Old Pittsburgh Days by Thomas Jefferson Chapman

Author:Thomas Jefferson Chapman [Chapman, Thomas Jefferson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA)
ISBN: 9783849675271
Google: DMcTAAAAYAAJ
Publisher: J. R. Weldin & Company
Published: 1900-01-15T00:39:04+00:00

CHAPTER VIII. AFTER THE STORM

The war of the Revolution was over. Pittsburgh had not been molested by the enemy. It seems to have prospered in those troublesome days and the twenty houses of 1770 had increased to nearly one hundred, and the population numbered nearly five hundred souls.

The buildings would seem to have clustered about the fort, and in 1779 Colonel Brodhead complains that the inhabitants were encroaching upon what he conceives are the rights of the garrison, even building " their fences within a few yards of the bastions." Situated as the town was at the gateway to the great Southwest, and being the chief rallying-point on an extended frontier, it had a various and curious population. John Wilkins, who settled here about the year 1783, says that the place was then filled with old officers, soldiers, and camp followers, mixed with a few families of credit. All sorts of wickedness were carried on to excess, and there was no appearance of morality or order, or any signs of religion among the people. The description of the place by Arthur Lee, of Virginia, who visited it in the year 1784, is not more flattering.

" Pittsburgh," he says, " is inhabited almost entirely by Scots and Irish, who live in paltry log houses, and are as dirty as in the north of Ireland, or even in Scotland. There is a great deal of small trade carried on, the goods being brought at the vast expense of forty shillings per hundred-weight from Philadelphia and Baltimore. They take in the shops money, wheat, flour, and skins. There are in the town four attorneys, two doctors, and not a priest of any persuasion, nor church nor chapel, so that they are likely to be damned without the benefit of clergy. The rivers encroach fast on the town, and to such a degree that, as a gentleman told me, the Allegheny had within thirty years of his memory carried away one hundred yards. The place, I believe, will never be very considerable." From this account one gets quite a different impression from that produced by Hugh Henry Brackenridge's glowing description only two years later, — his " town with smoking chimneys, halls lighted up with splendor, ladies and gentlemen assembled, various music, and the mazes of the dance," — his new world, " where there is all the refinement of the former and more benevolence of heart." Brackenridge was a young lawyer, a Scotchman by birth, who had come over to Pittsburgh from Philadelphia in the spring of 1781 and settled here. He was afterwards for many years a conspicuous figure in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania. His description of his adopted town, which was published in the Gazette in 1786, was a highly fanciful sketch, " intended," as he said, " to give some reputation to the town, with a view to induce emigration to this particular spot." His sketch has small historical value because of its gross exaggerations. He grows at times quite

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