Was Pittsburgh's Economic Destiny Set in 1815?

Was Pittsburgh’s Economic Destiny Set in 1815? EDWARD K. MULLER first read The Urban Frontier as a graduate student in historical geog- Iraphy many years ago. I naturally focused on the geographical impli- cations of Richard C. Wade’s thesis that towns emerged on the Ohio Valley frontier along with the earliest pioneers, “held the West for the approaching population,” and accelerated its transformation to a settled region.1 This critical insight into the settlement process anchored my dissertation.2 His view that “towns were the spearheads” and not the cul- mination of the settlement process, overturned the conventional Tu rnerian interpretation of frontier urbanization and spurred the work of many subsequent scholars.3 At the time of my initial reading, I paid little attention to Wade’s comparative methodology and comprehensive topical coverage. Returning to The Urban Frontier often in the ensuing years, I gained an __________________________ Edward K. Muller is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Among his recent pub- lications is (with John F. Bauman) Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889-1943 (2006). 1Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 342. 2Edward K. Muller, “The Development of Urban Settlement in a Newly Settled Region: The Middle Ohio Valley, 1800-1860,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1972); Muller, “Selective Urban Growth in the Middle Ohio Valley, 1800-1860,” Geographical Review, 66 (April 1976), 178-99; Muller, “Regional Urbanization and the Selective Growth of Towns in North American Regions,” Journal of Historical Geography, 3 (January 1977), 21-39. 3Wade, The Urban Frontier, 1. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 105 (September 2009) ᭧ 2009, Trustees of Indiana University. 204 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY appreciation of his research, which encompassed five cities and the examination of forty to fifty years of local newspapers, municipal records, and other primary materials. As if unraveling the economic and geographical roles of five cities were not enough, Wade also wrote on everything from municipal governments’ structures and their evolving responsibilities to racial relations, cultural activities, and emerging social configurations. He presented a story of a rapidly developing and surprisingly sophisticated urban life on the frontier despite the towns’ small populations and relatively brief existences. In this narrative, citi- zens ambitiously pursued the myriad high-risk economic opportunities of these newly developing regions, while (in another challenge to Tu rnerian interpretations) they simultaneously emulated older eastern cities by bringing “established institutions and ways” to their towns.4 Twenty years after Harvard University Press published The Urban Frontier, I joined the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh and found myself faced with teaching a course on the city’s history. I discovered a wealth of writing on the struggle between France and Britain in the mid-eighteenth century for control of the peninsula formed by the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. I also found a vigorous and growing literature on the city’s industrial era that began a century later. Enthusiastic and productive graduate seminars in American social history begun during the 1960s at both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University emphasized the seven decades of rapid and extensive industrialization between the 1850s and the end of World War I. Pittsburgh’s importance to the nation’s industrialization in this period, especially with respect to the iron and steel industry and the labor movement, attracted national and international attention from industrial and social historians beyond the local universi- ties. Accordingly, there was an outpouring of books, theses, and seminar papers on this era of Pittsburgh history. This extensive body of work contrasted with the shockingly thin literature on the city as it had devel- oped in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 This imbalance in the writing of Pittsburgh history remains. Leland D. Baldwin’s 1937 history of Pittsburgh from 1750 to 1865 is the __________________________ 4Ibid., 318. 5Samuel P. Hays, ed., City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1989). PITTSBURGH 205 only extant comprehensive volume for the frontier and antebellum peri- ods. Baldwin wrote for a general audience, and although he based his book on newspapers, manuscripts, and other primary sources, he admit- tedly emphasized “feeling, drama, and atmosphere rather than textbook completeness.”6 Even as he dramatized and romanticized some events, in other places Baldwin resorted to list-like compilations of city-building achievements and social and cultural developments. In keeping with his generation of historians, he produced a book more in the style of older city biographies than the interpretive scholarly studies of cities which came after Wade. A decade later, Catherine Elizabeth Reiser wrote a richly empirical study of Pittsburgh’s economic growth down to 1850.7 In her view, the evolution of evermore efficient and far-reaching commercial capabilities served the manufacturing goals of the city elite. Despite being impressed with the city’s growth of manufacturing, Reiser spent most of her book carefully describing transportation improvements, the emergence of commission merchants and marketing, and developing efforts at economic organization. Further, her analysis involved the evolution of a prodigious trade in goods, largely unrelated to local manufactures, with points on the East Coast and in the Ohio Valley. Like many who wrote in the years after her, Reiser interpreted Pittsburgh’s antebellum past through the lens of its later industrial strength. Besides the typical turn-of-the-century subscription-based city and county histories and a smattering of essays and research notes (often written by history buffs), Wade had only Baldwin’s and Reiser’s works, and a handful of graduate theses and articles, on which to draw. On economic matters, he referenced Reiser several times, but clearly he pre- ferred to depend on his own research. There is no evidence that he used Baldwin’s story of Pittsburgh, which offered little critical interpretation. In contrast, Wade advanced generalizations about the early Ohio Valley cities on a great variety of urban topics. In one passage, he pulled togeth- er the various strands of social change to plausibly capture the situation in Pittsburgh until nearly mid-century, when significant industrial __________________________ 6Leland D. Baldwin, Pittsburgh: The Story of a City, 1750-1865 (1937; Pittsburgh, Pa., 1970), xi. 7Catherine Elizabeth Reiser, Pittsburgh’s Commercial Development, 1800-1850 (Harrisburg, Pa., 1951). 206 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY growth and social change began to transform the young city. Writing about the city as it appeared in 1830, he concluded: Larger populations and the expansion of commerce and industry created new groups and interests, thus adding to the complexity and sophistication of city life. Already stratified after a generation of growth, these communities found lines sharpened, class divisions deepened, and the sense of neighborliness and intimacy weakened. The fragmentation caused by the increasing special- ization of urban economies and the greater size of the towns meant the easy familiarity of small-town life more and more gave way to the impersonality of city living.8 Ranging across a broad variety of political, social, and cultural topics, Wade both supported his own conclusion and foreshadowed later schol- arship, as sparse as it is. Thirty years after Wade’s pathbreaking study, a few scholars reached back to the initial decades of the nineteenth century in the course of preparing topical overviews covering the city’s full history. They brought to their essays fresh perspectives based on the relatively recent literature of social history and on a handful of graduate student papers on antebellum Pittsburgh. Joel Tarr’s essay on infrastruc- ture, Laurence Glasco’s on African Americans, Paul Kleppner’s on poli- tics and government, John Ingham’s on elites, and my own on hinterland relationships all confirmed and went beyond Wade’s observations.9 Even with the addition of Scott Martin’s excellent book on leisure and culture, however, the paucity of scholarly investigations into early Pittsburgh leaves Wade’s generalizations about class, fragmentation, and diminish- ing intimacy inadequately tested.10 By examining the five major urban centers of the Ohio Valley frontier, Wade avoided the pitfalls of the single case study approach and strengthened his argument. His comparative approach, however, may have had the unintended consequence of overemphasizing Pittsburgh as __________________________ 8Wade. The Urban Frontier, 203. 9Hays, ed., City at the Point. 10Scott C. Martin, Killing Time: Leisure and Culture in Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1800-1850 (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1995). PITTSBURGH 207 a manufacturing city during the first third of the nineteenth century. Wade recognized Pittsburgh’s greater development of, and dependence on, manufacturing compared to that of the other Ohio Valley towns. By 1815, only Lexington seemed to depend as much on manufacturing. In this essay, I suggest that while Pittsburgh’s industrial development did distinguish it from its rival river towns, its business leaders—like those of Cincinnati, Louisville, and St.

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