country’s most powerful corporations. After National Guard units from Philadelphia were driven out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Railroad property became the target of strikers, rioters, looters and opportunists who briefly took control of several neighborhoods in the city.

“From Seventh Avenue along the railroad track nearly to Thirty-Second Street, a distance of about two miles, the destruction of property is complete, nothing remaining but indestructible material,” the Commercial Gazette reported on July 24. “Passing along this long line of the fire, the scene presented a most desolate one, indeed, calculated to vividly impress the beholder with the terrible results of the brief reign of the mob.”

Near Grant Street and what is now Seventh Avenue, a three-story freight office was gutted, while an adjoining freight depot and Adams Express building were in ashes. “Of the huge grain elevator, a conspicuous feature of the junction of Grant, Liberty and Washington streets, only the lofty smoke stack and fragments of the foundation walls remain, and nearly opposite, across the tracks, the Panhandle locomotive house stands roofless and windowless. The Union depot is a ragged mass of ruins….Near it a few freight cars and one locomotive remain intact, but thence eastwardly to the outer depot and for the three squares beyond nothing remains of the hundreds of freight and passenger cars but the wheels and other iron work.”

While the loss of life had been great—at least twenty strikers and bystanders and a half-dozen soldiers—the Gazette sought to end rumors of even higher casualties during the weekend of shooting and arson. One report said that fifteen Philadelphia militiamen had burned to death in the railroad roundhouse where they were under attack by rioters during the night of July 21–22. “It was utterly devoid of truth,” the Gazette reported. “Gen. [Robert M.] Brinton said that when he left the roundhouse he took every man with him. It is pretty well understood, though the General did not say so, that some of his men deserted.”

An April 11, 1877 illustration from Harper’s Weekly shows that only brick chimneys stood after the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

The next day’s paper had an update on missing militiamen:

On Saturday evening, after the firing which so inflamed the people, quite a number of [the soldiers] boarded the first passenger train that went East, and when the conductor put them off, they begged and [pleaded] for permission to remain. They escaped detection when the train was searched by the rioters at Twenty-Eighth Street by taking off their coats and sitting in their shirt sleeves. Among the deserters was an officer, who said that if he ever got to Philadelphia alive, he would never again be caught in such a scrape.

When it wasn’t shooting down rumors in other publications, the Gazette was not above offering its own thinly sourced story. General Alfred L. Pearson, a Civil War hero and former Allegheny County district attorney, had commanded Pittsburgh militia units that had been replaced by what were believed to be more reliable Philadelphia troops. While it was those out-of-town soldiers who had fired on strikers and bystanders, it was Pearson’s home that became a weekend target of the rioters.

“Mrs. Gen. Pearson was so terrified by the threats of the mob on Saturday and Sunday nights against her husband that her hair is said to have turned white….They also brought a coffin to her, it is said, and swore they intended to kill her husband and place him in it.”

While the Gazette described most of the victims in a line or two, a few received more attention. “Lieut. Dorsey Ash, of the Keystone Battery and a teller for the First National Bank of Philadelphia, is still…in a very dangerous condition,” the Gazette reported on July 24. “He is badly wounded in the left leg and knee, and is so low that the surgeons hesitate about amputating the limb for fear that the operation will kill him.”

The next day’s paper contained bad news: Lieutenant Ash had died that afternoon. “His wife and father arrived just in time to see him breathe his last, getting there about five minutes before his decease…his death is one of the saddest events connected with this saddest of all sad periods in the history of Pittsburgh.”

1881: GOMPERS HELPS WORKERS OF THE U.S. UNITE

When Samuel Gompers arrived here in November 1881 for a National Labor Congress, the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette was apprehensive. The newspaper warned that as leader of what it saw as “the Socialistic element,” he might fatally divide the labor movement.

Gompers, the president of the International Cigar Maker’s Union, was thirty-one years old. A union member since age fourteen, he became president of his local at twenty-five. In its November 16 edition, the Commercial Gazette described Gompers “as one of the smartest men present” for the four-day labor meeting. “It is thought that an attempt will be made to capture the organization for Mr. Gompers,” the newspaper reported. “Whether it succeeds or not, there will likely be some lively work as the delegates opposed to Socialism are determined not to be controlled by it. If the Socialists do not have their own way, they may bolt, as they have always done in the past. If they do bolt, the power of the proposed organization will be seriously crippled,” the newspaper warned.

The fears proved unfounded.

In his opening remarks, Gompers told the assembled delegates from twelve states that “he had come to Pittsburgh, not to air his opinions but to work, not to build a bubble, but to lay the foundation for a superstructure that would be solid.”

Gompers maintained his conciliatory attitude the next day when it came time to elect officers for what would be called the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions—a direct ancestor of the American Federation of Labor. When Gompers’s name was proposed as chairman by the labor convention’s organizing committee, he faced immediate opposition. Two rival candidates, Richard Powers, head of the Lake Seamen’s Union, and John Jarrett, president of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, were nominated from the floor.

“For a time it looked as if the chairmanship would be hotly contested, but Mr. Gompers poured oil on the troubled waters by stating that he was thoroughly devoted to trade unions, and in order to facilitate the work of completing the organization, would withdraw his name,” the Commercial Gazette reported on November 17. “Mr. Powers graciously followed suit, and Mr. Jarrett was unanimously chosen Permanent Chairman.” Gompers and Powers shared the number-two spot.

Delegates to that first convention, which was held downtown in Turner Hall on Sixth Avenue, passed resolutions that took decades to become law but that now are accepted parts of labor policy. They supported establishment of a standard eight-hour workday, an end to the use of convict labor and a prohibition on factory work for children younger than fourteen.

One delegate “painted a graphic picture of the misery of the child laborers of the Pacific slope and how they were growing up in ignorance,” the Commercial Gazette reported on November 18. Gompers then described his investigations of young children who spent long days rolling cigars in tenement apartments: “He found little children who were too young to understand any of the questions asked of them, but yet were compelled to work from before daylight until after dark, and [described] how he often found the little ones fast asleep before their work.”

“Other delegates recounted their experiences…which were pathetic enough to bring tears to most eyes,” the paper said. If those stories “could be published in full, they would form a powerful argument in favor of keeping the little ones out of the work shops and sending them to school where they belong.”

The convention backed tariffs to protect U.S. manufacturers from goods produced with cheaper foreign labor and regulations to protect U. S. workers from competition from imported foreign contract laborers. Delegates also called for laws that would require employers to care for workers injured in industrial accidents—the idea behind modern workers’ compensation programs. The delegates—perhaps worried about being tarred with a “socialist” brush—voted down a proposal calling for government acquisition and operation of railroads and telegraph companies.

When the organization formed in Pittsburgh morphed into the American Federation of Labor in 1886, Gompers became its president. He served, except for one year, until his death in 1924.

He formed an unlikely posthumous connection with one of Pittsburgh’s best-known business figures. The labor leader and Andrew Carnegie both are buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

1891: DARK, DEADLY DAYS UNDERGROUND

Some men are just born to suffer bad luck. That’s how the Pittsburgh Press described mine superintendent Fred C. Keighley on its editorial page.

“This man has been connected…with three serious mine explosions within the last few years,” the newspaper noted on January 30, 1891. “It does not appear that the disasters have occurred through any fault of his, but he has been unfortunate enough to be in charge.”

The third and most horrific of those calamities took place January 27, 1891, at Henry Clay Frick’s Mammoth Mine in Westmoreland County. “Over 100 miners killed,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported the next day. “Not a Man Is Left Who Can Tell the Cause of the Sudden, Terrific Explosion.”

Henry Clay Frick, seen in an engraving by J.J. Cade, was the owner of the Mammoth Mine. A total of 107 miners died there in an explosion in 1891. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

The disaster happened around 9:00 a.m. near Youngwood. The suspected cause was firedamp, the nineteenth-century name for the mixture of methane and other flammable gases that added to the danger of bituminous coal mining. The pocket of gas apparently had been ignited by a worker’s oil lamp. Miners who were not burned to death in the explosion were suffocated by the afterdamp, a deadly mix of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. “Miners, Mules and Cars Packed into a Clotted Mass,” a headline in the January 28 edition of the Gazette said.

Once the initial fire had been extinguished, about sixty bodies were brought out. Then a new blaze began, and rescue efforts had to be halted for several hours. By noon the next day, 106 bodies had been removed from the mine. The discovery of a final victim raised the death toll to 107.

Many of the dead miners were buried on January 28 in St. John the Baptist Cemetery in Scottdale. A crowd of about five thousand gathered in the rain for the evening graveside service, according to the Gazette. “This was undoubtedly the saddest day that Scottdale, as well as the entire coke region, has ever witnessed,” the Gazette reported on January 29, the day after the mass burial.

Pine coffins arrived by train and were loaded onto fifteen horse-drawn wagons. “Three coffins were placed on each wagon,” the Pittsburgh Press reported January 29. “It required all the strength of two horses to get a team through the roads, which already covered for several inches with mud, were made muddier still by a fine, drizzling rain which started to fall about 4 o’clock. The passage from the train to the cemetery was a battle between muscle and mud.”

