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Growth and Development in Washington, Pennsylvania, 1810--1870

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Growth and Development in Washington, Pennsylvania, 1810--1870 Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2012 Between Frontier and Factory: Growth and Development in Washington, Pennsylvania, 1810--1870 Eric D. Duchess West Virginia University Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Duchess, Eric D., "Between Frontier and Factory: Growth and Development in Washington, Pennsylvania, 1810--1870" (2012). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 4850. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/4850 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Between Frontier and Factory: Growth and Development in Washington, Pennsylvania, 1810-1870 Eric D. Duchess Dissertation submitted to the College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History Kenneth Fones-Wolf, Ph.D., Chair Katherine Aaslestad, Ph.D. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf, Ph.D. W. Thomas Mainwaring, Ph.D. A. Michal McMahon, Ph.D. Department of History Morgantown, West Virginia 2012 Keywords: Pennsylvania; Market Revolution; Railroads; Politics; Civil War Copyright 2012 Eric D. Duchess ABSTRACT Between Frontier and Factory: Growth and Development in Washington, Pennsylvania, 1810-1870 Eric D. Duchess This dissertation examines the small town of Washington, Pennsylvania from its post-frontier period to the eve of industrialization. Two primary areas are covered in the study: the Market Revolution’s growing influence on the local economy and society, and the Civil War’s local impact. This study contributed to the field of urban and town history by providing a case study from a relatively under-examined region, the Upper Ohio Valley and southwestern Pennsylvania, by studying the relationship between its economic development and its social and political characteristics. Washington was in many ways a typical small western Pennsylvania town, surrounded by farmland and serving as a local commercial and small manufacturing hub. By the 1810s, the town and surrounding county were adapting and adjusting to the growing Market Revolution, with expanding commercial activities, banking, the maturation of the cash-credit nexus in commerce, regular connections to distant markets, and transportation improvements, including local turnpikes, the National Road, and later, railroads. But despite growing influences from the Market Revolution, Washington’s economy and society experienced a high degree of continuity even into the post-Civil War years. There was no surge in population growth or industrialization until well after the Civil War, putting relatively little immediate pressure on the community between the 1810s and the 1870s. Although certainly not a boom-town, Washington Borough was still a growing and developing community, the study of which imparts a greater understanding of nineteenth century regional patterns and small town development generally. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction…………………………………………………………..………………1 Chapter 2: Foundations of Washington, Pennsylvania…………………..…………………..…19 Chapter 3: The Community Leadership Class………………………………....………………49 Chapter 4: The Market Evolution, 1810-1860…………………….……………………………88 Chapter 5: Reluctant Embrace – Washington and the Railroad Question, 1828-1861……..…160 Chapter 6: Continuity and Wartime Washington………………………………………………213 Chapter 7: From General Consensus to Major Conflict………………………………………..235 Chapter 8: Open Wounds at Home…………..…………………………………………………263 Chapter 9: Conclusion…………………………………………….……………………………312 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………318 iii Chapter 1: Introduction For more than half a century, articles, books, and other monographs on city, town, and rural communities have made major contributions to historians’ understanding of nineteenth century America’s social, economic, and political characteristics, not only in early-established areas on the East Coast, but also frontier and post-frontier communities dotted across the interior. Pioneering works in the 1950s and 1960s, like Richard Wade’s Urban Frontier, Robert Dykstra’s Cattle Towns, and Sam Bass Warner’s Private City emphasized town and city importance in national development and their changing dynamics over time, including progressively greater links to the larger capitalist economy, industrialization, and the social changes that accompanied it.1 By the 1970s, urban history reached new levels of sophistication and insight, as books like Michael Frisch’s Town Into City, Paul Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, and Don Harrison Doyle’s Social Order of a Frontier Community, probed more fully the relationship between economic development, social, cultural, and political patterns.2 Urban case studies, comparative studies, and other town and city-oriented works have continued to examine these broad issues, choosing communities from a variety of states, regions, and sub- regions as examples. Although major cities and boom towns tend to draw the lion’s share of scholarly attention, small town and rural communities must also be examined, for they were far more numerous than boom towns and metropolises, and perhaps more illustrative of ordinary America than the big city experience. As historian David Contosta has noted, obscure small towns with no claims to urban greatness frequently “illuminate larger forces and trends on a 1 Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Robert R. Dykstra, The Cattle Towns (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1968); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968). 2 Michael H. Frisch, Town Into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972); Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (1978; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 2004). 1 regional and national scale,” adding depth and new insights to historical interpretation and understanding.3 In describing Lancaster, Ohio, in the early nineteenth century, Contosta considers it one of the more significant and bustling towns in central Ohio, despite the fact that no local events or developments occurred that qualified it as famous or particularly outstanding. Lancaster’s significance to historians, Costosta argues, is “precisely because it fails to qualify for great fame, a characteristic that it shares with hundreds of other places, making it symptomatic of so many localities neglected by historians.”4 The nineteenth century was a period of immense economic, social, and political change in the United States. By the 1860s, the Market Revolution and the rise of modern capitalism fundamentally impacted economic, social, and political patterns in both North and South, with even small towns and rural areas increasingly under its influences. The market revolution was a decades-long process that did not unfold evenly across the country. Instead, its pace, character, and intensity varied greatly from place to place; some regions and towns were quickly and profoundly impacted, while others, like Washington Borough, experienced its effects more slowly and with less intensity. Similar to the market revolution, the Civil War impacted regions and localities in vastly different ways, including the war’s impact within the Union states. The war immediately and significantly transformed some towns and cities, while others, like Washington, experienced few or no transformative effects. Like most communities between the early 1800s and the immediate post-Civil War period, the town of Washington, Pennsylvania, as well as its surrounding county was compelled to adjust to new circumstances, opportunities and pressures rising from a fundamental economic transformation and the century’s largest war. 3 David Contosta, Lancaster, Ohio, 1800-2000: Frontier Town to Edge City (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 3. 4 Ibid, 4. 2 The town of Washington, Pennsylvania, is one of the many small, ordinary communities that enhances historians’ insight and understanding of nineteenth century American social, economic, and political history. By the early 1800s, the Ohio Valley was rapidly filling with farming communities, small towns already dotted the countryside, and a few larger cities emerged along the River. Although scholars have examined the larger cities, including Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Cincinnati, and Louisville, far more exhaustively than the region’s small towns and rural areas, some recent important work on the smaller communities have demonstrated the Ohio Valley’s rich potential for more contributions to the vast and complex field of urban and town history. Indeed, as historian Darryl Bigham observes, one of the Ohio Valley’s
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