Peculiarities of American Cities

by Willard W. Glazier

The Ohio River makes its beginning here, and in all but the season of low water the wharves of the city are lined with boats, barges and tugs, destined for every mentionable point on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. The Ohio River is here, as all along its course, an uncertain and capricious stream. Sometimes, in spring, or early summer, it creeps up its banks and looks menacingly at the city. At other times it seems to become weary of bearing the boats, heavily laden with merchandise, to their destined ports, and so takes a nap, as it were. The last time we beheld this water-course its bed was lying nearly bare and dry, while a small, sluggish creek, a few feet, or at most, a few yards wide, crept along the bottom, small barges being towed down stream by horses, which waded in the water. The giant was resting.

The public buildings and churches of Pittsburg are, some of them, of fine appearance, while the Mercantile Library is an institution to be proud of, being both handsome and spacious, and containing a fine library and well-supplied reading room. The city boasts of universities, colleges, hospitals, and asylums, and the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy is the oldest house of the order in America. There are also two theatres, an Opera House, an Academy of Music, and several public halls.

But it is not any of these which has made the city what she is, or to which she will point with the greatest pride. The crowning glory of Pittsburg is her monster iron and glass works. One-half the glass produced in all the United States comes from Pittsburg. This important business was first established here in 1787, by Albert Gallatin, and it has increased since then to giant proportions. Probably, not less than one hundred millions of bottles and vials are annually produced here, besides large quantities of window glass. The best wine bottles in America are made here, though they are inferior to those of French manufacture. A great number of flint-glass works turn out the best flint glass produced in the country.

In addition to these glass works—which, though they employ thousands of workmen, represent but a fraction of the city's industries—there are rolling mills, foundries, potteries, oil refineries, and factories of machinery. All these works are rendered possible by the coal which abounds in measureless quantities in the immediate neighborhood of the city. All the hills which rise from the river back of Pittsburg have a thick stratum of bituminous coal running through them, which can be mined without shafts, or any of the usual accessories of mining. All that is to be done is to shovel the coal out of the hill-side, convey it in cars or by means of an inclined plane to the factory or foundry door, and dump it, ready for use. In fact, these hills are but immense coal cellars, ready filled for the convenience of the Pittsburg manufacturers. True, in shoveling the coal out of the hill-side, the excavations finally become galleries, running one, two or three miles directly into the earth. But there is neither ascent nor descent; no lowering of miners or mules in great buckets down a deep and narrow shaft, no elevating of coal through the same means. It is all like a great cellar, divided into rooms, the ceilings supported by arches of the coal itself. Each miner works a separate room, and when the room is finished, and that part of the mine exhausted the arches are knocked away, pillars of large upright logs substituted, the coal removed, and the hill left to settle gradually down, until the logs are crushed and flattened.

The "Great Pittsburg Coal Seam" is from four to twelve feet thick, about three hundred feet above the water's edge, and about one hundred feet from the average summit of the hills. It is bituminous coal which has been pressed solid by the great mass of earth above it. The thicker the mass and the greater the pressure, the better the coal. It has been estimated as covering eight and a half millions of acres, and that it would take the entire product of the gold mines of California for one thousand years to buy this one seam. When we remember the numerous other coal mines, anthracite as well as bituminous, found within the limits of the State of Pennsylvania, we are fairly stupefied in trying to comprehend the mineral wealth of that State.

The coal mined in the rooms in these long galleries is conveyed in a mule-drawn car to the mouth of the gallery, and if to be used by the foundries at the foot of the hill, is simply sent to its destination down an inclined plane. Probably not less than ten thousand men are employed in these coal mines in and near Pittsburg, adding a population not far from fifty thousand to that region. Pittsburg herself consumes one-third of the coal produced, and a large proportion of the rest is shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, some of it as far as New Orleans.

The monster iron works of Pittsburg consume large quantities of this coal, and it is the abundance and convenience of the latter material which have made the former possible. No other city begins to compare with Pittsburg in the number and variety of her factories. Down by the banks of the swift-flowing Allegheny most of the great foundries are to be discovered. The Fort Pitt Works are on a gigantic scale. Here are cast those monsters of artillery known as the twenty-inch gun. Not by any means a gun twenty inches in length, but a gun with a bore twenty inches in diameter, so accurate that it does not vary one-hundredth part of an inch from the true line in its whole length. The ball for this gun weighs one thousand and eighty pounds, and costs a hundred and sixty-five dollars. The gun itself weighs sixty tons, and costs fifty thousand dollars, and yet one of these giants is cast every day, and the operation is performed with the utmost composure and absence of confusion. The mould is an enormous structure of iron and sand, weighing forty tons, and to adjust this properly is the most difficult and delicate work in the foundry. When it is all ready, three streams of molten iron, from as many furnaces, flow through curved troughs and pour their fiery cataracts into the mould. These streams run for twenty minutes, and then, the mould being full, the furnaces from which they flow are closed with a piece of clay. Left to itself, the gun would be thirty days in cooling, but this process is expedited to eighteen days, by means of cold water constantly flowing in and out of the bore. While it is still hot, the great gun is lifted out of the pit, swung across the foundry to the turning shop, the end shaven off, the outside turned smooth, and the inside hollowed out, with an almost miraculous precision. The weight of the gun is thus reduced twenty tons.

The American Iron Works employ two thousand five hundred hands, and cover seventeen acres. They have a coal mine at their back door, and an iron mine on Lake Superior, and they make any and every difficult iron thing the country requires. Nothing is too ponderous, nothing too delicate and exact, to be produced. The nail works of the city are well worth seeing. In them a thousand nails a minute are manufactured, each nail being headed by a blow on cold iron. The noise arising from this work can only be described as deafening. In one nail factory two hundred different kinds of nails, tacks and brads are manufactured. The productions of these different factories and foundries amount in the aggregate to an almost incredible number and value, and embrace everything made of iron which can be used by man.

George F. Thurston, writing of Pittsburg, says, it has "thirty-five miles of factories in daily operation, twisted up into a compact tangle; all belching forth smoke; all glowing with fire; all swarming with workmen; all echoing with the clank of machinery. Actual measurement shows that there are, in the limits of what is known as Pittsburg, nearly thirty-five miles of manufactories of iron, of steel, of cotton, and of brass alone, not mentioning manufactories of other materials. In a distance of thirty-five and one-half miles of streets, there are four hundred and seventy-eight manufactories of iron, steel, cotton, brass, oil, glass, copper and wood, occupying less than four hundred feet each; for a measurement of the ground shows that these factories are so contiguous in their positions upon the various streets of the city, that if placed in a continuous row, they would reach thirty-five miles, and each factory have less than the average front stated. This is "manufacturing Pittsburg." In four years the sale and consumption of pig iron alone was one-fourth the whole immense production of the United States; and through the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and their tributaries, its people control the shipment of goods, without breaking bulk, over twelve thousand miles of water transportation, and are thus enabled to deliver the products of their thrift in nearly four hundred counties in the territory of fifteen States. There is no city of its size in the country which has so large a banking capital as Pittsburg. The Bank of Pittsburg, it is said, is the only bank in the Union that never suspended specie payments.