“When the first coffins reached the burying ground[,] the men were still at work with pick and shovel.” Workers had dug two parallel trenches, each about 150 feet long. Coffins were placed in rows on wooden boards next to the hastily prepared burial sites. “At the head of the graves the Rev. Father A.M. Lambing took his position….The coffins were placed close to each other. Their headboards, containing the name [of the man in] the box, were stuck into the ground. The early winter night closed in with 100 men at work burying their fellow employees.”

One, and possibly two, of the victims brought to Scottdale was fated not to rest in peace. The body of “Billy Buchell, No. 26” was sent on to Latrobe for burial there. Another of the “coffins may be removed as the remains are said to be those of a Protestant,” the Press reported. “This was discovered at a late hour.”

The Mammoth Mine disaster happened seven months after a similar explosion killed thirty-one workers at the Hill Farm Mine near Dunbar, Fayette County. “The Dunbar disaster has been repeated and overshadowed,” the Gazette said.

The year 1891 was a terrible time to be a coal miner in Pennsylvania. Of the 956 workers who died in coal mining accidents that year, more than two-thirds were killed in this state, according to U.S. Department of the Interior statistics. Things got even worse over the next fifteen years, with 1907 ultimately becoming the deadliest year in U.S. mining history. There were 3,242 deaths that year. Almost half—1,507—happened in Pennsylvania’s hard- and soft-coal mines, according to a 1916 government reported compiled by Albert H. Fay.

Whatever bad luck accompanied Keighley, he did survive both the Mammoth explosion and threats by surviving workers, “rendered insane by grief,” to hang him. It was to the credit of the “men in the coke region… that they were dissuaded from their cowardly design,” the Press opined. “There are enough horrors already…without adding murder to the list.”

1894: MR. COXEY GOES TO WASHINGTON

Allegheny City officials kept close watch on the two hundred or so members of Coxey’s Army when the ragtag band arrived on the North Side on April 3, 1894.

The group’s formal name was the Commonweal of Christ. Led by businessman Jacob Coxey, the army was headed on foot from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C. Coxey’s goal was to seek congressional support for his plan to issue $500 million in interest-free bonds. Proceeds would be used to pay unemployed men to build roads at a time when the country was in a deep economic depression. “Enthusiastic Crowds Greet the Pilgrims of Poverty,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported on April 4.

The army was encamped in Exposition Park, a baseball field in what was then the independent City of Allegheny. The ballpark was located on the North Shore between modern-day Heinz Field and PNC Park. While recognizing that they couldn’t stop the marchers from entering Allegheny, municipal leaders did their best to limit their movements once they arrived. Coxey’s second in command, Marshal Carl Browne, had announced a public parade; the city banned it, while police barred sympathetic residents from visiting the camp. The management of Allegheny’s Palace Theater invited marchers to attend a performance, but the men were forbidden to leave the ball field.

“They have not treated us decently and have penned our men up like a lot of cattle,” another of the army’s marshals told a Gazette reporter in a story that appeared April 5. “But the plan of the leaders was to meet each new order with a new submission and defeat the police by sheer force of meekness.”

While his army was small, Coxey and Browne knew how to draw and keep a crowd. “Laugh and scoff at the Coxey movement, as many do, and more wish that they could, the scene on the [Monongahela] wharf yesterday afternoon was such as to convince any but the thoughtless that these be times of unrest and discontent with prevalent social conditions,” the Gazette reported. “People came and went, but while the speaking was in progress, they mostly came, until the number of auditors at its maximum was estimated at from 15,000 to 20,000 people.”

If Allegheny police were hostile, many North Side and Pittsburgh residents gave both attention and supplies to the movement. “Just before the army was ready to move, Marshal Browne announced that a Pittsburgh firm had presented the commonweal with 500 pairs of shoes,” the Gazette reported on April 6. “This was hailed with delight by the almost shoeless marchers.” Volunteers at the front of the army carried a banner on which were written the nineteenth-century equivalent of sound bites: “Pittsburgh and Allegheny…Laws for Americans…More Money, Less Misery…Good Roads…Non-interest Bearing Bonds.”

“The army could hardly work its way through the crowd around the baseball grounds….When the army arrived at the Point it found the heads of the Pittsburgh police department there to meet it….They were given three cheers and the commonweal moved on.”

Along Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue, “the crowd…was never grander. All business had been suspended and everybody was out to see the army….The crowd on Smithfield Street was even greater….On the south side the ovation was the same.”

The army marched in a slight rain to Homestead, a working-class community still demoralized following an unsuccessful strike against Carnegie Steel Co. in 1892. Residents perked up for the arrival of Coxey’s Army. It was met at the edge of town by a cornet band and a welcoming committee of four hundred men. “One of the foremost of the leaders of the escort was William Foy, the second man to be wounded in the battle of the barges on July 6, 1892,” the Gazette reported. That fight was between strikers and Pinkerton detectives, who had arrived at the Homestead Works by barge in the middle of the night.

It turned out that the army’s warm reception in Pittsburgh and the Monongahela valley was one of the campaign’s high points. The Commonweal of Christ soon splintered following internal battles among its leaders. The march on Washington ended with a whimper on May Day when police prevented Coxey from making a speech on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The next day he was arrested, charged with trespassing on the grass around the building.

CHAPTER 6

CITY WITH A CONSCIENCE

1859: SPLIT DECISION ON SLAVERY

Few acts of Congress have so bitterly divided the country as did the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The controversial act strengthened the power of slave owners to recover their “property”—escaped slaves—from free states.

Federal support for the “peculiar institution” gained additional legal backing from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the 1857 Dred Scott case. In that ruling, a majority of the justices said that neither Dred Scott, whose master brought him into a state where slavery was outlawed, nor any other black person could be a citizen and, therefore, could not file a lawsuit to challenge enslavement.

In April 1859, readers of the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette could follow two slavery-related court disputes.

In the first case, a man faced trial for the second time in Allegheny County, charged with abducting a longtime Pittsburgh resident named G.W. Ferris. G. Shaw—no first name is given in the newspaper—had been convicted a year earlier of having “kidnapped and sold into slavery in Alabama, a man whom everybody assumed to be white,” the Gazette reported on April 7. His conviction was overturned on appeal, because the jury that found him guilty had only eleven members.

Among the witnesses at Shaw’s retrial was Ferris’s wife. “She is a very respectable looking white woman, and her child is a little cherub,” the Gazette’s reporter wrote. The writer’s descriptions of the Ferris family emphasized their fair skins. Ferris’s four-year-old child had “golden yellow” hair, “hanging in ringlets about its neck.” Mrs. Ferris “testified that she married Ferris in this city, six years ago, and never knew he was a mulatto [of mixed race] until she saw it stated in the newspapers.” At the time of the retrial, she had not seen her husband for two years.

Shaw’s defense attorney, Marshall Swartzwelder, argued that neither Ferris’s appearance nor his many years of living in freedom in Pittsburgh was relevant. What was important was that he had been born a slave. His most effective witness was Miles Owen, a slave owner from Memphis, Tennessee. Owen told the jury he had owned both Ferris and his mother and later sold him to an Alabama man named George O. Ragland.

“I inherited him by marriage, both him and his mother,” Owen testified. “I knew from the public prints and handbills that he had run away.” He identified the man Shaw had forcibly taken to Alabama as Ferris.

The Allegheny County jury took three hours to reach a decision. Shaw was found “not guilty.” The Gazette, the city’s Republican newspaper, was dismayed by the verdict. “Under the technical rules of the law, Shaw is declared not guilty, although the wife of Ferris and his wife and child are here dependent and unprotected,” the paper said on April 8. “Ferris himself is doomed to a life of hopeless bondage.”

The Gazette took more satisfaction from a ruling that same month by a federal commissioner in Philadelphia named J. Cooke Longstreth. Under the terms of the fugitive slave act, special commissioners, rather than county judges, would hear cases involving people believed to be escaped slaves.

Daniel Webster—no relation to the New Hampshire senator who had backed the fugitive slave law—had been arrested near Harrisburg and brought to Philadelphia for a hearing to determine whether or not he should be sent south. Several white witnesses testified that they recognized Webster—then known as Daniel Dangerfield—as the slave of a Virginia farmer named French Simpson. Dangerfield had escaped in 1853, but black witnesses testified that the man they knew as Webster had been in Pennsylvania as early as 1849.

Pointing to the difference in height in the descriptions of Dangerfield and Webster, Longstreth released the black man. “The colored persons outside, who now became the principal actors in the scene, rushed forward, seized him, and gave way to the most extravagant demonstrations of joy,” the Gazette reported on April 9. The Pittsburgh newspaper’s source was a Philadelphia Bulletin story.

Webster was seated in a carriage and “a double rope about two hundred feet long was attached to the vehicle and Daniel was drawn in triumph through the streets attended by hundred[s] of colored men and women who shouted and cheered.”

Recognizing that he could be rearrested and brought before a less sympathetic commissioner, Webster soon left Philadelphia. The newspaper speculated that he would take the Underground Railroad—a network of secret routes and safe houses that helped escaping slaves—to flee farther north or to Canada.

1864: CIVIL WAR RELIEF EFFORT MORE THAN “FAIR”

The most famous phrase from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address promised policies “with malice toward none; with charity for all.”

In that same speech, delivered a month before the end of the Civil War, he also pledged “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.” Ten months earlier, residents of the twin cities of Pittsburgh and Allegheny, as the North Side was then known, had done their part to fulfill the president’s oath. The Pittsburgh Sanitary Fair, a regional fundraising effort to benefit wounded Union soldiers and their families, opened June 1, 1864, near Federal and Ohio Streets.

