Remembering Pittsburgh

by Len Barcousky

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 R
ailroad 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.”