In 1871, the B&O finally succeeded in leasing the Pittsburgh & Connellsville Railroad, after it had been completed to Cumberland and gained independent access to Pittsburgh. By that time, it was clear that no latecomer would truly rival the Pennsy’s importance to Pittsburgh, with its connections to destinations in all directions through its branches, including the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railway; the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railway (known as the Pennsy’s Panhandle lines); the Pittsburgh, Virginia & Charlestown Railway; the Western Pennsylvania Railroad; and the Allegheny Valley Railroad.
The Pittsburgh Riots
In the 1889 book History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, one of the work’s contributing authors writes, “All cities have riots, at some time in their history, and Pittsburgh had her share in 1877. It was chiefly remarkable for the amount of property destroyed, and for the utter paralysis that overcame the local authorities in attempting to put it down. The total of the property destroyed was valued at three millions of dollars, and all this destruction was wrought during the quiet of a beautiful Sunday in July.” This riot was part of America’s first national labor uprising, which erupted simultaneously in many other cities and towns but has since come to be generally associated with Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Railroad.
In 1877, at a time when railroads were still recovering from the depression triggered by the Panic of 1873, the Pennsy announced a 10 percent cut in wages for all officers and employees. Management was also experimenting with other cost-cutting measures, such as double-heading (joining two freight trains into one), essentially downsizing by eliminating available jobs for railroad workers.
Three days after a riot started among equally disgruntled B&O railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on July 19 of that year, several Pennsy crews refused to take out their trains. Other Pittsburgh workers, both employed and unemployed, soon joined them at the freight yard, where they succeeded in causing a sheriff and his posse, who had been summoned by Pennsy executives, to back down. After the local militiamen who were called in ended up joining the strike, fresh troops were transported from Philadelphia. The situation worsened when these Philadelphians opened fire on hearing what sounded like either pistol shots or explosions, killing twenty people and wounding many more. The troops retreated to the roundhouse, but the mob set fire to the Pennsy’s freight yard and rammed flaming cars down the tracks to flush out the soldiers, who again opened fire. At that point, according to History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, “Every thief, every loafer, every idler, every ill-disposed creature, seeing the opportunity offered for plunder, jumped at the unwonted chance, and at once began the work of looting.”
Pittsburgh’s Union Depot as illustrated for William B. Sipes’s 1875 book—published not long before the Pittsburgh Riots.
The ultimate loss to the PRR included virtually all its Pittsburgh terminal facilities, including its passenger station, two roundhouses, machine shops, and 125 locomotives. The Pennsy filed claims against Allegheny County for property damage amounting to $2,312,000. The strikers had inflicted their anger and frustration on the very railroad that was so important to the city. The published History of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania theorizes that the general population of Pittsburgh might have concluded that the Pennsy was no longer according their city the proper respect: “From the very start the Pennsylvania road had persisted in treating Pittsburgh, not as the western terminus of the line, but as a mere way-station on its route to the west. The city, until within a few years past, was unable to profit by the advantages of its position. The railroad rates discriminated against it at nearly every point, and it was cheaper to ship grain and other western produce from Chicago to Philadelphia and New York than to Pittsburgh.”
At the time it occurred, newspapers suggested that the strike might signal the start of a new civil war in America, this time between labor and capital. It did indeed foster union development and led many to conclude that if the railroad needed the government’s protection from its own workers, perhaps it needed some government regulation as well.
One Last Main Line for Pittsburgh
In 1912, when the first freight train traveled a new route from Pittsburgh to Baltimore over an extension of the Western Maryland Railway to Connellsville, the achievement was welcomed and applauded in both cities and all the towns in between. No one knew it at the time, but this extension was the last significant piece of main-line railroad to be constructed in the continental United States.
Acquisition of the Western Maryland Railway had been an important step in George Jay Gould’s dream to control a transcontinental railroad network, the dream that also brought his Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal Railway into Pittsburgh. In 1902, working quietly through an organization called the Fuller Syndicate with the authorization of Baltimore’s city council, Gould purchased the interest that the city of Baltimore had held in this railroad in the form of mortgages. The following year, he began construction on an extension that would follow the Potomac to Cumberland. With numerous bridges and more than two miles of tunnels, however, the line proved to be expensive, and the Western Maryland Railway entered receivership in 1908, together with Gould’s Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal and his Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad.
Once the Western Maryland Railway was free of Gould and out of receivership, its simple extension to Connellsville brought it a trade and traffic partner in the P&LE, which by that time was part of the New York Central system. The connection between these railroads forged a new Great Lakes-to-Seaboard system that was suddenly a real competitor for the B&O.
The fact that the Western Maryland’s new tracks ran parallel to those of the B&O in many places brought about the eventual demise of this line. Although the Western Maryland Railway may have had the better route, CSX Corporation abandoned it after absorbing what was then called the Connellsville subdivision in the mid-1970s. Parts of the western end of the Western Maryland Railway are now being converted into rail-trails, except for that portion being used by the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad.
