McKeesport was the second city of Allegheny County, far enough from Pittsburgh to be a small metropolitan center in its own right, but near enough to be within commuting distance of the larger city. The economic engine of the city was the National Tube Works, which gave McKeesport the proud nickname “Tube City.”
Metal tubing, however, was not the city’s only industry. For example, the Wernke Brothers produced carriages, wagons, and other vehicles.
All that money had to be kept somewhere, and this was the First National Bank. Later bank buildings in McKeesport grew much grander.
Back in the 1800s the Monongahela House was Pittsburgh’s first-class hotel. Charles Dickens stayed here, which was not enough to give him a good impression of the city. The hotel went through several incarnations; this is how it looked in 1888.
Pittsburgh is a colonial-era city, but downtown has been rebuilt so many times that not much is left from before the Civil War. This building probably dates from the late 1840s, making it one of the oldest remaining downtown. It probably came after the Great Fire of 1845, but it appears in this engraving of the Diamond as it appeared before 1852, which was the year the old courthouse in the middle was torn down.
The building in the background, with smoke rising from its chimneys, is clearly meant to be this one. There are eleven columns of windows in the engraving instead of the nine columns of windows we see today, but old Pa Pitt suspects the engraver was working from a rough sketch and simply gave us his best guess.
The Hamilton Building stood at 91 and 93 Fifth Avenue, which, if the addresses are the same, would put it right about where the May Building is now. The owner, a dealer in pianos and cottage organs, was obviously very proud of its astounding height. But the skyscraper age was about to begin, and in a few years this would be just another inconsiderable storefront downtown, soon to be replaced by a skyscraper itself.
This view of Pittsburgh appeared in A Pictorial Description of the United States, an expensive book published in 1851. Father Pitt has not seen it before. Every once in a while he runs across what we may describe as an undiscovered historical image of the city, which he will publish here for your enlightenment.
Although the original caption describes the image as a view “from the northwest,” it appears to be from the southwest, on the south bank of the Ohio just downstream from the Point. This book has trouble with directions: it lists Washington (Pennsylvania) as twenty miles north of Pittsburgh.
“This is the greatest manufacturing town of the west,” says the book, “and has furnished a large proportion of the steamboats which navigate the Mississippi and its branches. It occupies a low point of land, at the junction of the Allegany and Monongahela rivers, whose united stream is named the Ohio. It is three hundred miles west from Philadelphia, eleven hundred from New Orleans, by land, and over two thousand by water, yet has almost daily communication with it by steamboats. A part of the city now covers Ayres’ hill, and part of the sides of two other eminences; while four small towns, Allegany, Sligo, Manchester, and Birmingham, at short distances, occupy points on the banks.
“A bridge of eight arches, and fifteen hundred feet long, crosses the Monongahela, erected in 1818, at an expense of one hundred thousand dollars; while four bridges cross the Allegany, as well as the noble aqueduct of the Pennsylvania Canal. The city contains about seventy churches, and the population, in 1850, was 80,000.”
Note that the great fire of 1845, which destroyed the original Monongahela bridge, is not mentioned, although the population figure for 1850 is given. Consider for a moment what a crowded place the city was when 80,000 people lived in the area now occupied solely by downtown, with only a few straggling up the Hill.
The rest of the description is worth reading to get a notion of what Pittsburgh was like, or what people in Boston (where the book was published) thought Pittsburgh was like, in the middle of the 1800s.
View of the Great Fire of Pittsburgh, by William C. Wall (1846)
In 1845 a catastrophic fire swept through the booming Western city of Pittsburgh. Much of the city was destroyed, including the covered wooden Monongahela bridge, where the Smithfield Street Bridge is now. William C. Wall, a local painter of some skill, saw an artistic and financial opportunity and painted small views of the destruction, which seem to have been reproduced as prints (prints of great catastrophes being very popular among some of the more morose and sentimental Victorians). The next year he created a larger painting with a view of the fire; though he obviously did not have the fire in front of him as he painted, he seems to have depicted fairly accurately the extent of the conflagration—note the area to the west of the bridge that was spared the flames, an area that included the Burke Building, which still stands today.
These three paintings hang together in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s gallery of “European and American Art ca. 1820-1860.” Finding that there seemed to be no good reproductions of them on the Internet, old Pa Pitt took these, which give a fair impression of the pictures as they appear on the wall.
