A Look At the Upper Monongahela by Richard Bissell

Brownsville Pa. Looking south

A description of the towns and sights along the Monongahela River from Brownsville to Fairmont in the late 1940s, written by the pilot of the towboat COAL QUEEN:

You would never think, to walk the streets of Brownsville today, that the town is old and filled with history and legend. Monongahela Valley towns just do not look the part as do Lexington and Concord and Portsmouth and Gloucester and Boston and Philadelphia. For famous Redstone Old Fort, now Brownsville, is another "industrial town," and aside from the Greek Revival, postColonial Playford House on Second and Market Streets, little romance is visible.
Colonel James Burd selected the site of Redstone Old Fort in 1758 because of the presence there of an early Indian fortification, and built his stockade. In 1785 Thomas and Basil Brown founded the town, which in the years to follow played an important part in the westward movement. It was at Brownsville that the weary emigrants saw the end of their toilsome struggle over the mountains and took to the calm waters of the Monongahela for the next lap of their journey. As the steamboat rose to fame and fortune on the western waters and industrial activity in the valley grew, the Brownsville-Pittsburgh trade developed. Even before the slack-water system had been completed to Brownsville in 1844, there were about two hundred steamboat arrivals annually at Pittsburgh from upriver points. After the locks and dams went into service, there was a daily packet line between Pittsburgh and Brownsville.
There is an old iron bridge in Brownsville that I inspected one time when we were laid up in drydock out at the Hillman shipyard. This bridge is on Market Street near Bank, and it has a tablet on it which says it is the first iron bridge west of the Alleghenies. It was apparently built in the period 1836-1839 of iron forged in Iocal furnaces. Before this bridge was built, Henry Clay's carriage overturned near this spot, dumping the great man into Dunlap's Creek. They say that Clay "gathered himself up with the remark that Clay and mud should not be mixed in that place again." Clay then returned to Washington to his senator's post and shortly afterwards an order was issued for the construction in Brownsville of an "iron span, carrying the road high above the stream."

Maxwell Lock looking south

After we go under the Brownsville Highway Bridge, height 50.2 feet above low water, span 386 feet, we come to Dam 5, and after locking through, we pass the Alicia Marine Ways of the Hillman Company and then are pretty much out in the country, except for coal mines and tipples at regular intervals. There's Vesta tipple and Frick Mine Light, Fox Mine Light and the H. C. F. Coke Company tipple, Vestaburg and Fredericktown and the bend around to Tenmile Creek, and Emerald Tipple, Pumpkin Run, Klein's Sawmill Light, Crucible Fuel Company tipple, and Light, Weirton Steel Company tipple, National Steel Corporation Pier, Buckeye Coal Company tipple, Browns Run, Little Whiteley Creek, Robena Mine Light and tipple, Pittsburgh Steel tipple, Duquesne Light Company tipple, Jacobs Creek, and then around the bend to Dam 7.


Vesta 5 Tipple looking south

Below Dam 7 are Greensboro on the starboard side, and New Geneva on port. New Geneva boasts a population of 410 souls, more or less, and was named for the native city of its famous early settler, Albert Gallatin. Gallatin came to this country without friends or influence, and by the sheer power of his personality and ability (and despite the handicap of a monumental French accent) achieved appointment as a member of the President's Cabinet within ten years of his arrival. A man of many talents, Gallatin served in the Revolutionary War, then became a French instructor at Harvard. Later he journeyed to Richmond on business and there became an intimate of Governor Patrick Henry, who advised him to go west to the wild lands of opportunity out by the Monongahela. Gallatin settled in Fayette County, a few miles from New Geneva and in a short time established the first glassworks west of the Alleghenies. In 1789 he built Friendship Hill, a 2 1/2-story, ivy-covered residence, still standing and open to the public.He began to enter local politics, filling several state and federal posts, and in 1801 was appointed secretary of the treasury by President Jefferson. He served in this post during both of Jefferson's presidential terms, the.whole of President Madison's first term, and until February, 1814, in the second, something of a record in Cabinet tenure. After retirement from the Cabinet this energetic adopted son of the new Republic held several diplomatic posts and finally, between 1831 and 1839 was president of the National Bank of New York.
Patrick Henry said Albert Gallatin was one of the most extraordinary men he had ever seen. He was surely of keen intellectual powers and magnificent ability in political and diplomatic affairs--the model statesman. At Friendship Hill the dignified retirement of Gallatin was embellished in 1825 by a visit from "his long tried, his bosom friend," the Marquis de Lafayeffe. Of this sumptuous affair an old Monongahelite, James Veech (writing in 1858), said: "Who that was there can ever forget the 'feast of reason'--and other good things, and the 'flow of soul'-and champagne? The like of which old Springhill [Township] had never seen--may never see again."

In the five miles upriver from New Geneva to Point Marion, where the Cheat River enters the Monongahela, no less than five coal tipples are busy dumping Pennsylvania coal into waiting barges. Point Marion has a large glassworks and a sand and gravel company which owns a baby Diesel towboat with a steam boiler for operating the steering rig and blowing the whistle, a quaint arrangement unique in my experience.

