The Monongahela &endash; From the Golden Triangle to the Old Tygart The Monongahela by Richard Bissell, part of the Rivers of America series, Rinehart & Co., Inc., New York, 1952, pp. 70-83

[A description of the towns and sights along the Monongahela River in the late 1940s, written by the pilot of the Coal Queen.] Now if we enter the Monogahela from the Ohio, passing the Golden Triangle on the port side, and start upstream, we enter immediately into an area jampacked with human beings, commercial enterprises, and statistics. You can't any more get away from statistics than you can get away from the hum of industry and progress that fills that rich and wonderful valley from brim to brim. Everything is the "oldest", the "biggest," the "first west of the Alleghenies," or "was built at a cost of 33,000,000,000 dollars." All these statistics are not to be ignored, and besides, the towns that stand here on the banks of the ancient Monongahela have a rare flavor of their own, composed as they are of a blend of history, and Pennsylvania custom, old houses, old walls, old, names, and a dynamic, part-European, modern culture. Going upstream through Pittsburgh, especially at night, is an amazing experience. We are surrounded by the smoke and uproar of 62 glass factories, 350 coal mines, and 35 steel mills, plus uncountable other noisy enterprises, all blamming away. As we start up the historic river we go under the Point Highway Bridge, then the Smithfield Street Highway Bridge (this bridge is on the site of the earliest bridge across the Monongahela), and then the bridges come thick and fast and we are dodging the big coal-laden barge fleets of Jones & Laughlin, Union Barge Line, Carnegie-Illinois, and Hillman, not to mention small craft, a possible dredge or two, sand and gravel rigs, push boats and skiffs, all seeming about to run afoul of each other. By daytime, the eye can wander over the roofs of mill, factory, and warehouse, to the curiously varied architectural exhibits of the hillsides (stained glass, golden oak, "art brick," faded wedding cake, peeling Ruskinesque, Pittsburgh Gothic, steeltown Romanesque, nightmare Victorian, 1895 "modernistic," 1923 Sears Roebuck, steamboat colonial--cupolas, turrets, lace-curtain bay windows, cement block, tier after tier of turn-of-the-century balloon frame realtors' errors, and always the "rowhouses," smoke begrimed, flat faced, clinging precariously to the steep slopes), always the tunnels, inclines, long steep flights of wooden stairs, and always the pattern of skyscraper, tower, and church steeple rising above the dingy secrets of Pittsburgh's riches and fame. In these smoky precincts many wonderful things have taken place, and not in steel and coal and bank deposits only, for long associated with the brutal city of raw realities are the names of such creative artists as Willa Cather, Hervey Allen, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Malcolm Cowley, George and Gilbert Seldes, Marc Connelly, Robinson Jeffers, Gertrude Stein, and John Kane (primitive painter of coal towns, tipples, and postcard views of Monongahela-land), and Mary Cassatt, and Ethelbert Nevin, Victor Herbert, and Stephen Collins Foster. Out of the grime, and smell of slag, and glow of nighttime blast furnaces came poems and songs and paintings. It was thus from the earliest times in Pittsburgh. "After the revolutionary war," says H. M. Brackenridge (whose father was one of the prominent citizens of early tlmes), "a number of families of the first respectability, principally of officers of the army, were attracted to this spot, and hence a degree of refinement, elegance of manners and polished society, not often found in the extreme frontier. The Butlers, the O'Haras, the Craigs, the Kirkpatricks, the Stevensons, the Wilkinses, the Nevilles, are names which will long be handed down by tradition." The town was the key to the West, frequently if not constantly visited by travelers of distinction, who usually tarried a few days on the point between the rivers making preparations for the trip west, and thus lent peculiar character and unusual interest to the place. Although maligned the world over for its sooty flavor, Pittsburgh has always been a recognizable force in American progress in the arts and sciences. In medicine, way back in the sixties, Dr. A. M. Pollack was experimenting with the use of the wire loop as a substitute for the ligature in amputation. Today there are the MeIlon Insritute, the William H. Singer Memorial Laboratories, and the Institute of Pathology. In the art world of America today, no prize is more significant than the Carnegie award. On the starboard side, Homestead is the first community we come to on our upstream voyage, a soot-coated town of 20,000 people and 100,000 smog-smeared windowpanes. Here in 1881, Carnegie started his Pittsburgh-Bessemer Steel Company, now one of the largest units in United States Steel Corporation. The most widely known incident in Homestead's history was the 1892 steel strike. This was not so much a strike as a shooting war waged by three hundred Pinkerton detectives hired by H. C. Frick against the striking