“The day was delightful, and Providence seemed to smile upon the noble efforts made in behalf of the sick and disabled soldier,” the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette reported the next morning. “The requests of the Mayors of both cities for a suspension of business, was cordially acceded to… workshops, stores, factories, schools, and even private dwellings were abandoned, and the people turned out en masse to witness the [opening] procession and attend the inauguration ceremonies.”

“The streets along the route were thronged with spectators, male and female, and the crowd in the neighborhood of the Fair Buildings was immense.”

Paintings, machinery, floral arrangements, autographed books and historical artifacts were displayed for purchase or viewing in a half-dozen buildings. Standard admission to the fair’s floral or dining halls was fifty cents, equivalent to more than seven dollars in modern currency. Entry to other structures, including the Ladies Bazaar, Mechanics’ Hall and Picture Gallery, cost twenty-five cents per building. “We spent a couple of hours yesterday afternoon taking a look at the contents of the Old Curiosity Shop,” an anonymous reporter wrote on June 2. “It is a grand success. We had not thought it possible to gather in so short a time so large and interesting a collection of rare and curious things as are now on exhibition in the south room of the Allegheny City Hall.”

“The Old World curiosities are richer and more numerous than were anticipated. We note a fine assortment of Egyptians mummies and Etruscan vases, contributed and arranged by Mrs. Charles F. Spang.”

Fundraising activities were not limited just to the fairgrounds. Arts groups and entertainers, performing elsewhere in the area, pledged their profits toward soldiers’ relief during the eighteen-day run of the fair. Visiting Pittsburgh from Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, “Brian’s Great Show and Tom King’s Excelsior Circus” advertised multiple joint benefit performances to aid wounded soldiers.

“The Mayor of the City of Pittsburgh [will] act as treasurer [and] will see that the monies received shall be donated to the exclusive benefit of this truly charitable purpose,” a June 1 advertisement promised.

Businesses and wealthy individuals had been encouraged to make cash contributions before the fair got underway. As a result, organizers announced that $100,000—equal to more than $1.4 million today—had been received by opening day. That large number encouraged the writer for the Gazette to predict that the event might raise as much as $250,000 by its conclusion. By June 10—a little more than halfway through the run—fair activities already had raised $220,000, according to the newspaper. That amount is equivalent to more than $3 million in modern currency.

That same day’s edition also included a sobering reminder of why the fair was being held. A Gazette correspondent, writing under the name Nemo, listed the names and injuries of fourteen Pittsburgh soldiers wounded during battles in Virginia. Those on Nemo’s roster included James A. Stamford, who suffered a severe head injury; John Lauth, wounded slightly in the right eye; and James McKee, who died “in an ambulance at White House Landing [Virginia].”

“I have seen most of the persons whose names I have reported,” he wrote. “There are about two thousand wounded men here. They are being attended to as well as could be expected.”

“Our Western Pennsylvania soldiers learned with inexpressible delight and exultant pride that the Pittsburgh Sanitary Fair opened successfully,” he wrote.

According to a June 20 wrap-up story in the Gazette, the fair had raised $300,000 by the time it closed, with proceeds from an estimated $30,000 in unsold merchandise yet to be added to the total.

One beneficiary of the sanitary fair continues its mission in the twenty-first century. When the Civil War ended, on April 9, 1865, about $200,000 remained unspent from the profits of the fair. According to historian Leland D. Baldwin, that money became the “nucleus” of the endowment for Western Pennsylvania Hospital, now part of West Penn Allegheny Health System.

1869: PITTSBURGH “MARRIAGE” HEALS PRESBYTERIAN SPLIT

If Harriet Beecher Stowe was the woman whose book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, caused the Civil War, the Reverend Albert Barnes probably was the preacher most responsible for American Presbyterians’ Thirty Years’ War.

In the early 1830s, the Philadelphia minister argued against original sin and for unlimited atonement. Unlimited atonement is the belief that Jesus died for the sins of all people, while more traditional Presbyterians believed he died only for those predestined to accept him as savior. In 1837, shortly after the Reverend Barnes faced, but was acquitted of, heresy charges, Presbyterians split into Old School and New School divisions.

The New School, in general, favored a “modern” interpretation of Scripture, while the Old School backed what it believed to be the views of John Calvin, the denomination’s sixteenth-century founder. Over the decades, however, the two sides recognized that more united than divided them. The schism ended in Pittsburgh in 1869 with what the Daily Post called “The Marriage of the Assemblies.”

“The procession numbered about seven hundred gentlemen, and, without wishing to step aside to compliment or flatter those in the ranks, we must record what was the universal remark, that a finer or more dignified body of citizens was never observed together in this city,” the Pittsburgh Gazette reported on November 13, 1869.

The general assemblies of the two groups had been meeting separately in Pittsburgh for the previous two days—the New School at the Third Presbyterian Church and the Old School in the First Presbyterian building. Both groups heard from and approved a report from a Joint Committee of Union. “All that remains to be done,” the Gazette reported on November 12, “is the formal announcement…of the Basis of Union…and the dissolution of the separate Assemblies, which will take place at ten o’clock today, to be followed immediately by the ‘flowing together’ of the members in public meeting in the Third Church.”

That “flowing together” was choreographed as carefully as a military review. Delegates from each assembly were instructed to leave their churches that morning and form single lines along both sides of Fifth Avenue. “The two lines being now opposite each other, the two Moderators will pass to the centre of the street, join arms and proceed up Fifth avenue, followed by the procession, which will be formed by the two lines joining in the center of the street so that an Old School and New School Commissioner will join, and, walking arm in arm the line will pass up Fifth avenue,” the Gazette explained on the morning of the event.

The ceremonies appear to have gone off as their planners hoped. “As this important and imposing body quietly and unostentatiously moved through our streets there were none who looked idly on, but all felt deeply impressed with the solemnity of the occasion and the grandeur of the deed of reunion among so numerous a branch of the Christian family about to be ratified,” the Gazette reported the day after the events.

Coverage of the assemblies and the combined closing exercises drew gavel-to-gavel coverage in both the Daily Post and the Pittsburgh Gazette. On November 13, the Post also gave its readers no-holds-barred “Verbographic sketches” of some of the major players.

Ezra A. Huntington, DD, was fifty-six in 1869, when fifty was the present century’s seventy. “Professor Huntington, who has passed the rubicon of life… shows the footprints of the years that evidently have not fallen lightly upon him,” an anonymous reporter wrote. New Church home mission secretary Edmund Francis Hatfield “cannot be regarded as a pleasing speaker, his words being rather constrained, though distinct.”

New Jersey pastor Charles K. Imbrie was of “medium height and wiry build and frame [and] he is as mercurial and nervous as a Frenchman.” The Reverend Mr. Imbrie had a high forehead, “with his head almost destitute of capillary covering.” Lack of “capillary covering” was a nineteenth-century euphemism for baldness.

The Gazette on November 13 called the event “one of the most important ecclesiastical councils ever held in this country.” The statistics are impressive. The newly reunited Presbyterian Church brought together 2,381 ministers and 258,903 congregation members from the Old School and 1,848 ministers and 192,264 members from the New School. Librarian Anita Johnson, at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, located those numbers in the original general assembly minutes.

1889: CANUTE ON THE LITTLE CONEMAUGH

Colonel Elias J. Unger, a retired Pittsburgh hotel owner, was the president and manager of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, northeast of Johnstown.

When the club-owned dam broke on May 31, 1889, the resulting Johnstown Flood caused the deaths of more than twenty-two hundred people. “A STUPENDOUS CALAMITY,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported the next morning.

Unger briefly became the public face for the publicity-shy private club, whose members included Andrew W. Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, Henry Phipps, Robert Pitcairn and Andrew Carnegie. “When the heavy masonry gave way from the immense pressure of the pent up waters, and I had done all in my powers to avert the fearful disaster, I was thoroughly exhausted,” Unger told a reporter for the Pittsburg Press on June 5, 1889. “I returned to the house and was completely prostrated.” The story that Unger related showed him to be energetic, conscientious and quick thinking. He also shaded the truth to deflect any blame for the disaster from himself, the elite club and its wealthy members.

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper featured several images from Johnstown after the 1889 flood. This engraving shows the city’s Main Street and the ruins of the Merchants’ Hotel. Courtesy Senator John Heinz History Center.

Cambria County had been deluged by spring rains starting the day before the dam broke, turning rivulets into streams and creeks into torrents. Millions of tons of water had been impounded behind the dam in Lake Conemaugh—almost three miles long and as much as a mile wide—on the Little Conemaugh River. Lake Conemaugh was at the top of a narrow valley about seventeen miles upstream from Johnstown.

“It was raining hard on Friday [May 31], and as I lived within a short distance of the dam, I put on my gum coat and went out to look at it,” Unger told the newspaper. “The lake was then rising at the rate of four inches an hour, which is quite fast for a body of water like that.”

Engineers, historians and the National Park Service, which maintains the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, point to multiple causes for the failure of the dam. Those cited include the unprecedented heavy rainfall, hillsides denuded by clear-cutting of trees, faulty initial dam design, poor maintenance and the removal of discharge pipes that made it impossible to lower the water level of the lake from the bottom.