Railroads and Pittsburgh’s Renaissance
No one knows exactly how the section of Pittsburgh bounded by the Allegheny River, the Monongahela River, and Grant Street came to be called Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle. This piece of real estate is certainly triangular, but it hasn’t always been a very appealing place. When the Writers’ Program of the Works Project Administration published Pennsylvania: A Guide to the Keystone State in 1940, its authors observed that “the triangle formed by the rivers is packed with smoke-grimed buildings; from the manufacturing establishments come clouds of devastating smoke that unite with the river fog to form Pittsburgh’s traditional nuisance, ‘smog.’”
The smoke and the grime were a product of, and a kind of tribute to, the many successful industries in and around Pittsburgh, including Andrew Carnegie’s Edgar Thomson Steel Works, the H. J. Heinz food-processing operations, Alcoa, and Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG). Making the atmosphere even less wholesome were the railroad facilities that dominated the triangle, including the massive freight operations of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which embraced the terminal facilities of the Wabash-Pittsburgh Terminal, later the P&WV.
By the mid-twentieth century, architectural styles had changed and even the railroads’ spectacular stations, designed to surround passengers with opulence, looked dated and old. Two of them, Theodore C. Link’s flatiron Wabash Terminal and the B&O passenger station designed by Frank Furness, had already been torn down, and Pittsburghers seemed inclined to sacrifice even more Victorian landmarks. For a while, it seemed that even the Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, would be replaced by a hotel.
Mayor David Lawrence and the influential banker Richard King Mellon led a massive renovation project that became known as Pittsburgh’s Renaissance. As a member of the PRR board of directors, Mellon was particularly influential in gaining the support of the reluctant Pennsy. In 1950, demolition began on everyth
ing at the western end of the Golden Triangle, except for its few remaining eighteenth-century structures and the nondescript building housing the Pittsburgh Press. The empty space was filled in by an office complex called Gateway Center and new buildings for Alcoa and U.S. Steel. After a number of suggestions about what to locate at the extreme point of land where the rivers meet, statues and futuristic office centers were rejected in favor of a fountain that tapped an underground water source to spout water three hundred feet into the air, just beyond the preserved outline of old Fort Duquesne.
A second redevelopment project of the Golden Triangle was undertaken in the 1980s. Grant Street was essentially rebuilt, and Pittsburgh got a light-rail transit line, or a combination subway-surface line, which proved to be very successful and has since been expanded. Although the first renaissance obliterated quite a few railroad artifacts, the second one brought rail service back to Pittsburgh, even using a few remaining railroad artifacts, such as the Pennsy’s Panhandle Division Bridge, over which light-rail transit cars now travel to Station Square and points south.
George H. Thurston Travels
In celebration of the nation’s centennial in 1876, George H. Thurston wrote a book titled Pittsburgh and Allegheny in the Centennial Year (referring to the borough of Allegheny). Thurston had long been editor of Pittsburgh’s residential and business directories and had published other promotional material about the general area. In this volume, he describes how Pittsburgh might have appeared at that time to a visitor arriving by train:
The traveler, simply passing through Pittsburgh, sees things under such a gloom of smoke, that the beauty of the city outside of its business area is generally unknown. The traveler approaching Pittsburgh from the East on the Pennsylvania Railroad hardly suspects that the beautiful park-like country through which he is passing, dotted thick with attractive residences, picturesque grounds, and broad paved roads, over which the bright sunshine showers down and clear blue skies bend, is part of the famous “Smoky city,” a portion of the great metal factory of the United States. Just as some chance remark conveys the idea that for nearly twenty minutes he has been riding at a rapid railroad speed through miles of Pittsburgh’s fairest wards, he enters upon a region of smoke and fire, and for two miles or more rides under canopies of smoke, past furnace and mill, coke ovens and factories, to be, after a brief pause in the spacious Union Depot of the Pennsylvania Railroad, drawn into the bowels of the earth, to travel entirely from one side of the city to the other under its houses and streets. Emerging on the Monongahela River side of the city, he still pursues his course amid fire and smoke, past glass houses, steel works, rolling mills and foundries, for some two or three miles, to again pass into a land of sunshine and clear skies; where still the houses of Pittsburgh merchants and manufacturers dot the landscape and beautify the scenery. The ear has been so stunned by the whistle of the escaping steam, the clank of machinery, the din of metallic reverberation, and the roar of forges in all directions; that as the eye is prevented from comprehending any of the landscape surroundings, the mind is equally confused in obtaining any definite comprehension of the scope of its manufactures. The travelers pass from under its clouds of smoke and beyond its ear distracting and peculiar noise with the one distinct idea that its manufactures must be great, and with a feeling of curiosity to explore the mysteries of its workshops….
And such is Pittsburgh in 1876 to the passing traveler as he enters it by either of the railroads that center in the city. To the tourist who may spare the time to explore Pittsburgh there is, beside that region of fire and smoke, sections of calm delight, districts of great picturesque beauty.
