Pittsburgh Allegheny Pennsylvania United States

The third group is made up of tribes of the Ohio Country: Delawares (Lenape), Shawnee, Wyandot, and Mingo.

These people had migrated to the Ohio valley earlier in the century from the mid-Atlantic and other eastern areas in order to escape British, French, and Iroquois domination in the New York and Pennsylvania area.

Unlike the Great Lakes and Illinois Country tribes, Ohio Native Americans have no great attachment to the French regime.

They had fought as French allies in the previous war in an effort to drive away the British.

They had made a separate peace with the British with the understanding that the British Army would withdraw from the Ohio Country, but after the departure of the French, the British strengthen their forts in the region rather than abandoning them, so the Ohioans go to war in 1763 in another attempt to drive out the British.

A multi-cultural group of natives called the Mingo has settled the Ohio Valley in the eighteenth century.

They lack a central government and, like all other natives within the region at this time, are subject to the control of the Iroquois Confederacy (comprising the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora people) headquartered in Upstate New York.

The Mingo originally lived closer to the Atlantic Coast, but European settlement had pushed them into western Virginia and eastern Ohio.

During the French and Indian War, the Mingo had sided with the French.

When the French lost and subsequently ceded their holdings to Britain, intensified settlement of the Ohio valley by their former enemies has led to conflicts.

By 1774, tension between the settlers and the native tribes has increased; there had been killings on both sides.

The rivalry between Pennsylvania and Virginia over the site of Pittsburgh increases these unsettled circumstances.

Scouts returning to Fort Pitt report that war is inevitable, and John Connolly sends word for settlers in outlying settlements to be on their guard for an attack.

The first formal written treaty between the United States and a Native American tribe (the Lenape or Delaware), the Treaty of Fort Pitt, is signed on September 17, 1778.

Although many informal treaties have be and will be held with Native Americans during the American Revolution years of 1775–1783, this is the only one that results in a formal document.

It is signed at Fort Pitt, Pennsylvania, site of present-day downtown Pittsburgh.

Essentially a formal treaty of alliance, the treaty gives the United States permission to travel through Delaware territory and calls for the Delawares to afford American troops whatever aid they might require in their war against Britain, including the use of their own warriors.

The United States is planning to attack the British fort at Detroit, and Lenape friendship is essential for success.

In exchange, the United States promises "articles of clothing, utensils and implements of war", and to build a fort in Delaware country "for the better security of the old men, women and children ... whilst their warriors are engaged against the common enemy."

Although not part of the written treaty, the commissioners point out the American alliance with France and intend that the Delaware will become active allies in the war against the British.

The University of Pittsburgh, founded by Hugh Henry Brackenridge as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787, is one of the few universities and colleges established in the eighteenth century in the United States.

Modeled on Benjamin Franklin's Academy of Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania), it is the oldest continuously chartered institution of learning in the United States west of the Allegheny Mountains.

The school began as a preparatory school, presumably in a log cabin, possibly as early as 1770  in Western Pennsylvania, then a frontier.

Brackenridge obtains a charter for the school from the state legislature of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on February 28, 1787, just ten weeks before the opening of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

The Teutonia Männerchor Hall in Pittsburgh is founded on January 9, 1854, to promote German culture.

A private membership club, its purpose is the furtherance of choral singing, German cultural traditions, and good fellowship.

The Allegheny Arsenal explosion results in the single largest civilian disaster during the war.

On Wednesday, September 17, 1862, around 2 pm, the arsenal explodes.

The explosion shatters windows in the surrounding community and is heard in Pittsburgh, over two miles (three kilometers) away.

At the sound of the first explosion, Colonel John Symington, Commander of the Arsenal, rushes from his quarters and makes his way up the hillside to the lab.

As he approaches, he hears the sound of a second explosion, followed by a third.

Fire fighting equipment as well as a bucket brigade try to douse the flames with water.

The volunteer fire company from Pittsburgh arrives and assists in bringing the fire under control.

By the time the fire is put out, the lab has been reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble.

Seventy-eight workers, mostly young women, are killed. Fifty-four bodies are unidentified, and are buried in a mass grave in the nearby Allegheny Cemetery.

The most commonly held view of the cause of the explosion was that the metal shoe of a horse had struck a spark that touched off loose powder in the roadway near the lab, which then traveled up onto the porch,where it set off several barrels of gunpowder.