union. In the attempt to dislodge the strikebreakers from a barge in the Monongahela from which they had planned to enter the plant, the strikers used burning oil, gas, dynamite, pistol and cannon fire. The plants eventually reopened on the company's terms. The strike has been so much discussed by labor leaders and students of labor problems that it has become a standard narrative in texts for the histories of American labor. The furor it caused over the nation at the time was loud, strenuous, and bitter. Homestead was originally called "Amity Homestead." The borough of Munhall is next to Homestead. The first openhearth furnace in the United States was opened here in 1886. This is a nice town with wide streets, and a rambling casual plan. The famous Queen Aliquippa sold 327 acres here in 1786 for assorted plunder worth about $260. This real estate has increased in value considerably since the time of the queen but the air has lost some of its quality. Across the river at the other end of the two highway bridges and the Union Railroad Bridge are the towns of Rankin and Braddock. Rankin is a typical steel town of row-houses rising up a hill beside the river, the chief feature of the neighborhood being a mill called the Carrie Furnace. The Carrie Furnace stretches for a mile along the river and has little to recommend it to the eye of the aesthete. It employs 1,000 workers, some of whom, being Slavs, Italians, Serbs, Greeks, and members of other effervescent racial stocks, rise to prominence from time to time in many fields of intellect or emotion. Next door to Rankin is Braddock, named of course for General Braddock. Within its present city limits the defeat of his British and colonial troops took place at the hands of the French and Indians in 1755. The slaughter itself is supposed to have occurred in the neighborhood of Jones and Bell Avenues. Braddock is another steel and iron town; but to add a note of variety it also boasts a "wall plaster factory." In Duquesne, which is laid out on the inside of the next bend south of Braddock and across the river, the story is again steel. The Carnegie-Illinois plant here produces 136,000 tons of ingot steel and 1,000,000 tons of bar steel every year. Across the river, at the mouth of the Youghiogheny River, is McKeesport, settled in 1755 by David McKee, a North Country Irishman, who ran one of the first Monongahela ferries at this point. Up the Youghiogheny, Henry Overholt may be said to have invented rye whisky. He was a weaver, a Bucks County Mennonite, who moved into the region about 1800 and in tending the family still made so many improvements in the distillation process that he erected a distillery to capitalize on the fine whisky he had developed. The distillery originally had a daily output of 200 gallons. McKeesport has a very large foreign-born population and the onion-shaped tops of the Russian church are seen here as elsewhere in the Monongahela Valley. In the shops and stores, in the movies and taverns, you hear the romantic music of foreign tongues, Italian, Czech, Russian, Greek, Polish, and some unidentifiable, but all giving the town a pleasant international air. McKeesport is sometimes known as the Tube City, because the National Tube Company, "the largest of its kind in the world," has its factory here. The American Sheet and Tin Plate Company is also "the biggest," and the Firth-Sterling mill the "first fabricator of stainless steel in America." In 1794 McKeesport was a center in the local disturbance, target practice, and barn burning known as the Whisky Rebellion. An attempt was made in early times to engineer a slack-water system on the Youghiogheny, but the dams washed out in the raging spring floods and the project was given up. Boatbuilding began very early here, and the history of the town is intimately connected with the river. Incidentally they had a hell of a time over at East McKeesport at the time of the big snowstorm in November, 1950. This was the worst snowfall in the history of the Pittsburgh area -- 28 inches. Anyway, at East McKeesport, which is the gateway to the Pennsylvania state superhighway, there were a thousand stranded motorists. Their abandoned cars, trucks, and buses sprawled through the streets and on the roads leading into town, buried completely in giant drifts. The citizens of the town turned everything over to the unwilling guests and the firehouses, churches, and movie theaters were filled with refugees. A couple of miles upriver is Glassport, where the glassworks at the foot of Seventh Street produces 15,000 different items of ordinary staple glassware. Let's see now. . . Passing Coal Valley on the right and heading up on Bellbridge Light we pass another rugged industrial concentration, Clairton, distinguished by "the largest by-product coke plant in the United States." This was a peaceful residential town until the gay nineties, when the blight of industry fell upon it, and since then it has been glassworks, brickyards, steel mills, coke plants, and smoke. This coke plant covers 175 acres along two miles of river front and when I last asked, it had 1,134 ovens in 18 batteries. Elizabeth, Pa., is