Remembering Pittsburgh

by Len Barcousky

  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 ca
lamity 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 wh
at 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.”