Morgantown looking east around 1928

Around a few bends and beyond more tipples, Morgantown rises on the hills to port. Ah, Morgantown, with your glass factories and coal mines and spaghtetti at Capellanti's and houses all peeling from chemical fumes in the air! On Saturday nights in spring the boys and girls from the University of West Virginia, perched up on the hill at the end of Main Street, mingle on the sidewalks down by the courthouse with coal miners and fanners and glassworkers. To us on the Coal Queen, Morgantown was everything, our metropolis--the hot bath, the glass of Tube City beer, the lump-in-throat in the movies, the Girl, paradise, purgatory--we knew them all in Morgantown. But Morgantown knew little of us. Steamboaters, with their excitable and noisy ways, are not invited to tea parties. I can call every bartender and short-order waitress in town by name but the mayor and I have yet to shake hands. Above Morgantown the Monongahela is a beautiful narrow stream running between high hills--"mountains," we always called them. The locks are small, the traffic is light, and there is a friendly intimacy benveen boat crews and lock tenders. The locks are so close that in a six-hour watch you might make seven or eight locks. After a few months of this, running those locks seemed automatic. That's pretty country up in there from Morgantown to National Mine, and pretty again above Jordan, especially in the spring, when the trees and flowers are all in bloom. And then, half blinded sometimes by the smoke from the railroad yard, we come to Fairmont, and beyond it the "Dark Bridge" (no lights on it), which we all hated, and then there was the point, where the Monongahela ended, a point with a big tree on it, a good mark and easy to pick up with the searchlight on a bad night.

The Monongahela is formed by the West Fork River and the Tygart River, which join here at Fairmont, 128.73 miles south of Pittsburgh. The tipple where we loaded coal was at Kingmont, up the Tygart, two miles above head of navigation on the Monongahela, and we would snake our loads out of there in a river so narrow you could nearly jump across.

Now just imagine, in the old days you could take a good big steamboat from Fairmont, West Virginia, at the headwaters of the Monongahela, down to Cairo, up the Mississippi and Missouri to Fort Benton, Mont.--3,623 miles, or about as far as from the North River in New York to the East India Docks on the Thames at London. In fact the stern-wheeler E. H. Durfee made regular trips between Pittsburgh and Fort Benton in the years 1872 to 1876. Wouldn't that be something, to raise steam amidst the roar of industry on the Monongahela and keep that paddle wheel splashing until you began to run into buffalo and Sioux and the Rocky Mountains ?

This is taken from the book The Monongahela by Richard Bissell, part of the Rivers of America series, Rinehart & Co., Inc., New York, 1952, pp. 70-83. He wrote several outstanding books on towboating and the river life. The accounts are gritty and very realistic. He also wrote several successful Broadway plays including The Pajama Game.

Ten Mile Trivia # 2

Ten Mile Creek came to be called so because it's mouth is ten miles above Old Redstone Fort at Brownsville. In the early days they named creeks and other landmarks as being so many miles from a known place, as Brownsville certainly was in the early days. Islands also took mile marker names, for instance above Louisville Ky is 18 mile island then 12 mile island and then 6 mile island.
Some think the creek was named so because it's ten miles long. Not true, but ten miles up the creek is located the town of Ten Mile. Its Indian name is Cusuthee.
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The very first steamboat to travel to New Orleans and return by its own power was the ENTERPRISE, designed and built in the Brownsville boatyards and launched from the Brownsville Wharf in 1814.

"Saint Barbara , the patron saint of miners, was a young virgin who defied her father and decided not to marry. Because of this he kept her in a tower. She ordered some workmen to alter the tower while her father was away, thus becoming the saint of architects. After finding out about this her father chased her to the hills where she was swallowed up by the hill. Her name is attached to Santa Barbara, California. There is a prayer for miners dedicated to Saint Barbara:
"As I now descend into the dark bowels of the earth, I beseech thee, sweet Barbara, that I be kept safe from harm, for it liketh me not that I rush unbidden into God's presence."
Wilson's Port, later called New Geneva was a very early place for freighting flatboats and rafts.The land later was patented by Elias Stone and his wife in 1787 and was called Delight.

Augustine Dillner and his wife were the first settlers in what is now Greene county.They arrived as early as 1754 and in 1755 built a cabin close to Crow's Ferry ( Dillner ). The Indians were friendly with them till Lord Dunmore's war of 1774.


"While making a tour of the United States in 1837, General Santa Anna, President of Mexico, stopped in Washington Pa.on January 15. Following the custom of the time, he probably took breakfast at Hill's Stone Tavern ( now the Century Inn ) in Scenery Hill, Pa. This was only a year after the massacre of the Texans at the battle of the Alamo, and Santa Anna was not very popular, so there was no reception committee. All known of this visit was the mere mention in the local paper, The Examiner of his passing and a well grounded tradition that a local man named Brice, whose brother had drawn a black bean ( died ) at Goliad, lay in wait just west of town to take a pot shot at the self styled "Napoleon of the West" as the stage rolled by. Fortunately for Santa Anna the sheriff heard of the plot, and, probably against his personal inclination, gathered Brice into his official fold until the Mexican was safely through Washington. Incidentally, Brice was a dead shot, and might have saved the United States much trouble nine years later if the sheriff had let him alone."