upriver a little distance and across from Clairton; and although the population is only about three thousand, you certainly hear a lot about it on the river. It's one of the very oldest of the Monongahela towns, and was the scene of tremendous boatbuilding activities starting as far back as 1778. Later on, when steamboats came to the western waters, Elizabeth was one of the most important boatbuilding centers in the country. Monongahela history oozes out of the cracks in the sidewalks of this ancient town. Today the Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company operates the Elizabeth Marine Ways, about a quarter of a mile below the bridge, offering complete repairs to towboats--hull, engines, and equipment. If your towboat is in need of an overhaul call telephone number 63, Elizabeth, and ask for W. C. Kelly. On the bluff just below Lock No. 3 at Elizabeth stands the residence of the late Captain John L. Howder, who died in 1951. Captain Howder began his river career in 1890 at the age of 13 as cabin boy and won his captain's license at the age of 21. He was captain of the Helen White of the United Coal Company when she was sold to Mexican interests for use on the Panuco River at the time of the Tampico oil strike and he took her across the Gulf of Mexico himself, something few rivermen ever attempted. The industrial uproar quiets down a bit as we proceed upriver beyond Clairton and Elizabeth. Then a few miles up we come to Monongahela, where the clangor is heard again; Donora, on the big bend in the river, whose local mill produces "the largest tonnage of wire in the world;" Monessen, more steel, coal, and smoke; Charleroi, glass, glass, and more glass; and on past Bellevernon, Little Redstone Creek, the Republic Steel Tipple, and around hairpin Greenfield Bend, the J. & L. Tipple at California, Warren Elsey Light, Redstone Creek, and so under the Pennsylvania Railroad Bridge and into Brownsville. You would never think, to walk the streets of Brownsville today, that the town is old and filled with history and legend. Monongahela Valley towns just do not look the part as do Lexington and Concord and Portsmouth and Gloucester and Boston and Philadelphia. For famous Redstone Old Fort, now Brownsville, is another "industrial town," and aside from the Greek Revival, postColonial Playford House on Second and Market Streets, little romance is visible. Colonel James Burd selected the site of Redstone Old Fort in 1758 because of the presence there of an early Indian fortification, and built his stockade. In 1785 Thomas and Basil Brown founded the town, which in the years to follow played an important part in the westward movement. It was at Brownsville that the weary emigrants saw the end of their toilsome struggle over the mountains and took to the calm waters of the Monongahela for the next lap of their journey. As the steamboat rose to fame and fortune on the western waters and industrial activity in the valley grew, the Brownsville-Pittsburgh trade developed. Even before the slack-water system had been completed to Brownsville in 1844, there were about two hundred steamboat arrivals annually at Pittsburgh from upriver points. After the locks and dams went into service, there was a daily packet line between Pittsburgh and Brownsville. There is an old iron bridge in Brownsville that I inspected one time when we were laid up in drydock out at the Hillman shipyard. This bridge is on Market Street near Bank, and it has a tablet on it which says it is the first iron bridge west of the Alleghenies. It was apparently built in the period 1836-1839 of iron forged in Iocal furnaces. Before this bridge was built, Henry Clay's carriage overturned near this spot, dumping the great man into Dunlap's Creek. They say that Clay "gathered himself up with the remark that Clay and mud should not be mixed in that place again." Clay then returned to Washington to his senator's post and shortly afterwards an order was issued for the construction in Brownsville of an "iron span, carrying the road high above the stream." After we go under the Brownsville Highway Bridge, height 50.2 feet above low water, span 386 feet, we come to Dam 5, and after locking through, we pass the Alicia Marine Ways of the Hillman Company and then are pretty much out in the country, except for coal mines and tipples at regular intervals. There's Vesta tipple and Frick Mine Light, Fox Mine Light and the H. C. F. Coke Company tipple, Vestaburg and Fredericktown and the bend around to Tenmile Creek, and Emerald Tipple, Pumpkin Run, Klein's Sawmill Light, Crucible Fuel Company tipple, and Light, Weirton Steel Company tipple, National Steel Corporation Pier, Buckeye Coal Company tipple, Browns Run, Little Whiteley Creek, Robena Mine Light and tipple, Pittsburgh Steel tipple, Duquesne Light Company tipple, Jacobs Creek, and then around the bend to Dam 7. Below Dam 7 are Greensboro on the starboard side, and New Geneva on port. New Geneva boasts a population of 410 souls, more or less, and was named for the native city of its famous early settler, Albert Gallatin. Gallatin came to this country without friends or