The New Student's Reference Work/Pittsburgh, Pa.

Pittsburgh, Pa. The junction of two navigable rivers, to form a third, with its outlet in a distant ocean, gave to the site of the ninth city in population of the United States, commercial advantages from the earliest days of settlement beyond the Alleghenies. Enormous manufacturing industries and trade originating in the locality were forced upon it by the lavish hand with which nature had deeply underlaid the surrounding hills with iron, coal, petroleum and natural gas.

The site of Pittsburgh is one of the greatest beauty with its bluff-bordered streams and distantly circling heights. No smoke marred this sylvan paradise when the French came from Canada, in 1753, and built Ft. Duquesne on The Point. At the close of the French and Indian War the British rebuilt the demolished fortress and named it Fort Pitt in honor of the Earl of Chatham, their brilliant statesman and orator. To the south Mount Washington and Duquesne Heights look down on the city to remind us that here the father of our country was initiated in the business of war; and 12 miles away, on the field of a famous defeat to British arms, stands the steel-manufacturing town of Braddock. With the opening of Kentucky and Ohio to settlement Pittsburgh rapidly developed into a frontier trading-post. It was incorporated as a village in 1794 and as a city in 1816. In 1845, when it had a population of 30,000, it was destroyed by fire.

A bird's-eye view of Pittsburgh with its population of over 500,000, would show the Allegheny, the Monongahela and the Ohio as a Y-shaped channel outlined for 20 miles on both banks with columns of smoke from factory-chimneys by day and with flame by night. Mills, docks, warehouses and tall, grimy tenements are wedged in the upper triangle, and have burst across the numerously bridged currents into Allegheny and other cities. The dense mass is gridironed with railroads, and the streams are covered with processions of funereal iron-ore and coal barges. Factory operatives and many others must live under this perpetual pall of the Smoky City, but all who can escape it at night have fled to the eastern hills, where they have set beautiful residences, public buildings, churches and schools along broad boulevards and landscape parks. Pittsburgh has money to pay for anything it wants. The steel-industry alone is said to have made 2,000 millionaires. Coal, coke, oil-fields and gas-wells have made others. There are locomotive and car-works, glass-furnaces and brass-foundries, paper-mills, salt and chemical works, plants for making electrical supplies and for many by-products of the steel-mills and oil-refineries to swell the streams of gold that flow into the city's coffers. Pittsburgh is traversed by, or has direct connection with, every important railroad from the Atlantic seaboard to the West. Its railway tonnage is said to exceed that of any other city in the world, and its river tonnage, among cities in the United States, is exceeded probably only by that of Detroit.

Because of its great wealth Pittsburgh is noted for its 200 costly churches, its fine public buildings, its 70 public schools and numerous private schools and academies. Carnegie Institute of Technology, built by Andrew Carnegie and endowed with $10,000,000, is one of the finest institutions of the kind in the world. Nearly one seventh of the population is enrolled in the public schools and more than 1,000 teachers are employed, an unusually high percentage among American cities. Little could be done to beautify the crowded manufacturing district, but as the city is only eight miles long and is but five wide at its eastern extremity, the suburbs and parks on the surrounding hills are easily accessible. Schenley Park is one of the largest parks in the country and Highland Park one of the most beautiful. In 1908 Allegheny was consolidated with Pittsburgh giving Greater Pittsburgh a population of 533,905. See Allegheny.