Witnesses to the events said that another reason the lake had risen so fast was that a weir, made of wood and wire, had been built over part of the dam’s spillway to keep game fish from escaping. Once the weir became partially blocked by debris, it reduced the amount of water that could flow down the spillway and diminish the pressure behind the earthen dam.

While Unger several times in the interview rejected any suggestion that the weir had been part of the problem, he, nevertheless, said he had ordered “laborers—10 or 15 in all—to cut a new sluiceway at the west end of the embankment.”

They worked incessantly, and the water kept coming up all the time… about 11 o’clock the flood began to assume such dangerous proportions that I ordered a civil engineer, Mr. [John] Parke, to take a horse and gallop through the valley and warn the people of the impending danger. He left in haste and did his duty, returning in time to help with the digging of the new outlet.

By the time he returned the water was beginning to flow over the dam. The new sluice was discharging a fearful volume of water, and I was advised by many of the people not to dig it or have it dug. But I am positive that by it being done, the dam was kept from bursting for fully an hour.

We also had a portion of the roadway on top of the [dam] ploughed up, which formed a breastwork. This was intended to keep the water back and divert the current toward the sluice way. We had piled the dirt to a height of several feet, and this way held the water in check for more than an hour.

At about 3:15 the dam burst, while we were still at work.

The reports that the weir or outlet for the water in the embankment was closed or clogged up is not true. It is…very wide—wide enough to allow all the water to flow out under ordinary circumstances. A screen was placed in the outlet, but that was a small concern…the remainder of the space was entirely clear and the screen was only heavy enough to keep the fish back.

While both individuals and companies sued the club and its members for damages after the flood, courts ruled—and at least one jury agreed—that the dam’s collapse had been a “visitation of providence,” or an act of God. No one ever collected any money.

1914: WHEN BILLY SUNDAY PREACHED, 1.6 MILLION LISTENED

Midwinter may have seemed like a bad time of year to mount a six-week revival program in a makeshift wooden building. It wasn’t.

“Religious Tidal Wave Rolls Over Pittsburgh,” a Gazette-Times headline said on January 12, 1914, the day after the crusade began. By the time Billy Sunday and his associates wrapped up their 124 services, almost 1.6 million people had traveled to Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood to participate. That attendance number, reported in the February 24, 1914 edition of the Gazette-Times, was equal to three times the city’s population in 1910 and about one and a half times Allegheny County’s.

Most revival services were held in a temporary wooden tabernacle, constructed at Forbes and Bellefield Avenues, where Heinz Chapel now stands. Nearby Soldiers Memorial Hall, as it was originally called, was used to handle overflow crowds and smaller services.

About 75,000 people attended opening-day programs, the newspaper estimated in its January 12 edition. “Many were turned away from the tabernacle… shortly after the doors were swung for the first service of the day,” the paper said. “During the afternoon, when Mr. Sunday spoke to the men, it was figured that 20,000 found it impossible to gain entrance to the campaign house of worship.”

Pittsburgh’s response to Billy Sunday’s revival meetings was not uncommon. Sunday was a former professional baseball player who had played for both the Pittsburgh Alleghenys and the Philadelphia Phillies in the 1880s and 1890s. Converted to evangelical Christianity, he crisscrossed the country for more than twenty years, drawing huge crowds to his revival meetings.

His first evening service gave the flamboyant Sunday “an opportunity to do many spectacular things,” the newspaper reported. These included “the shedding of his coat, which he waved wildly in the air with his right hand, then dropped it to the top of his pulpit and put it on again, as if the temperatures without had been torrid, or frigid.

“Looking straight down into the sawdust in front of his platform, as if talking with the devil himself, the Rev. William A. Sunday laughed,” the newspaper reported. “He poked fun at an imaginary devil, ‘hah-hahed’ him to scorn, and led his audience to believe he was giving Old Nick an occasional poke in his ribs with his fist.”

While Billy Sunday was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, his revivals were nondenominational Protestant events that drew listeners from many churches.

Not to be left out, the same day that Sunday began his Pittsburgh crusade, leaders of the region’s large Roman Catholic population offered a one-day event to be part of the region’s “Religious Tidal Wave.”

“FOES OF PROFANITY FORM MIGHTY HOST,” the newspaper reported elsewhere on its January 12 front page. “A demonstration such as is seldom witnessed in Pittsburgh took place yesterday when almost 10,000 men, members of the Diocesan Union Holy Name Society, gathered at the Exposition to take a solemn stand against the use of profanity and blasphemy,” the Gazette-Times said. “As many as could filled the seats and the outer aisles of the music hall and almost an equal number thronged machinery hall.” The Exposition was a complex of buildings at Pittsburgh’s Point used for fairs, conventions, trade shows and, later, ice hockey.

Speakers at this event included the Reverend Charles H. McKenna, head of the Dominican Order and the father of the Holy Name Movement. “Father McKenna was clad in the robes of the Dominican order, and as he looked over the vast audience a smile crept over his countenance,” a reporter observed. “When he seated himself, he trembled slightly from the cold and did not remove his overcoat until he was called upon to speak.”

While thousands had to be turned away from Billy Sunday’s opening events, organizers did find room for two late arrivals. Police lieutenant Hugh Duffy was approached by “a short, stocky, kindly faced man, accompanied by an elderly woman,” according to a Gazette-Times sidebar story on the revival. ‘“I’m Mr. Bryan, the secretary of state,’ the man said, ‘and this is Mrs. Bryan. We would like to slip in.’” They were guided into the service and seated four rows from the back. “Only a few persons recognized the secretary of state,” the newspaper said.

William Jennings Bryan, three times the Democratic candidate for president, was known as the Great Commoner, and during his brief visit to Pittsburgh he lived up to his nickname. “Mr. and Mrs. Bryan went to the tabernacle on a street car and back by the same route,” according to the Gazette-Times.

1920: ELECTION MARKS FIRSTS FOR WOMEN, RADIO

Driving rain did not deter women in Allegheny County from casting their first-ever ballots for president.

“A storming of the polling places by men and women in the early hours was the response to the appeals for early voting,” the Pittsburgh Press reported on Election Day, November 2, 1920. “The belief in political circles is that probably a larger per cent of the registered women than of registered men will cast ballots today, due to the enthusiasm among women over their first opportunity to vote.”

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gave adult females the right to vote, had been passed by both houses of Congress in 1919, but it hadn’t been approved by the necessary two-thirds of state legislatures until August 1920, less than three months before the general election. The presidential contest that year was between Republican Warren G. Harding and Democrat James M. Cox.

“In the Shadyside district, the voters were coming to the polls in families,” the Press reported. “In one instance a man, his wife and five daughters went to the polls in a body and after they had deposited their ballots[,] proudly announced that they were all Harding votes.”

The 1920 race proved to be groundbreaking for a second reason.

For the first time, election results were being collected and broadcast via radio, or “wireless” as it was sometimes known in its early days. KDKA announcer Leo Rosenberg reported returns that evening from a makeshift studio in East Pittsburgh to a few thousand homes that had receivers. At the same time, eight amateur radio operators in Pittsburgh’s Public Safety Building were receiving and relaying voting returns from all forty-eight states. Those numbers, updated every five minutes, “were thrown on a screen high up on the side of the Pittsburgh Life Building,” according to the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times on November 3.

The intersection of Market Street and Liberty Avenue was jammed for several blocks, the newspaper reported. “The crowd extended so far that it backed into Oliver Avenue for half a block, [with] hundreds being forced to crane their necks for a glimpse at the lighted bulletin board.”

It was a multimedia presentation. “On the second story of the downtown office, a phonograph horn protruded through the window and music familiar through a decade regaled the crowds between bulletins.”

As more and more results came in favoring Harding, GOP headquarters at Fifth Avenue and Grant Street was packed with his happy supporters, the newspaper said. Nearby at the Republican Women’s headquarters, in the 500 block of Smithfield Street, “Every available inch of space was taken.”

Harding-Cox presidential election returns were the first-ever broadcast on a commercial radio station—KDKA—in 1920. That election also marked the first time women could vote. Courtesy KDKA.

“A woman telegraph operator handled returns over a special wire,” the reporter for the Gazette-Times noted. “Scores of women pushed their way into the headquarters to shake hands with the chairman, Mrs. Leonard G. Woods, and other workers.” Seated next to Mrs. Woods was Mrs. J.W. Lawrence, the former Mary Flinn. Her father, William Flinn, had been a longtime Republican boss and construction magnate in Pittsburgh. Her mansion is now part of Hartwood Acres, an Allegheny County park.

The crowd at the women’s headquarters was entertained several times during the evening by a thirty-five-member girls’ chorus. “From a platform in front of a building, they sang campaign songs; then they wheeled down Smithfield street, making the thoroughfare resound with the strains of ‘John Brown’s Body.’”

“When the Republican men swarmed about their headquarters, their red torchlights flaring and their band blaring its loudest marches, the women [again] hurried outside, [and] joined in cheers for Harding and Coolidge.” Calvin Coolidge was the GOP vice presidential candidate.

Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, had been president for the previous eight years, winning both times without the support of Pennsylvania voters. The Gazette-Times greeted Harding’s victory with satisfaction in its front-page story on the city’s reaction to the GOP win.

“From all quarters came the joyous assertion that the country had been restored to a Republican basis again and once more could march forward unchecked,” the newspaper reported.