influence, and by the sheer power of his personality and ability (and despite the handicap of a monumental French accent) achieved appointment as a member of the President's Cabinet within ten years of his arrival. A man of many talents, Gallatin served in the Revolutionary War, then became a French instructor at Harvard. Later he journeyed to Richmond on business and there became an intimate of Governor Patrick Henry, who advised him to go west to the wild lands of opportunity out by the Monongahela. Gallatin settled in Fayette County, a few miles from New Geneva and in a short time established the first glassworks west of the Alleghenies. In 1789 he built Friendship Hill, a 2 1/2-story, ivy-covered residence, still standing and open to the public.He began to enter local politics, filling several state and federal posts, and in 1801 was appointed secretary of the treasury by President Jefferson. He served in this post during both of Jefferson's presidential terms, the.whole of President Madison's first term, and until February, 1814, in the second, something of a record in Cabinet tenure. After retirement from the Cabinet this energetic adopted son of the new Republic held several diplomatic posts and finally, between 1831 and 1839 was president of the National Bank of New York. Patrick Henry said Albert Gallatin was one of the most extraordinary men he had ever seen. He was surely of keen intellectual powers and magnificent ability in political and diplomatic affairs--the model statesman. At Friendship Hill the dignified retirement of Gallatin was embellished in 1825 by a visit from "his long tried, his bosom friend," the Marquis de Lafayeffe. Of this sumptuous affair an old Monongahelite, James Veech (writing in 1858), said: "Who that was there can ever forget the 'feast of reason'--and other good things, and the 'flow of soul'-and champagne? The like of which old Springhill [Township] had never seen--may never see again." In the five miles upriver from New Geneva to Point Marion, where the Cheat River enters the Monongahela, no less than five coal tipples are busy dumping Pennsylvania coal into waiting barges. Point Marion has a large glassworks and a sand and gravel company which owns a baby Diesel towboat with a steam boiler for operating the steering rig and blowing the whistle, a quaint arrangement unique in my experience. Around a few bends and beyond more tipples, Morgantown rises on the hills to port. Ah, Morgantown, with your glass factories and coal mines and spaghtetti at Capellanti's and houses all peeling from chemical fumes in the air! On Saturday nights in spring the boys and girls from the University of West Virginia, perched up on the hill at the end of Main Street, mingle on the sidewalks down by the courthouse with coal miners and fanners and glassworkers. To us on the Coal Queen, Morgantown was everything, our metropolis--the hot bath, the glass of Tube City beer, the lump-in-throat in the movies, the Girl, paradise, purgatory--we knew them all in Morgantown. But Morgantown knew little of us. Steamboaters, with their excitable and noisy ways, are not invited to tea parties. I can call every bartender and short-order waitress in town by name but the mayor and I have yet to shake hands. Above Morgantown the Monongahela is a beautiful narrow stream running between high hills--"mountains," we always called them. The locks are small, the traffic is light, and there is a friendly intimacy benveen boat crews and lock tenders. The locks are so close that in a six-hour watch you might make seven or eight locks. After a few months of this, running those locks seemed automatic. That's pretty country up in there from Morgantown to National Mine, and pretty again above Jordan, especially in the spring, when the trees and flowers are all in bloom. And then, half blinded sometimes by the smoke from the railroad yard, we come to Fairmont, and beyond it the "Dark Bridge" (no lights on it), which we all hated, and then there was the point, where the Monongahela ended, a point with a big tree on it, a good mark and easy to pick up with the searchlight on a bad night. The Monongahela is formed by the West Fork River and the Tygart River, which join here at Fairmont, 128.73 miles south of Pittsburgh. The tipple where we loaded coal was at Kingmont, up the Tygart, two miles above head of navigation on the Monongahela, and we would snake our loads out of there in a river so narrow you could nearly jump across. Now just imagine, in the old days you could take a good big steamboat from Fairmont, West Virginia, at the headwaters of the Monongahela, down to Cairo, up the Mississippi and Missouri to Fort Benton, Mont.--3,623 miles, or about as far as from the North River in New York to the East India Docks on the Thames at London. In fact the stern-wheeler E. H. Durfee made regular trips between Pittsburgh and Fort Benton in the years 1872 to 1876. Wouldn't that be something, to raise steam amidst the roar of industry on the Monongahela and keep that paddle wheel splashing until you began to run into buffalo and Sioux and the Rocky Mountains?

	Updated on Saturday, 01-Jul-2000 18:10:29 MDT