Which US regions natural resources made it a key area for the production of iron and steel in the late 1800s?

Located at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers at the head of the Ohio River, Pittsburgh was referred to as the "Gateway to the West" from its early days as a frontier village.

Introduction to Pittsburgh

Easily navigable waterways with an abundance of natural resources, (coal, timber, natural gas, iron and limestone) helped Pittsburgh become the industrial center for a growing nation. 

Most people recognize one thing about Pittsburgh's history, that it was known as an industrial hub for coal mining and steel production.  

Pittsburgh has played an important part in U.S. history from the early days of the French and Indian War (1758), to the Revolutionary War (1776), to the infamous Whiskey Rebellion (1791) and the American Civil War (1860s) with its secretive Underground Railroad stops.

The Civil War boosted the city's economy with increased iron and armament demand. With his introduction of the Bessemer steel making process, Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie, completed his rise from obscurity to become the richest man in the world. Carnegie began steel production in 1875. Henry Clay Frick, grandson of western Pennsylvania whiskey distillers, made his fortune building and operating beehive coking ovens where coal was turned into coke, a necessary raw material in steel making. Soon, the two men came together to form the Carnegie Steel Co. In 1901, Carnegie and Frick merged several companies into United States Steel Corp. 

The history of America's labor union movement added some dark days during the Homestead Steel Strike and subsequent armed conflict of the Battle of Homestead. From these dark days, though, grew modern labor practices and laws to protect workers. 

While the riverfront steel mills of the Mon Valley  are mostly gone now, the generosity of industrial giants like Carnegie and Frick, food manufacturer H.J. Heinz, and banker/financier Andrew Mellon lives on in a legacy of art, culture and education in Pittsburgh. What remained are the Frick family home, known as Clayton, as well as a masterful art collection. Andrew Carnegie's generous public donations included The Carnegie Library, Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Institute of Technology (known today as Carnegie Mellon University).

Up through the mid-1950s, Pittsburgh was the nation's eighth-largest city, accounting for nearly half of national steel output. The city's population swelled to over a half million with European immigration via Ellis Island. Pittsburgh's patchwork of neighborhoods still retains an ethnic character reflecting the city's immigrant history.

Even though Pittsburgh faced rough times in the 1970s and 80s when steel production all but disappeared from its landscape, it has since re-invented itself as a hub for education, medicine, small manufacturing and research. Of course, having extremely successful sports teams has enhanced the city's reputation. The black and gold of all three of its professional teams, Steelers (NFL), Pirates (MLB) and Penguins (NHL) are synonymous with the pride local residents have in its sports teams and the city they represent.

 Today Pittsburgh welcomes visitors from around the globe.  Its strengths lie in its authenticity as an all-American city, and its genuine, hard-working and welcoming sense of community that has transformed it into one of the most surprisingly beautiful and progressive cities in the USA. To fully relive Pittsburgh's past, visit the Senator John Heinz History Center for an immersive historical experience.

Coal can easily appear mundane to modern eyes—an inferior product from a bygone era. Yet this black, sooty, heavy rock provided a crucial underpinning for the Industrial Revolution: the development of industrial economies based on manufacturing from the late 18th century onwards. The rise of coal in the modern era was a global phenomenon, taking place in earnest in Britain beginning in the mid-18th century, the United States and Germany in the early 19th century. Most other nations have followed suit since, with China and India becoming the world’s leading consumers of coal in the present century.

Industrialization, a slow and uneven process, helped bring enormous social changes, including the rise of factory work, the move from rural farms to giant cities, the production and consumption of countless new goods, and the spread of global inequality and modern empires.

Coal was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for large-scale industrialization. It was necessary because industrialization required more concentrated forms of energy than previously available. Human and animal muscle, rivers with falling water, trees to burn, wind to turn windmills and fill sails—these energy sources were limited in their local availability and in their energy density.

Yet many regions in the world had access to coal and did not industrialize. Coal is not, and never has been, an independent or sufficient factor. People made choices and had to decide if, whether, and how to use coal. Advocates (and opponents) included well-known entrepreneurial capitalists, government officials, and factory operators as well as less often considered homeowners, workers, journalists, scientists, and authors.

The most visible uses of coal in the United States were to manufacture iron, steam engines, and railroads. Americans had made iron before coal using charcoal—wood burned in the absence of oxygen. But charcoal required lots of wood, and this limited its total supply. With coal, iron production could expand enormously, giving rise to further industries that, in turn, used more coal, such as steam engines.

Built of iron or steel, steam engines provided a new and flexible source of power for growing factories. Previously, factories relied on falling water for power, but there were only so many rivers and they often froze in the winter. Steam engines allowed industrial production to grow regardless of local power sources. Often this meant clustering in cities. And by combining steam engines with thousands of miles of iron tracks, the railroad offered the quintessential image of an industrializing nation. The “Iron Horse” spanned the continent, delivered people and goods at high speeds regardless of rain, snow, or mud, and built financial fortunes for a lucky few. Some Americans spoke about the annihilation of time and space along railroads, others bemoaned the power of railroad barons to charge high rates, some perished in fiery crashes, and others struggled to adjust to the disorienting change of pace railroads ushered in.

Railroads and steam engines may have been the “big tech” of the nineteenth century, but a more humble use of coal mattered greatly as well: its consumption in homes. In fact, before railroads were widespread and when only a handful of steam engines were in operation, thousands of urban homeowners were using coal to heat their houses and cook their food. This gave coal dealers an important early market before industrial users. Adopting coal in the home involved more than just substituting coal for wood. It often meant purchasing a new stove, an expensive proposition that changed the look and feel of the home. This change in the household had uneven effects for men and women. Chopping, splitting, stacking, and hauling firewood was often labor performed by men, while the cleaning of wood and then coal-fired stoves fell to women. Women also were typically responsible for cleaning the sootier smoke from coal fires. Less work for men could mean more work for women. Homes looked different, smelled different, and required different divisions of labor once their owners adopted coal.

Finally, coal found its way into countless industries that generated a growing economy. Textile factories could use steam engines to increase output; construction projects could take advantage of cheaper iron bars, nails, and screws; and entirely new industries (such as making stoves for homeowners to burn coal) were made possible by cheap and abundant coal. Whether it was making a product, sending it to market, or constructing a building, coal played an increasingly important role in making it happen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on steam and coal, 1860.

In 1860, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson published “The Conduct of Life,” a widely read collection of essays on topics such as beauty, power, culture, and wealth. Emerson’s reflections included commentary on the power of steam and coal, and the ways in which people harnessed these tools to transform the natural world and society.

How does Emerson see the role of technology and invention in the creation of wealth?

What does Emerson mean when he calls coal a “portable climate”?

W. Stanley Jevons, "The Coal Question," 1865.

In his 1865 book, “The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines,” British economist William Stanley Jevons warned that Britain would exhaust the coal supplies that were fueling its growth and prosperity.  He argued that increased efficiency in consumption would not reduce demand for energy, but rather would spur increased use and further deplete supplies.

Which of the following resulted from the opening of large coal deposits in the US in the late 1800s?

What did the method of manufacturing known as the American system rely upon?

What were two significant factors in the growth of the US industry?

What was the major advantage of Westinghouse's alternating current power invention?