Pittsburgh After the Fire from Birmingham, by William C. Wall (1845)
Pittsburgh After the Fire from Boyd’s Hill, by William C. Wall (1845)
In the time of the French Revolution there was a positive mania in France for descriptions of the newly independent United States, and it occurred to Father Pitt that some of those books might contain valuable and hitherto undiscovered descriptions of late-eighteenth-century Pittsburgh. Here is a curious little story from a footnote in one of those books, a Nouveau voyage dans les Etats-Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale, fait en 1788, par J.-P. Brissot (Warville), Citoyen Français; that is, New Voyage in the United States of North America, Made in 1788, by J.-P. Brissot (Warville), French Citizen. It describes a mixed-race family who became one of the leading households in the young city, and no other apology is necessary for the dated language used to describe the races of the characters. Father Pitt provides a new translation below—the first time, as far as he knows, this passage has ever appeared in English. Note, by the way, that the book manages to spell the name of the place two different ways.
“There exists at Pittsbourg on the Ohio a white woman of French origin, brought up in London, and taken, at the age of twelve years, by pirates who made a living by taking children and selling them in America to work for a fixed time. —Certain singular circumstances caused her to marry a negro who bought her freedom, and who took her out of the hands of a white man, a barbarous and libidinous master, who had done everything he could to seduce her. —A mulatta produced by that union married a surgeon from Nantes who had established himself in Pittsburgh. —This family is one of the most respectable in that city; the negro runs a very good business, and the mistress of the house makes it her duty to receive and give good treatment to foreigners, and especially to French people whom chance has brought that way.”
A much longer excerpt, including this footnote, is at Dr. Boli’s Random Translations.
UPDATE: A revised version of this article may be found at the Historical Miscellany.
Many historians speculate that the name “Pittsburgh” was originally pronounced “PITTS-burrah,” the way Edinburgh is pronounced “ED-in-burrah.” After all, General Forbes, who gave the place its name, was a Scotsman: it would seem odd that he would not pronounce the “burgh” as in “Edinburgh.”
Today Father Pitt presents a tiny piece of evidence suggesting that the old pronunciation may have endured into the early 1800s. The evidence is only suggestive, not conclusive; but he thinks you will agree that it is at least very interesting.
Union Cemetery in Robinson Township is an old graveyard with a number of Revolutionary War veterans in it. Here we find, side by side, two early settlers’ tombstones.
First is Thomas Thornberry, a Revolutionary War veteran. His stone is regrettably so badly damaged that we can read nothing on it. But a plaque in front of the stone identifies it as belonging to Thomas Thornberry, a Revolutionary War veteran. Presumably the name comes from the church records, but Father Pitt is not sure of that. Perhaps someone from the church could enlighten us more.
Beside his stone is a legible stone for a woman who is obviously his wife.
IN MEMORY OF DINAH Wife of Thomas Thornburgh who departed this life July 26th, 1830, aged 70 years.
And here is our evidence. Inscriptions on tombstones of the early 1800s around here are commonly semi-literate; it is common to find variant spellings of the same name. Here we have the same name spelled “Thornburgh” and “Thornberry.” Now, it is not possible to imagine the name “Thornberry” being pronounced “THORN-burg,” but it is quite possible to imagine both “Thornburgh” and “Thornberry” being pronounced “THORN-burrah.” And if that is the case, then we have evidence that, in western Pennsylvania, the spelling “burgh” indicated the sound “burrah” at least to some residents as late as 1830.
Old Pa Pitt repeats that this is not evidence of very high quality. But it is some evidence.
Sometimes one finds things one didn’t know one was looking for. Father Pitt had decided to visit Rosedale Cemetery in Ross Township, a small German cemetery that does not show up on many maps, and here it was: the Osterling family monument, with “Fred J. Osterling” inscribed on it. By the dates we know that this is Frederick Osterling, the great architect, and the monument itself is so strikingly tasteful that one suspects Mr. Osterling designed it himself for his parents.
Frederick Osterling is responsible for some of the most important buildings in Pittsburgh:
—among many others. His career pretty much ended with the Union Trust Building, however; the client, Henry Frick, refused to pay Osterling’s fee when the construction ran late, and Osterling sued. After a decade in various courts, the case of Osterling v. Frick ended in victory for Osterling; but meanwhile it seems that Frick, who was good at holding grudges, had made sure Osterling would never work again. On the other hand, it seems he didn’t really need to work: when he died in 1934, Osterling left an estate valued at a million dollars, which was a good bit of money in those days.
The Bertha Osterling whose name appears below Fred’s name is one of Frederick’s sisters, who apparently never married. Frederick never married, either; but, when he died with a million dollars in his estate, he left $10,000 of it to a certain Martha O. Aber in a handwritten codicil to his will (the rest went to his sisters Bertha and Anna). This woman then claimed to be his secret wife, and demanded a much larger share of the estate. Old Pa Pitt does not know what happened after that.