Local Chapters of the National Railway Historical Society
The Beaver Valley Junction Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society was formed in 1991 by rail fans in the Conway area to preserve Beaver County’s railroad heritage. In 2007, the chapter ended its affiliation with the national organization, becoming the Beaver-Lawrence Railway Historical Society the following year. The society formerly owned rolling stock but sold most of it after losing its storage space. It then refocused its attention on the restoration of the 1907 Arts and Crafts–style West Pittsburgh Railroad Station, which had been out of service since 1964. The station will eventually be furnished with artifacts and operated as a museum. In 2005, the organization successfully restored a railroad tower that is called the UN Tower because of its location near Union Valley Road.
The Pittsburgh Chapter of the National Railway Historical Society holds regular meetings and publishes a newsletter called The Keystone.
The Region’s Railroad Giants
Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919)
The name Andrew Carnegie is synonymous with Pittsburgh, as well as with the phrase “self-made man.” Carnegie was born in Scotland and immigrated with his family to the town called Allegheny in 1848. Slum housing was all they could afford while Carnegie’s father labored in a textile factory to support them. At the age of twelve, Carnegie was put to work as a “bobbin boy” in the same factory.
Andrew Carnegie. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Carnegie’s rise to wealth and fame began when he was promoted from a subsequent job of delivering telegrams to a telegraph operator. He so impressed Thomas A. Scott that this Pennsylvania Railroad executive hired him as his private secretary. Carnegie spent twelve years working for the Pennsy, where he acquired business and management skills. When Scott was promoted, Carnegie was appointed to Scott’s former position as superintendent of the western division, where he remained until 1865. Scott also introduced Carnegie to the art of stock investment. Carnegie sold railroad bonds in Europe and invested in a telegraph company that was purchased at a profit by Western Union. He also organized the Pullman Palace Car Company with George Pullman.
Andrew Carnegie is best remembered for the steel plant he constructed to employ the new, quick, cheap Bessemer process. Located along the Pennsy’s tracks, the plant was named the Edgar Thomson Works after the president of the PRR, which Carnegie hoped would become his biggest customer. Carnegie’s efficient company soon became the world’s largest producer of steel.
Carnegie frequently found himself at odds with the Pennsy, whose rates he claimed discriminated against Pennsylvania’s businesses in favor of those located farther away. Determined to break its transportation monopoly, he supported the South Pennsylvania Railroad project and later formed the Bessemer & Lake Erie Railroad, mainly out of a deteriorating line that ran from a town north of Pittsburgh to Conneaut, Ohio. Once the Pennsy management realized that Carnegie was serious about developing his acquisition into a competing railroad with connections to other major lines, it backed down and cut its rates.
Carnegie Steel became United States Steel Corporation in 1901, when J. P. Morgan bought out Carnegie in a deal that made Carnegie one of the world’s richest men. Regarding himself as the trustee, not the owner, of this fortune, Carnegie devoted the remainder of his life to philanthropy, providing opportunities for those who could and would grasp them. Carnegie is remembered today for the many libraries he founded—nearly two thousand in the United States.
Robert Pitcairn (1836–1909)
Robert Pitcairn was another Scot whose family immigrated to the Pittsburgh area, where he and Andrew Carnegie became boyhood friends. Carnegie got Pitcairn a job as a telegram messenger (Pitcairn was also later promoted to operator) and later a position as ticket agent in Cresson.
Pitcairn rose in the Pennsy ranks, becoming superintendent of the division between Harrisburg and Altoona. When Carnegie left the PRR in 1865 to go into business for himself, Pitcairn succeeded him as superintendent of the entire western division. Pitcairn is sometimes blamed for the destruction of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, because his policies during this time of general depression had been perceived as harsh by the angered workers.
Pitcairn found another friend in George Westinghouse, whom he assisted in organizing the company that would manufacture air brakes for trains
. It was Pitcairn’s investments in Westinghouse that helped him amass a personal fortune.
Jay Gould (1836–92)
Just as Carnegie personifies the self-made man, Jay Gould is sometimes depicted as the archetype evil robber baron, though modern business historians are lately beginning to rehabilitate his reputation. Like Carnegie, Gould was a man of humble background; his parents were farmers in upstate New York, and Gould worked at his father’s store before he was able to start a business as a self-taught surveyor.
Gould’s robber baron image was born in the days when he joined forces with James Fisk and Daniel Drew in the Erie War to prevent Cornelius Vanderbilt from taking over the New York & Erie Railroad. Gould launched an expansion program at the Erie that forced the Pennsy and the New York Central to expand and compete. He blackened his reputation with an effort to corner America’s gold supply and was forced out of Erie management.
In 1874, Gould acquired the Union Pacific Railroad and worked hard to improve its inefficient operation. During the 1880s, he gained control of a number of midwestern, southwestern, and western railroads in an effort to forge a transcontinental system.
Gould’s contemporaries described him as habitually thin and sickly, a condition probably resulting from chronic tuberculosis. He died at home on Fifth Avenue, leaving a will intended to keep his fortune in his family.
George Jay Gould. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
George Jay Gould (1864–1923)
Railroads of Pennsylvania Page 31