Remembering Pittsburgh

by Len Barcousky

  “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 wis
hing 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.