1927: SYMPHONY OUT OF TUNE WITH BLUE LAWS

While musicians of the Pittsburgh Symphony tuned their instruments on the stage of the Syria Mosque, uniformed motorcycle policemen guarded the entrances of the Oakland landmark.

The Syria Mosque, seen in a 1955 photo, was home to the Pittsburgh Symphony for many years. The building was demolished in 1991. Courtesy the Pittsburgh Press.

Police were there in force on April 24, 1927, to head off protests as the newly re-formed orchestra began its first Sunday concert. By performing on Sunday, the musicians were about to run afoul of Pennsylvania’s blue laws and of the Sabbath Association of Allegheny County, which sought to enforce them.

The blue laws had been passed more than a century earlier in Pennsylvania and several other states. Designed to keep Sunday as a day for worship and rest, they had banned most commercial activities, professional sports and noncharity concerts.

Thirty-five hundred people showed up for the symphony’s inaugural Sunday concert and “with thunderous applause for every number on the program, declared that if this be Sabbath desecration, make the most of it,” the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times reported the next day. “Uniformed motorcycle police held sway outside the Mosque in deference to the ruling of the City Law Department that the Symphony Society’s membership plan of admission…was legal in every way,” the newspaper said. “There were no interruptions and no attempts at interruptions.”

“There was a spirit of amiable defiance in that crowd at Syria Mosque last night,” music critic J. Fred Lissfelt wrote in his review. “They all seemed a little worried.”

The program included Weber’s Euryanthe overture, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and two works by Tchaikovsky—Capriccio Italien and his Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat minor. Eugene Goossens was the conductor, and Josef Lhevinne the soloist.

The concert opened with a prayer from an Episcopal priest, the Reverend Dr. H. Boyd Edwards. His invocation was “a plea for tolerance and forbearance, among the creeds. It called to mind the inspirational value of good music and it asked the blessing of God upon [the Sunday concert] movement.”

Critic Lissfelt was complimentary about the performance, although he described his shock after the soloist “defied a good concert rule when he played an encore.”

“If a debutante had been called to break a bottle of champagne over the conductor’s stand, the [event] would have been complete,” the scandalized reviewer wrote.

Facing operating deficits, the orchestra had disbanded in 1910 for what supporters hoped would be a year. The year stretched into sixteen seasons. When the Symphony Society re-formed in 1926, its board announced plans for Sunday concerts. “The musicians had to work at other jobs during the week,” Frederick Dorian and Judith Meibach wrote in their 1986 history of the orchestra. “And, as a large segment of the audience came from the suburbs, Sunday afternoon was the most convenient time for them to attend concerts.”

While Pittsburgh officials had allowed the concert to take place, the legal hammer fell the next day. The Sabbath Association filed complaints before an alderman—the equivalent of a magisterial district judge—against orchestra manager Edward Specter, concertmaster Elias Breeskin and eight others. “The society directors accepted full responsibility for the concert and showed irritation that 10 of 27 officers and directors should be ‘singled out’ for prosecution,” the Gazette-Times reported on April 26.

The Symphony Ten appealed their twenty-five-dollar fines, and both the court case and Sunday concerts continued for the next year. In July 1928, state superior court “quashed” the case on what the newspaper called technical grounds, and the twenty-five-dollar fines were overturned.

The Sabbath Association, however, pledged to keep up its battle against both secular music and sporting events. “We will not tolerate Sunday concerts and the very next breach of the law of 1794 will results in arrests and another case similar to this one,” the association’s lawyer, William H. Pratt, told a reporter for what had become the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. That story appeared July 13, 1928. His reference to 1794 cited the state’s original Sabbath laws.

The blue law battle continued in the courts and in Harrisburg for the next several years. In 1933, supporters of professional sports were able to persuade the state legislature to adopt a local option measure, allowing communities to vote on what leisure activities to allow on Sunday. After city voters passed the measure, both the Pittsburgh Pirates football team—an earlier name for the Steelers—and the symphony could perform without fear of arrest.

CHAPTER 7

NOW, THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT

1823: FRONTIER PITTSBURGH PURSUES CULTURE

William Staunton Jr., the organist of Trinity Episcopal Church, took out a front-page ad in the May 9, 1823 edition of the Pittsburgh Gazette.

In it, he “respectfully informed the lovers of music, in Pittsburgh and its vicinity, that he has commenced a course of instruction in the science of Thorough Bass, or the Principles of musical composition.” He planned to select his pedagogical examples from “the works of the most eminent European masters.” Staunton’s list illustrates how musical fashions and reputations rise and fall. His composer choices included “Corfe, Calcott, Shield, Liston, Kirnberger, Marpurg, Burney, Kollman.” While all were once well known, J.W. Calcott, the composer of “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” may be the only one whose music is regularly played today.

Pittsburgh had a population of about seventy-three hundred at the start of the 1820s—fewer people than those living in Bellevue or Carnegie today. While the city had been a center of trade and manufacturing for more than a half century, early nineteenth-century newspaper advertising indicates its residents also were interested in a wide variety of cultural pursuits.

Potential teachers touted their Continental training. Staunton, for example, told prospective pupils his musical studies had included time spent in Europe. One of his competitors for Pittsburgh’s self-improvement dollars was Willis Midford. In the May 30 edition of the Gazette, he touted “sword exercise.” Midford, “who served 16 years in one of the best Cavalry Corps of Europe, would offer instruction in the use of the broad sword.”

“Military and other Gentlemen who wish to avail themselves of this opportunity to become masters of this most essential part of the science of attack and defense will please make early application,” he wrote. “The terms will be moderate.”

A May 2 ad in the Gazette provides evidence that the Midford family—or perhaps just Willis Midford himself under a slightly different name—was multitalented.

“Geo. Willis Midford, professor of music,” offered to teach violin and cello in his residence, on what is now Third Avenue, between Market and Wood Streets. That location was only a few buildings away from where Willis Midford would provide his instruction in sword handling. His biweekly lessons would be given at Colonel Ramsay’s Hotel on Wood Street.

Despite the pursuit of culture, the business of Pittsburgh remained business, and most public notices and advertisements in the Gazette focused on commercial matters. These items included lists of steamboat arrivals and departures and wholesalers’ offers to sell everything from rye whiskey to made-to-order glass equipment. Tradesmen, including two makers of wood planes for carpenters, advertised for new customers.

Pittsburgh, via the Ohio River, was a gateway to the west. That translated into opportunities for ambitious indentured servants and apprentices who grew tired of the demands of their masters.

On May 23, tailor Leonard Louy offered a six-cent reward for the return of his apprentice, Robert Hutchenson. The insultingly small offer made it clear that Louy probably didn’t want the boy back, but he wished to alert any potential employers of his former apprentice’s untrustworthy nature.

In a postscript to his reward notice, Louy indicated that he planned to be more particular about whom he trained next time: “An apprentice wanted to the above business. None need apply but such as can come well recommended.”

The May 30 edition of the Gazette also offered leisure-time options for those interested in literature. Eichbaum Johnston, Booksellers, had for sale a new work of historical fiction; set at the Forks of the Ohio during the French and Indian War, it was called The Wilderness; or Braddock’s Times, A Tale of the West. Napoleon had died May 5, 1821, on St. Helena. Eichbaum Johnston had “a few copies” of a memoir about his last years, “Napoleon in Exile, by Barry O’Meara, Esq., his late Surgeon.”

Another author sought local financial support for his project: a multistanza poem about the city of Pittsburgh. Writer W. Skinner offered readers of the Gazette an excerpt from his work in progress:

Here once the savage hunters proudly sought

The nimble deer, or for some trophy fought;

Here the brave Washington to glory led

His undaunted warriors, who freely bled,

Whose names the weeping Muse shall yet rehearse,

Embalm’d in many a sweetly melting verse,

For here in Pittsburgh it shall ne’er be said,

No Muse weeps o’er the great, the honor’d dead.

Skinner promised potential backers that they wouldn’t have to wait long to see the final version. If support was forthcoming, his poem would be “put to the press in the course of a few weeks.”

1851: JENNY LIND LEAVES PITTSBURGH WANTING MORE

Judging from newspaper coverage, the April 1851 concert in Pittsburgh by Jenny Lind—the Swedish Nightingale—surpassed performances by the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen and even Miley Cyrus in her Hannah Montana persona. Or it may just be that Mick, Bruce and Miley all lacked the advantage of having Lind’s promoter: P.T. Barnum.

“The contagion of the Nightingale fever, it appears, has reached our city, and fears being entertained of her not honoring us with a visit, some of our citizens are departing for Cincinnati, in order to hear this famous enchantress,” the Morning Post reported on April 18, 1851. Those worries evaporated three days later when the Morning Post announced that the Swedish-born singer would perform April 25 in the city’s new Masonic Hall. She was supposed to return east after her Cincinnati performance, but “at the earnest solicitation of some of our citizens, Mr. [Barnum]… has agreed that Miss Lind shall sing here at least one night.” About fifteen hundred tickets would be sold, through an auction, at what the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette estimated was an average price of $7.50—about $ 194 in today’s money.

“The excitement relative to the arrival of Jenny Lind in our city is already becoming very contagious,” the Morning Post reported April 22. “The people from the surrounding country—Washington, Greensburgh, and other towns in the vicinity—are flocking in, determined if possible to get a seat under the sound of her voice.” Other businesses advertised wares that week designed to take advantage of Lind-o-mania. New sheet music available at O. Blume’s Piano Depot, 118 Wood Street, included “Jenny Lind’s celebrated ‘Bird Song,’ arranged for the guitar.”

