TRACK FOUR: Pittsburgh

When John Chapman was 18, he left his family home in Massachusetts and headed for the frontier of western Pennsylvania. It was 1792, and Pittsburgh and four nearby counties held a few thousand people. George Washington was President of the new country, although he had expressed reluctance to accept the job because it had so many administrative duties and so great a likelihood to descend into bickering among the political factions. But Washington seemed to be an able leader, he had presided over the group that wrote, and passed, the new Constitution … “We the People… in order to form a more perfect Union … “ And he presided over the group that wrote and passed the Northwest Ordinance, annexing the Territories of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin, that is, land north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. That was all in 1787. Now, just 5 years later, there was John in Pittsburgh, arrived at the very edge of the new frontier.

John found work in the boat yards along the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers, mostly making barges and flatboats, and he found lodging at a large farm owned by a former officer in the Continental Army. A lot of the ex-solders were moving west, and John was able to point to his own father as a veteran of Lexington and Concord. In fact, John’s father had been away from home and fighting with the Colonials during a large part of John’s childhood, serving as a Captain under General Washington.

The farmer and ex-soldier that John stayed with in Pittsburgh had a large orchard, and John earned his keep by tending that orchard. The orchard was at Grant’s Hill, just above the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers, where the Ohio River begins. It was an area that had been surveyed earlier by a very young George Washington, who had recommended that a fort be built at that location. He called that location The Gateway to the West. It was already the intersection of Indian trails to and from places like Williamsburg, in Virginia and Detroit, on the Great Lakes.

Pittsburgh was both a destination and a jumping-off point. There were a lot of New England Yankees heading west, with the War for Independence being successfully concluded and the government, newly in place, encouraging that movement in part by selling land cheaply or granting it outright to the former soldiers.

The Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo was still a dream, but well before the turn of the century, John could see what was coming: the westward expansion of the Yankee settlers, the massive flow of migrants hoping to realize the prizes of “freedom” and “democracy” and their own successful “pursuit of happiness.” The counties around Pittsburgh were named for the war heroes: Washington County, Lafayette Country, Greene County.

John’s father would take advantage of the land offer and head to Marietta Ohio, a little further down the river from Pittsburgh, in 1805. But John had preceded the rest of his family by about a decade. And it was in Pittsburgh that he began to figure out what he would do, what he would make of himself, what role he could create in the American adventure.

A hopeful and optimistic young man, John enjoyed those rivers…. He enjoyed planting and tending those trees… but he felt keenly that he had not yet discovered his calling. He knew he was not cut out to be a soldier like his father, or everyone’s hero, General Washington. But how would he contribute to life in this new democracy, and to his countrymen’s pursuit of “life, liberty and happiness”?

He’d figure it out, in time…