Andrew Carnegie had invested forty thousand dollars in Story Farm on Oil Creek in Venango County, Pennsylvania, in 1864.

In one year, the farm has yielded over one million dollars in cash dividends, and petroleum from oil wells on the property has sold profitably.

The demand for iron products, such as armor for gunboats, cannon, and shells, as well as a hundred other industrial products, have made Pittsburgh a center of wartime production.

Carnegie has worked with others in establishing a steel rolling mill and steel production and control of industry becomes the source of his fortune.

Carnegie had had some investments in the iron industry before the war.

After the war, Carnegie leaves the railroads to devote all his energies to the ironworks trade.

Carnegie works to develop several iron works, eventually forming The Keystone Bridge Works and the Union Ironworks, in Pittsburgh.

Although he had left the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, he remains closely connected to its management, namely Thomas A. Scott and J. Edgar Thomson.

He uses his connection to the two men to acquire contracts for his Keystone Bridge Company and the rails produced by his ironworks.

He also gives stock to Scott and Thomson in his businesses, and the Pennsylvania is his best customer.

When he builds his first steel plant, he will make a point of naming it after Thomson.

As well as having good business sense, Carnegie possesses charm and literary knowledge.

He is invited to many important social functions—functions that Carnegie exploits to his own advantage.

Carnegie believes in using his fortune for others and doing more than making money.

He writes: I propose to take an income no greater than $50,000 per annum! Beyond this I need ever earn, make no effort to increase my fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes! Let us cast aside business forever, except for others. Let us settle in Oxford and I shall get a thorough education, making the acquaintance of literary men. I figure that this will take three years active work. I shall pay especial attention to speaking in public. We can settle in London and I can purchase a controlling interest in some newspaper or live review and give the general management of it attention, taking part in public matters, especially those connected with education and improvement of the poorer classes. Man must have no idol and the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry! No idol is more debasing than the worship of money! Whatever I engage in I must push inordinately; therefore should I be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character. To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery. I will resign business at thirty-five, but during these ensuing two years I wish to spend the afternoons in receiving instruction and in reading systematically!

George Westinghouse had created his first invention, the rotary steam engine, when he was nineteen years old; he had also devised the Westinghouse Farm Engine.

In 1868, at age twenty-one, he had invented a "car replacer", a device to guide derailed railroad cars back onto the tracks, and a reversible frog, a device used with a railroad switch to guide trains onto one of two tracks.

In 1867, Westinghouse had met and soon married Marguerite Erskine Walker, to whom he will be married for forty-seven years and produce a son, George Westinghouse 3rd.

After making their first home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, they will later acquire houses in Lenox, Massachusetts and in Washington, D.C.

At about this time, Westinghouse had witnessed a train wreck where two engineers had seen one another, but had been unable to stop their trains in time using the existing brakes.

Brakemen ran from car to car, on catwalks atop the cars, applying the brakes manually on each car.

In 1869, at age twenty-two, he had invented a railroad braking system using compressed air.

The Westinghouse system uses a compressor on the locomotive, a reservoir and a special valve on each car, and a single pipe running the length of the train (with flexible connections) which both refills the reservoirs and controls the brakes, applying and releasing the brakes on all cars simultaneously.

It is a failsafe system, in that any rupture or disconnection in the train pipe will apply the brakes throughout the train.

It is patented by Westinghouse on March 5, 1872.

The Westinghouse Air Brake Company (WABCO) is subsequently organized to manufacture and sell Westinghouse's invention.

It will in time be nearly universally adopted.

Modern trains use brakes in various forms based on this design.

Westinghouse, born in Central Bridge, NY in 1846, was the son of a machine shop owner.

He had shown an aptitude for machinery and business.

At the age of fifteen, as the Civil War broke out, he had enlisted in the New York National Guard until his parents urged him to return home.

Two years later, in 1863, having persuaded his parents to allow him to re-enlist, he had joined the New York Cavalry.

He had resigned from the Army in December 1864 to join the Navy, serving as Acting Third Assistant Engineer on the USS Muscoota through the end of the war.

Returning to his family in Schenectady in 1865, he had enrolled at nearby Union College, but lost interest in the curriculum and dropped out in his first term there.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania becomes the site of the worst violence.