“Memorial Hall, to-night, will be a scene of beauty and gaiety, such as has never before been witnessed in Pittsburgh,” the Morning Post said on the day of the concert. “The reputation of Jenny Lind is as extensive as the universe itself, and our citizens, who have heard so much about her angelic notes and heavenly charity, will now have an opportunity to see and hear for themselves this gifted daughter of Sweden.”

The anonymous writer for the Morning Post was not disappointed. “All our preconceived opinions of the extraordinary vocal powers of Miss Lind, were more than confirmed,” the newspaper reported on April 26. “She sang only as the angels sing in the courts of Paradise. Her voice is sweet as the warbling of birds. Although she can set up no great claims to beauty, yet there is something uncommonly pleasing in her countenance, that never tires the beholder.”

As well received as her concert was, Pittsburgh had to brace itself for disappointment. Jenny Lind was unable to give a second performance. “The public are most respectfully informed that the noise and confusion occasioned by the immense crowd outside the Masonic Hall last night, so completely unnerved M’lle Jenny Lind, that all entreaties and assurances from his honor, the Mayor, and myself, were unavailing to induce her to give another Concert,” P.T. Barnum wrote in the April 28 edition of the Morning Post. “She would have been pleased to do so, had not the tumult on the roofs of the buildings adjacent to her retiring room…thrown her into a state of excitement which she could not control, and which must render it impossible for her to sing until a few days’ seclusion will have restored her to tranquility,” he explained.

The Morning Post estimated the crowd outside the theater to have been between seven thousand and eight thousand people. “There was not the least intention to alarm or annoy M’lle Lind, but so much ‘noise and confusion’ in the vicinity of the dressing room was enough to produce unpleasant emotions in the bosom of any lady,” the Morning Post reported. “The greatest noise that was produced was in consequence of some reckless hack and omnibus drivers attempting to force their vehicles through the dense mass of human beings assembled on Fifth street,” the story continued.

The writer concluded that not much could have been done about the large, but friendly, crowd. “It is idle to suppose that people would seclude themselves at home when the greatest singer the world ever produced was charming the hearts of our citizens by the sweetness of her angelic notes.”

1860: A RUNAWAY BALLOON MEANS “PITTSBURGH, WE HAVE A PROBLEM”

As the United States lurched closer to civil war during the summer of 1860, Pittsburgh residents could look heavenward for some momentary distraction.

In the last days of July, a botched balloon ascension offered nonpolitical drama to readers of the Pittsburgh Gazette.

An “aeronaut” who called himself Professor Wilson took flight over Pittsburgh in 1860 in a basketless, runaway balloon. His aircraft was similar to the one shown that flew over Somerset County during a 1954 air show. Courtesy the Pittsburgh Press.

An “aeronaut,” who called himself Professor Wilson, had announced plans to launch his balloon from Allegheny City—now Pittsburgh’s North Side—on Saturday, July 28. “The event was advertised to take place at four o’clock in the afternoon, but an accident caused the ascension to be made at an unexpected moment,” according to a Gazette story that appeared July 31. The balloon, called the Great Western, had been inflated, using methane gas ordinarily burned in streetlights, at the Diamond Market, an area that is now part of Allegheny Center.

Young balloon handlers, directed by Professor Wilson, were moving the five-story-tall, gas-filled bag east toward the Mechanics Street Bridge, which crossed the Allegheny River at modern Sixteenth Street. At Ohio Street and what was then called East Lane, “one of the ropes which held down the balloon broke, and another quickly followed,” according to the newspaper.

“The crowd (chiefly of boys) who were holding the balloon became frightened, and all of them let go their hold, except police officer Long,” the story said. “He continued his hold until he had been dragged along for several yards and lifted a few feet into the air, and then he let go, and dropped to the ground without injury.”

One person on the ground was not so lucky. “We are informed that while [the balloon was] passing along Ohio Street, a brick torn from one of the houses by the ropes fell on a…woman and injured her severely,” the paper reported. “The balloon had in her nearly twenty thousand feet of gas and was without ballast, basket, or car, or anything save the netting.”

Professor Wilson had been riding in the netting when the balloon broke free. “He remained in his place and coolly exerted his utmost to right her,” but the balloon began “ascending with great rapidity and moving in a northwestern direction.”

“Just before leaving the scope of the vision of our citizens, some of whom were anxiously watching him with powerful glasses, he settled down quietly in his seat…He passed from sight between 1 and 2 o’clock.”

Although word didn’t reach Pittsburgh for several days, the balloon had landed about seventy-five miles northeast of the city. “Great fears are entertained for the safety of Prof. Wilson, as when the balloon lodged he was not found with it,” according to the Gazette.

By the politeness of a gentleman from Clarion County, Mr. Hunter Orr, we are informed that the air ship struck…about two miles from Rimersburgh, between that place and the river, Saturday afternoon. She skipped along the ground for about a quarter mile at a fearful rate before she lodged. Nothing was seen or heard from the aeronaut. There was an overcoat, a life preserver and some rope in the netting and a good deal of gas in the balloon.

Despite the ominous initial report, the tale had a happy ending. After taking off from Allegheny City, the balloon had traveled up the Allegheny Valley toward Sharpsburg, where winds carried it north toward Bakerstown. “By this time the Professor had got [the balloon] under control, and he landed with it in a tree on the farm of Mr. Carnahan, near the Butler County line,” the newspaper reported. “He succeeded in getting onto terra firma safely himself, but the balloon escaped from him, ascending rapidly.”

During its unpiloted journey north, it hovered for an hour over the town of Butler, “and was there an object of great attention; and, then, having ascended into an easterly current, it passed to the eastward, out of sight, descending…in Clarion County.”

“We did not hear whether Prof. Wilson was injured in any way…but presume that he was not.” That proved to be the case. When Wilson arrived back in Pittsburgh on August 2, he made a stop at the offices of the Gazette. “He gave us a very interesting account of his sudden and unexpected trip from the Allegheny Diamond…which he will deliver to the public in the shape of a lecture at Lafayette Hall Friday night,” according to the next day’s edition of the newspaper.

Wilson also announced plans for another ascent on August 4, this time accompanied by a reporter named Thomas Plympton, who worked for a competing newspaper, the Pittsburgh Dispatch. Additional passengers could come along at a cost of twenty-five dollars each.

The professor’s second voyage appears to have gone off without incident. The Gazette had no further reports of runaway balloons.

1867: NO JOY IN PITTSBURGH WHEN ROWER CLAIMS A FOUL

The smart money was betting on James Hamill, “the acknowledged champion oarsman of America,” when he defended his national rowing title on Pittsburgh’s rivers against Walter Brown.

Hamill, a Pittsburgh resident, was the favorite in the days leading up to the five-mile single-scull contest, the Pittsburgh Gazette reported. The race was run May 21, 1867, on the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers. While Brown was believed to be a faster oarsman over shorter distances, Hamill “would, by reason of his advantage in ‘wind,’ or endurance, gain the race,” the Gazette said in a May 23 story, recapping the contest.

A competitor in the men’s open singles race heads to the finish line in a 2009 competition. Claims of bad sportsmanship during a similar race in 1869 forced one rower to flee Pittsburgh, fearing for his life. Courtesy Pam Panchak of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Brown, who lived in Portland, Maine, also had faced terrible pre-race publicity. A letter from him became public, “the tone of which seemed to indicate that he had no hope of success….Following this, his trainer John Shea, deserted him, and published a card, traducing Brown, charging among other things, that he had made overtures to ‘sell the race,’” the Gazette reported on May 22. “This circumstance, while many doubted the statement, placed Brown in a peculiar position; but he appears to have set himself assiduously to work to win the race at every hazard, and thus to put at rest imputations on his character.”

The winner’s purse was $2,000, equivalent to more than $31,000 in modern currency. In addition, Hamill, “in excess of confidence, had laid wagers on the result to the extent of three to one”—the champion was betting on himself, according to the Gazette.

“Perhaps the most exciting event that Pittsburgh has seen for many a day transpired yesterday afternoon on the bosom of the Monongahela, when the great aquatic contest between Hamill and Brown…took place,” the Daily Post said on May 22. Its front-page headlines told of “INTENSE EXCITEMENT, “40,000 People Present,” “THE INAUSPICIOUS WEATHER” and “Too Much Water for a Boat Race.”

The Gazette on that same day described “ocular evidence of the interest taken in the race.”

“Many of our citizens in the different manufacturing establishments, forming a considerable proportion of the foreign element, ‘knocked off work’ for the day, and collected about the wharf.”

The start had been announced for 2:00 p.m., but storms delayed it until a little before 4:00 p.m. “The multitudes assembled on the river’s bosom, the shores, the housetops and the bridge now gave way to all the enthusiasm they had treasured up for the race. Cheers long and loud rolled up, and uniting with the demonical steam screeches of the score of wicked little tow boats…the noise and wild confusion of sounds approached the terrible.”

Shortly after the race started, Brown pulled ahead by inches, then “soon put nearly a full boat length between himself and Hamill.” The halfway marker was a buoy in the Ohio River. “There Brown turned with rare scientific ability, and was followed in as good style by Hamill,” the newspaper said. “Both appeared to be fresh and lively as they entered upon the home stretch.”

