Beyond Rust. Allen Dieterich-Ward
in 1784. A year later, the passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785 defined how the lands across the Ohio would be surveyed and sold to settlers.5
As a result, while Pittsburgh remained part of the state of Pennsylvania, by the turn of the eighteenth century it was separated politically from its hinterlands to the south and west. By 1820, the city’s population had topped 7,200, making it second in size only to Cincinnati along the length of the Ohio. Wheeling scored an important coup in 1818 when it became the western terminus of a new National Road that connected the port of Baltimore with the Ohio River. Anglo-American settlers laid out the village of Steubenville, Ohio, in 1797 near a fort established to protect surveyors. Twenty years later the community boasted three thousand residents and a variety of manufacturers. Town lots for smaller communities also began appearing on local tax assessment records. The southwestern Pennsylvania community of Falls City, later renamed Ohiopyle, was founded adjacent to a series of rapids along the Youghiogheny River, a tributary of the Monongahela, shortly after the American Revolution by residents attracted by the availability of water power for mills. Ohiopyle’s population then slowly expanded after construction of the National Road in 1811 provided easier access to the markets of the east. Over the next century, residents were involved in the farming, mining and timber industries particularly after the arrival of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1871.6
This relationship between geography, market conditions and transportation technology drove metropolitan development within the region. While the Upper Ohio Valley had a temperate climate and relatively fertile soils replenished by seasonal flooding, the hilly landscape limited areas suitable for intensive agriculture and placed a premium on the level lands of the river and stream valleys. On reaching the flatter, fertile area just west of the Ohio River escarpment after weeks in the mountains, one early traveler on the National Road from Wheeling reportedly declared “This must be the land of Egypt,” a name that stuck to the small farming community of Egypt Valley in southeastern Ohio. The early market towns and river cities followed a development pattern of expansion outward on the relatively narrow flatlands between the riverbanks and the steep escarpment of the surrounding hills. These small towns served a number of important functions in frontier society, clustering together a variety of skills, professional services, and economic opportunities for the region’s residents. Even by 1790, Washington, Pennsylvania, located west of the Braddock Road between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, boasted sixteen retailers, thirty merchants and more than ninety-three other artisans and tradesmen, including such new trades as Windsor chair makers and coppersmiths.7
By the 1830s, the regional identity binding the trans-Appalachian West was overshadowed by an increasing identification along state lines. This transition was due in part to the decline in the importance of the rivers for inter-regional transportation and marketing in the face of road and canal construction. The arrival of the National Road in 1818 held out the possibility that Wheeling might challenge Pittsburgh’s supremacy, but the city struggled to attract investment when infrastructure development funds from Richmond were not forthcoming. President Andrew Jackson’s veto of the federal Maysville Road proposal in 1830 further heightened the role of individual states in determining the route of new transportation corridors, thus shifting the emphasis away from intra-regional improvements. “By 1835 the change wrought on Wheeling business [was] perceptible,” concluded historian F. F. Crall, and advertisements in Wheeling papers suggest the increasing penetration of the market by Pittsburgh merchants.8
Pittsburgh, which looked largely to Philadelphia as a partner in commerce, had an advantage compared to Wheeling, for whom out-of-state Baltimore was the key Atlantic port. The opening of a canal between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia in 1834 reversed Wheeling’s advantages and caused the beginning of the city’s commercial subordination to its upriver rival. “We exceedingly regret that we cannot live at peace with our neighbors ‘at the head of navigation,’ ” one Pittsburgh editor mockingly declared. “We want to see our ‘little sister’ thrive and prosper. But she cannot let us alone. Like a half-starved, ill-natured mangy cur, she is constantly snarling and snapping at our heels.” Wheeling boosters struck back arguing that while Pittsburgh was above Wheeling, the seasonal lowness of the water and the five shoals between the two cities meant that only small boats could reach Pittsburgh—“little wet-tailed dinky boats that a cart load of rock would sink in their best days.”9
The commercial tension between Pittsburgh and Wheeling during the early nineteenth century manifested as a battle over each city’s claim to be the “head of navigation” on the Ohio-Mississippi system. This rivalry became particularly bitter during the infamous Bridge War of the 1840s and 1850s. Bridges had special significance as a triumph over nature in both Europe and the United States. Described as “one of the proudest monuments of enterprise of our citizens,” the completion of the first bridge across the Ohio River in 1849 at Wheeling was hailed as one of the great marvels of its time, a triumph of human engineering over the forces of nature. For residents of Pittsburgh as well as Steubenville, however, the bridge was “an inconvenience and delay,” “an unreasonable obstruction to navigation” that impeded the passage of ships upstream. A series of cases that worked their way to the Supreme Court exposed the rivalry between state and local boosters in Virginia and Pennsylvania as well as the competing merits of land versus water transportation.10
Even as this rivalry intensified, the relative decline of the Ohio River as an inter-regional transportation artery marked the beginning of the end for Pittsburgh and Wheeling as chief cities of the trans-Appalachian West. The growth of Cincinnati especially, which developed a direct connection to the Great Lakes via the Miami and Erie Canal, cut off markets to the south and west. While Pittsburgh’s population trailed Cincinnati’s by only 2,400 in 1820, by 1850 the “Queen City” had twice as many residents as its upriver rival. On the other hand, new railroad links coupled with a common geography, culture, and perceived economic interests created a strong Unionist movement in northwestern Virginia. In a series of conventions between 1861 and 1863, the first held with Union troops gathered across the river within sight of the meeting place, Wheeling residents formally ratified ties to their regional neighbors in Pennsylvania and Ohio and the new state of West Virginia took its place in the Union on June 20, 1863.11
Making Steel
As in the rest of the nation, railroads were key to the industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century. The 1854 completion of the Pennsylvania Railroad to Pittsburgh spurred more rapid economic and population growth, pushing new manufacturing firms up the Allegheny and Monongahela floodplains and across the water. In Wheeling, over five hundred “excursionists,” including the governors of Maryland and Virginia, members of the two state legislatures, and municipal officials traveled all night from Baltimore to the opening celebration of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) in “handsomely decorated” railroad cars complete with “bands of music.” The ceremony itself included major banquets as well as speeches by railroad president Thomas Swann and other luminaries including the Latrobe brothers and Baltimore financier George Brown. By the early twentieth century, Pittsburgh alone had six major trunk lines, sixteen industrial and switching railroads, fifteen inclines, and dozens of streetcar and feeder lines that honeycombed throughout its area.12
In addition to providing a faster, more direct, and more reliable means of transporting goods, the development of railroads created a vast market for iron and steel products as well as for coal. Here again, the region’s location, coupled with easy access to natural resources, made Upper Ohio Valley communities ideal for supporting the industry. “The commercial advantages possessed by Steubenville are not confined simply to excellent transportation facilities by land and water,” proclaimed an 1888 report, “but underlying the city and surrounding country veins of coal are easily accessible to market.” In 1840 Pittsburgh produced more coal-fired steam horsepower than any other city in the United States; Wheeling was in second place. Between 1845 and 1855, coal mine production in Belmont County, Ohio, just across the river from Wheeling, exploded from less than 8,000 to 133,000 tons annually. Notably, production doubled from 40,000 to 80,000 tons in 1854, the year after the B&O crossed the river from Wheeling. Similarly, coal production around Steubenville doubled in 1854 with the arrival of the first railroad and then leaped to more than 200,000 tons in the late 1860s after the completion of the Steubenville Railroad