Thomas Alexander Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, often considered one of the first robber barons, suggests that the strikers should be given "a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread."

However, local law enforcement officers refuse to fire on the strikers.

Nonetheless, his request comes to pass on July 21, when militiamen bayonet and fire on rock-throwing strikers, killing twenty people and wounding twenty-nine others.

Rather than quell the uprising however, this action merely infuriates the strikers, who then force the militiamen to take refuge in a railroad roundhouse, and then set fires that raze thirty-nine buildings and destroy one hundred and four locomotives and twelve hundred and forty-five freight and passenger cars.

On July 22, the militiamen mount an assault on the strikers, shooting their way out of the roundhouse and killing twenty more people on their way out of the city.

Charles Taze Russell, an American Christian restorationist minister also known as Pastor Russell, founds the Bible Student movement, whose origins are The origins of the movement are associated with the formation of Zion's Watch Tower Tract Society in 1881, and the later formation of Jehovah's Witnesses, whose beliefs will diverge considerably from Russell's millennialist teachings.

Russell was born to Scottish-Irish parents, immigrant Joseph Lytel Russell (d. December 17, 1897) and Ann Eliza Birney (d. January 25, 1861), on February 16, 1852 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, USA.

Charles was apparently the second of five children, and one of only two to survive into adulthood.

The Russells lived in Philadelphia, as well as Allegheny, before moving to Pittsburgh, where they had become members of the Presbyterian Church.

In his early teens, Charles' father had made him partner of his Pittsburgh haberdashery store.

By age twelve, Russell was writing business contracts for customers and given charge of some of his father's other clothing stores.

At age thirteen, Charles left the Presbyterian Church to join the Congregational Church.

In his youth he was known to chalk Bible verses on fence boards and city sidewalks to draw attention to the punishment of hell awaiting the unfaithful in an attempt to convert unbelievers.

At age sixteen, a discussion with a childhood friend on faults perceived in Christianity (such as contradictions in creeds, along with medieval traditions) had led Charles to question his faith.

He then began to investigate other religious views and philosophies, including Islam, Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, but concluded that they do not provide the answers he is seeking.

In 1870, at age eighteen, he attended a presentation by Adventist minister Jonas Wendell.

During his presentation Wendell had outlined his belief that 1873 or 1874 would be the date for Christ's second coming.

He later stated that although he did not entirely agree with the arguments presented by Wendell the presentation itself had been sufficient to inspire within him a renewed zeal and reestablish his belief that the Bible is the word of God.

About 1870, Russell and his father had established a group with a number of acquaintances to undertake an analytical study of the Bible and the origins of Christian doctrine, creed, and tradition.

The group, strongly influenced by the writings of Millerite Adventist ministers George Storrs and George Stetson, themselves frequent attendees,had come to the conclusion that many of the primary doctrines of the established churches, including the trinity, hellfire and inherent immortality of the soul, are not substantiated by the scriptures.

Around January 1876, Russell had received a copy of Nelson Barbour's Herald of the Morning in the mail.

Russell had telegraphed Barbour to set up a meeting.

The first response was a visit by Barbour and John Henry Paton in Allegheny in March 1876, at Russell's expense, to hear their arguments, and compare the conclusions that each side had made in their studies.

Russell sponsored a speech by Barbour in St. George's Hall, Philadelphia in August 1876 and attended other lectures by Barbour.

Among the teachings Barbour had introduced to Russell is the view that Christians who had died will be raised in April, 1878.

Russell, who had previously rejected prophetic chronology, had been moved to devote his life to what he was convinced were now the last two years before the invisible, spiritual return of Christ.

He had sold his five clothing stores for approximately $300,000 (current value $6,548,000).

With Russell's encouragement and financial backing, Barbour had written an outline of their views in Three Worlds and the Harvest of This World, published in 1877.

A text Russell had previously written, entitled The Object and Manner of our Lord's Return, had been published concurrently through the offices of the Herald of the Morning.

Russell, eager to lead a Christian revival, had called two separate meetings of Christian leaders in Pittsburgh.

Russell's ideas, particularly stressing the imminence of the rapture and the second advent of Christ, had been rejected both times.

When 1878 arrives, failure of the expected rapture of the saints brings great disappointment for Barbour and Russell, and their associates and readers.