“Hamill kept his boat in a faultless line…and gradually gained a little upon Brown.” But he was unable to pull ahead. His supporters claimed that Brown was “purposely ‘zigzagging’ in order to keep Hamill from passing him.”

“Our reporter failed to discover anything particularly wrong with Brown’s action in that respect,” the Gazette said. The boats were still very close when at “Lorenz’s Glass Works, a little below the Point, unaccountably Hamill dropped out of the race and Brown kept manfully on, being feebly cheered as he neared the Monongahela wharf.”

“The people were disappointed; they had a natural local pride in ‘Jimmy’ and seemed disappointed that he had lost the race.”

“The time was exceedingly poor, 46 minutes 50 seconds, but this may be accounted for by the rough state of the water, and not from the lack of abilities of the successful sculler.”

When Hamill arrived back at the starting line, about fifteen minutes later, he complained to his supporters that Brown had fouled him. The race referee, C.P. Caughey, was unable to reach a decision on Hamill’s challenge that afternoon, and the newspapers reported he would meet with a judge representing each side the next morning.

“After having received the fullest testimony available on both sides concerning the alleged ‘foul’… and having carefully and impartially weighed and compared all the facts present, I have decided the race in favor of Walter Brown, and all interested will govern themselves accordingly,” Caughey ruled in a decision reported May 23 in the Gazette.

Brown, however, was not present to enjoy his victory. “We learned last evening that Brown departed on the night train for the east, and also that his departure was hastened through fear of personal violence,” the Gazette said on May 22. The newspaper was scornful of the rower’s fear of physical harm from Hamill’s disappointed supporters. “We cannot believe there was good ground” for his sudden leave taking.

1890: NELLIE BLY COMES HOME

When Nellie Bly’s train stopped at Pittsburgh’s Union Station, the Armstrong County–born reporter was completing a journey that would make her one of the best-known journalists in the country.

She had left New York for England by boat on November 14, 1889, in an effort to beat the fictional record set by Phileas Fogg, hero of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. She succeeded, completing her trip on January 25, 1890—seventy-two days later.

Born Elizabeth Cochrane in 1864, she had started her career as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, where she was given the pen name “Nellie Bly.” Her stories included reports on terrible working conditions for women in Pittsburgh sweatshops. She later reported from and wrote a book on Mexico.

By 1887, she was in New York, where she got a job on Joseph Pulitzer’s World. Feigning madness, she was committed to the city’s lunatic asylum. Her articles and book on the terrible conditions she found there resulted in increased spending and improved treatment for patients.

In 1889, she persuaded her editors to let her circle the globe, sending back dispatches from her travels in England, France (where she met Jules Verne), Egypt, China and Japan. When the twenty-five-year-old reporter arrived back in San Francisco, she was several days behind schedule. Pulitzer arranged for special trains to transport her across the continent.

It was after 3:00 a.m. on January 25, 1890, when Bly’s train arrived in Pittsburgh on one of the final legs of her journey. “About 130 people, chiefly newspaper men, surrounded the train immediately, all anxious to get a chance to speak to her,” the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette reported later that same morning.

“Although she had succeeded in skimming around the globe in the fastest time on record, the achievement had not affected her the least bit,” the paper found. “She was the same bright-eyed girl who used to hustle…in this city, with a cheery greeting for every friend and an eager desire to gather in any stray gems of thought.

“She was as chipper as a cricket, and glad to meet and shake hands with everyone,” the paper reported.

Nellie, when she appeared on the platform of the car, was attired in a long traveling coat, which reached to her feet, and a jaunty little traveling cap, which was saucily set to one side of her head. She looked the picture of health.

“I am feeling splendid,” said Nellie. “I am not in the least fatigued and have had good luck during my entire trip. I kept myself awake on my way to this city as I wanted to see my old home and to meet my old friends. This reception is one of the most gratifying one[s] I have had along the route.”

While her own health was good, she told her friends she was concerned about a pet monkey that had been given to her in Singapore. “I fear the little fellow has the grip,” she told reporters. “The grip,” sometimes spelled “the grippe,” is an earlier term for the flu.

An editorial that appeared in the Gazette on January 27 drew several lessons from her journey.

It is not necessary, for a woman who has a little courage and self-reliance and who desires to visit foreign lands, to provide herself with a male escort. Neither is it essential to her health or comfort that she should carry with her a wagon load of trunks. Nellie Bly found a single suit of navy blue cloth, and a grip-sack supplied with a limited number of essential articles all that was requisite. If she had taken with her the conventional amount of luggage and occupied the time which ladies usually devote to dressing to suit the varied circumstances of their journey, she would not have completed her task in a year.

Her trip around the world was a race not only against the fictional Phileas Fogg but also against a real-life competitor named Elizabeth Bisland. Bisland’s editors at a magazine called Cosmopolitan had sent her west on a round-the-world journey within a few hours after Bly’s ship, traveling east, left for England. For much of the next two months, it appeared that Bisland would beat Bly back to New York, but she missed a final crucial connection in France.

During her stop in Pittsburgh, Bly asked reporters if anything had been heard of her rival. “Being informed in the negative [she] gleefully said, ‘Oh, I will win…I am so glad, and yet I’m so tired.”

In 1894, Nellie Bly married an elderly manufacturer named Robert Seaman, eventually taking over his business after his death. She later returned to journalism and was working for the New York Journal when she died of pneumonia in 1922.

1903: SOMETHING DANGEROUS TO DO IN THE DARK

By the time Harry Davis and John Harris opened their Nickelodeon on Smithfield Street in June 1905, Pittsburgh theatergoers had been watching flickering images on screens for almost a decade.

The fiftieth anniversary of the opening of a nickelodeon on Wood Street in Pittsburgh was celebrated in 1955 with a ceremony and a new state historical marker. The city’s links to motion picture shows, however, extend back to 1896. Courtesy the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Pittsburgh’s Nickelodeon—its name is a combination of the word for the five-cent admission price and the Greek term for “theater”—is often described as the world’s first venue devoted exclusively to presenting films. Movies, however, were no longer a novelty by that time.

On September 8, 1896, the Pittsburgh Press printed brief reviews of not one but two cinema presentations that were opening that week at city theaters.

The main attraction at the Bijou theater, located in the 600 block of Penn Avenue, was a traditional play called The Sidewalks of New York. It was described as a “melodrama dealing with life in the metropolis.” Also on the evening bill was a demonstration of Thomas Edison’s Vitascope, a motion picture projector that “was given its first public exhibition in this city.” A half-dozen shorts were shown. They included Steamer Rosedale, Baby Parade, Toe Dance and “a glove contest between two light-weight pugilists,” according to the newspaper.

The most titillating offering was May Irwin’s Kiss. It was the filmed re-creation of a lingering stage smooch between the full-figured Irwin and her Broadway costar, John C. Rice. The pair had appeared the previous year in a musical comedy called The Widow Jones.

While the Bijou offered a traditional play as its principal attraction, the Avenue Theater on Fifth Avenue had built its variety show around a competing “cinematographe” program of ten short films made by France’s Lumiere Brothers. “The pictures of active life thrown upon the canvas were thoroughly enjoyed by the audience,” the Press reported. “The presentations were so lifelike as to be actually startling.”

“Among the views was that of the Ninety-sixth French infantry on the march, charge of the French cavalry, a wrecked building scene, showing a falling wall and workmen carting away the debris, two scenes of infantile life and a view illustrative of the French method of drawing coke.” There is no indication that Henry Clay Frick, the region’s King of Coke, took in the program to see what his European competitors were up to.

Both Edison’s Vitascope and the Lumieres’ cinematographe used highly flammable celluloid film, and theater fires were common. The worst occurred the next year at a charity bazaar in Paris, and more than one hundred people were killed.

Pittsburgh came close to having a similar tragedy on November 25, 1903, at the Avenue Theater, which was managed by Harry Davis. “A celluloid film in a cinematograph machine ignited, and the blaze swept through the upper balcony in the rear of the auditorium,” the Pittsburgh Gazette reported the next day. “Cool heads saved the lives and limbs of hundreds of people, and the intelligent work of the firemen confined the blaze to one corner of the building.”

About three hundred people were in the theater when the fire started. Projectionist George MacKenzie had just threaded the film for the second short into the projector when “the audience was startled by a sharp report and a vivid flash of blue light.”

“Instantly the blaze caught the woodwork, and in a few seconds long tongues of red flame rolled up the wall and out of the window opening in Fifth Avenue.

“MacKenzie was burned about the face and hands and was so disabled that he was unable to fight the fire,” the paper reported.

Things could have been much worse. “There was not the slightest semblance of the panic,” according to the Pittsburgh Press’s report on the blaze. “The lights were turned on and the spectators…walked out…quietly.”

“So well was the work done that women stopped to put on their wraps and some stood with their checks at the cloak room while the fire engines were roaring down Fifth Avenue and the excited crowd in the street was shouting that ‘the whole block was burning up.’”

The same theater was gutted in a second fire two years later, just a few weeks before Davis and Harris opened their Nickelodeon nearby.

1912: MISS RUSSELL, A NEW BRIDE, ADVISES

It was business before romance for Pittsburgh newspaper editor Alexander Moore and actress Lillian Russell.

The two were married June 12, 1912, at the Hotel Schenley in Oakland—now the University of Pittsburgh’s student union.

“Miss Russell, who is here with the Weber-Fields company, will leave at 12 o’clock tonight for the east,” the Pittsburgh Leader, Moore’s newspaper, reported the day of the wedding. “About the same time, Mr. Moore will leave for Chicago to attend the Republican national convention, in fulfillment of a promise he had made to Colonel Roosevelt some time ago.”

Russell, fifty-one, was one of the stars of the Weber and Fields Jubilee, a variety show that was touring the country. A reporter for the Leader called it “the most conspicuous theatrical event [in] years.” Moore, forty-four, was—by most accounts—Russell’s fourth husband. He had to leave his bride because he was expected in Chicago to build support for the presidential campaign of former President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was feuding with his handpicked successor, President William Howard Taft. He was seeking to deny Taft a second term and run as the GOP candidate himself in 1912. When Roosevelt did not get the Republican nod, he ran as the candidate of the new Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party. He polled more votes than Taft, but both lost to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

While the story about the wedding of the editor and the actress was a modest three inches or so, Pittsburgh readers did not lack for information concerning Russell. She was the author of an advice column, “Lillian Russell’s Philosophy,” that appeared regularly on the Leader’s Women, Home, Heart, Beauty page.

During the month of her marriage, she had advice on the most attractive ways to sit and on the benefits of vigorous dance.

Awkwardly placed feet were an aesthetic danger, she warned. “I have seen a tall, beautiful, graceful woman walk through a room full of admirers, sit down upon a piano seat, lean her arms gracefully up the piano, making a charming picture,” she wrote in a column that appeared on her wedding day. “Then spoil it all by twisting her ankle around the leg of the seat to steady herself, toes turned in and heel out of her slipper. She had studied every stance for a fascinating effect and those disagreeable little feet betrayed her.”

Russell had a solution to the problem. She recommended that her readers hang a few mirrors at floor level in various rooms of their homes. Those looking glasses would permit an occasional “glance at your unconscious little offenders” to make sure they were fetchingly displayed.

Dancing, she advised a few days later, would be of particular benefit for women who work outside the home. “Some women who are in business assume a manner of stiffness in their walk and carriage which is unwomanly,” Russell wrote. “Such women should dance…they should lighten up when away from business, drop responsibilities and feminize themselves.”

Russell had been a Broadway and London star since the early 1880s. Joe Weber and Lew Fields had been doing a Dutch act—two characters speaking with thick German accents—almost as long. In 1896, they opened their own theater where they performed satires, known as burlesques, of popular Broadway musicals.

The Weber and Fields Jubilee, which ended its national tour with two Pittsburgh performances June 14, 1912, was capitalizing on nostalgia. “Many prominent actors and actresses of old-day fame appeared in the all-star cast,” an anonymous reviewer wrote in the next day’s Leader. “The performances consisted of a medley of old Weber and Fields nonsense with the added spice of burlesque of the New York comedy success ‘Bunty Pulls the Strings,’” the reporter wrote.

After a long career on the New York stage, singer-actress Lillian Russell married Pittsburgh newspaper editor Alexander Moore. She is buried in the city’s Allegheny Cemetery. Courtesy Robin Rombach of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The audience expected stereotypes. Weber and Fields offered their “language destroying dialogues, which end up in highly amusing choking scenes.” John T. Kelley was “the famous old Irishman,” and George Beban appeared as “the affectionate and excited Frenchman.”

The boss’s wife wasn’t forgotten. “Lillian Russell was radiant in a number of beautiful gowns and sang splendidly,” the reviewer noted.

After her marriage, Russell appeared in a few more plays and silent movies. In her later years, she lobbied for women’s suffrage. She died in Pittsburgh in 1922 at age sixty-one. She and her husband, who died in 1930, are entombed in Lawrenceville’s Allegheny Cemetery.

1927: STUNT DRIVER INCLINED TO TEST HIMSELF

Flagpole sitting and marathon dancing are among the fads associated with the Roaring Twenties.

In Pittsburgh, you can add “incline driving” to that list.

“A spectacular stunt was enacted yesterday afternoon when Chick Murray drove a four-cylinder Whippet roadster up and down the Seventeenth Street incline of the Pittsburgh Railways Company,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported on October 8, 1927. “The grade is 37½ per cent, about twice as steep as the deepest street grade in Pittsburgh.”

Murray’s Whippet was manufactured in Toledo, Ohio, by the Willys-Overland Motor Co. Its base price was $625, equivalent to about $7,750 today. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Willys-Overland had been a major maker of automobiles in the United States. Surpassed during the 1920s by competitors like Chrysler and General Motors, the firm became a regional producer of smaller, less expensive cars.

Workers tore down the Seventeenth Street Incline in 1955. In 1927, a stunt driver drove a four-cylinder Whippet roadster up and down the steeply sloped track bed that linked Pittsburgh’s Strip and Hill Districts. Courtesy Tom Toia of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph.

Willys-Overland later became best known as one of three companies responsible for development of the military jeep. In that effort, it made use of designs originally developed by Butler County’s American Bantam car company.

The incline stunt was designed to show that cars made under the Whippet name could handle the region’s many mountains and valleys. Pittsburgh at one time had more than a dozen inclines, sometimes called “funiculars,” to carry people, freight and even vehicles up and down its hills. The system used two counter-balanced cars connected by a heavy cable that traveled simultaneously in opposite directions on steeply sloped, parallel trolley tracks.

Two examples remain within the city. The Duquesne and the Monongahela inclines continue to ferry passengers between the base and the summit of Mount Washington.

The 850-foot Seventeenth Street incline linked the city’s Strip District to the Hill District. Its route passed over the Pennsylvania Railroad yards and Bigelow Boulevard.

The Post-Gazette had a brief story and two photos the morning after the event. The newspaper followed up with a longer feature for its midweek automobile pages. “Spectacular Test Shows Power and Speed of Auto” was the headline on the October 12 follow-up story. “Crowds at both ends of the incline cheered wildly at [Murray’s] daring efforts,” the story said. “Traffic on Bigelow Boulevard and trains in the Pennsylvania railroad yards, beneath, were halted to enable passengers to see the Whippet four’s triumph.”

“Hundreds of skeptics, who had declared the feat impossible and who expected to see man and car crash back to the bottom of the incline, were held breathless.”

The two-seat roadster traveled on a narrow board “tramway” laid on top of the incline’s wooden ties. The lumber prevented the auto’s twenty-inch wheels from getting stuck in the twenty-two-inch spaces between the ties. “It required exactly 46 seconds by the stop watch for Murray to make the grade,” the newspaper said. “Murray had calculated 90 seconds as the minimum time possible and so shared in the amazement and gratification of Pittsburgh Willys-Overland officials over the high rate of speed obtained.”

Once he reached the top, Murray then drove back down the incline, relying on his vehicle’s “dependable four-wheel brakes…which are capable of holding the car at a nearly 45 degree angle.”

Murray stayed around the city for a week after his incline climb. Both he and his car were put on display in the sporting goods department of Kaufmann & Baer Co. Its building at Smithfield Street and Sixth Avenue later housed Gimbel’s department store and now is the downtown home of Burlington Coat Factory and other businesses.

The Seventeenth Street incline, also known as the Penn incline, was torn down in the early 1950s. Willys-Overland halted production of Whippets in 1931.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING

Baldwin, Leland D. Pittsburgh: The Story of a City. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970.

Darlington, Mary Carson, ed. Fort Pitt and Letters from the Frontier. Pittsburgh, PA: J.R. Weldin, 1892.

Dixon, David. Never Come to Peace Again. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.

Dohan, Mary Helen. Mr. Roosevelt’s Steamboat. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981.

Dorian, Frederick, and Judith Meibach. A History of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh Symphony, 1986.

Harpster, John W., ed. Pen Pictures of Early Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1938.

Hogeland, William. The Whiskey Rebellion. New York: Scribner, 2006.

Lambing, the Reverend Andrew Arnold, trans., annotator. Register of Fort Duquesne. Pittsburgh, PA: Myers, Shinkle, 1885. Memorial edition, Pittsburgh, PA: Diocese of Pittsburgh, 2004.

Lorant, Stefan. Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City. Fourth edition. Pittsburgh, PA: Authors Edition, 1988.

McCollester, Charles. The Point of Pittsburgh. Homestead, PA: Battle of Homestead Foundation, 2008.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh 1758–2008. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.

Swetnam, George, and Helene Smith. A Guidebook to Historic Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976.

Thomas, Clarke M. Front-Page Pittsburgh: Two Hundred Years of the Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

Thurston, George H. Allegheny County’s Hundred Years. Pittsburgh, PA: A.A. Anderson & Son, 1888.

Toker, Franklin. Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986.

Washington, George, and Christopher Gist. Edited and annotated by Kevin Patrick Kopper. The Journals of George Washington and Christopher Gist: Mission to Fort Le Boeuf 1753–1754. Slippery Rock, PA: Friends of the Old Stone House / Slippery Rock University, 2003.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Len Barcousky started writing for newspapers in 1970 and has never stopped. Along the way, he took breaks to earn degrees at Penn State in English and at Columbia University in business. Since 1986, he has been a reporter and editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the oldest newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains. He and his family live in Ben Avon, Pennsylvania.

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