Hills Tavern now Century Inn











UMWA LOCALS
6330 Chartiers
688 Clyde
4583 Clarksville
6151 Mather
6290 Nemacolin
6310 Greensboro
4731 Crucible
6159 Bobtown
762 Vestaburg
2300 Waynesburg

UMWA Band of 4583 Clarksville Stanley Fowler Collection

One of the most notable early teachers in Fredericktown was Jonathan Knight. He was later one of the most eminent engineers of his day and became Chief Engineer of the Baltimore and Ohio railroad. He was the inventor of the coning of RR car wheels so that cars stationary on their axles can run on curved tracks without spreading the rails. He surveyed a line ( never built) for the B&O through Greene County in 1836. He lived in Centerville Pa.

Augustine Dillner and his wife were the first settlers in what is now Greene county.They arrived as early as 1754 and in 1755 built a cabin close to Crow's Ferry ( Dillner ). The Indians were friendly with them till Lord Dunmore's war of 1774.

In 1826 the Str. REINDEER was the first boat to Morgantown.

"On February 11, 1850, the first steamboat came up the Monongahela River to the little town of Fairmont. This boat was the GLOBE owned by a man named Yeager. Its appearance created a great sensation among the people, for the majority of them had never seen a steamboat, much less had one come up to their very doors. When it became known throughout the country that a steamboat was to come up the Monongahela River at daybreak on February 11, the people for miles around gathered along the banks of the river as early as the afternoon before. When the whistle of the Globe was heard down the river, the courthouse bell was rung for two hours. The people had brought lunches, so they took the day off as a holiday; speeches were made, and the new wonder examined. Many of the citizens had a free ride up the river. That day was long to be remembered." It was two years before another boat arrived.

In 1856 slackwater, meaning locks and dams, were completed up to New Geneva, making navigation possible nearly year round.

Dry Tavern was named so because in early days there was a tavern there with no liquor sold. It was on the main road leading south between Pittsburgh and Virginia. For years it was the busiest north - south road west of the mountains. The road was laid out by John Crawford and went from Pittsburgh to Finleyville, Bentleyville, Beallsville, Millsboro, Charmichaels, Willow Tree, Rosedale to Morgantown. It was planned to be 60 feet wide.

Ruff Creek got it's name from an Indian named Ruff who lived there.

The first telegraph line in Greene county was erected from Rices Landing to Waynesburg in 1861.


Southwest Pennsylvania was claimed by the districts of West Augusta, Virginia and by Westmoreland, Pennsylvania. In 1776 West Augusta became Ohio, Yohogania and Monongalia Counties, in Virginia. . Greene County in 1776 was partly ( the western slope ) in Ohio county Virginia and partly ( the eastern slope ) in Monongalia County Virginia. The court house for Monongalia was near New Geneva Pa. on the farm of Theopolis Phillips. The court house for Ohio county was at West Liberty W. Va. Virginia law directed that at each court house there was to be a pillory, a pair of stocks, a whipping post and a ducking stool ( now called waterboarding ). Only the ducking stool was used for women.
By 1780 Virginia and Pennsylvania settled their boundary dispute placing most of the Yohogania County region in Westmoreland County. In 1781 Washington County was created from Westmoreland County. Greene County was created from Washington County in 1796.

Before the big modern dams you could at times cross the mouth of Ten Mile Creek by skipping from rock to rock. Other times, because of the volume of water coming out of the creek a very large sand bar would build up there and the river channel would have to be dredged for boats to pass.

Besco is named for the Bessemer Coke Company who operated the Champion mine there using all the coal to make coke in it's 100 ovens . By 1914 there were 257 ovens, a sizable operation. The railroad reached Besco around 1911 and that was the end of track until it was extended farther through Clarksville to Mather in 1919.
In Common Pleas Court in 1797, the following case was considered : The Sheriff of Greene County wishes Richard Swan to answer the charge that he bit off a piece of John Moore's ear thereby damaging the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth.

The Monongahela River Packet Co. And A Race On The River

This is the steam packet boat ELIZABETH at Fredericktown in 1902. She was 188 feet x 35 x 5.5 and was built at Brownsville ( the hull was built at Belle Vernon ) in 1888 for the Pittsburgh - Elizabeth Pa. trade. This trade died out by 1900, no doubt because the railroad by that time went as far upriver as Brownsville. It would be 7 more years till the rails reached any farther south on the west bank. This made the Ten Mile Creek Country trade above Brownsville worth pursuing. In 1902 an independent line was formed called the Monongahela River Packet Company and ran the ELIZABETH under that flag as far upriver as Morgantown. This put her in competition with boats of the Pittsburgh Brownsville and Geneva Packet Company , the oldest and biggest company on the upper river.
In August of 1902 she and the rival company's Str. I. C. WOODWARD met below old lock # 9 and raced each other to the chamber to be the first to lock through. They must have been pretty evenly matched because they arrived at the same time , both becoming wedged in the mouth of the lock and neither could or would move for the other. Here they sat for a while until the Masters of the vessels were called and the issue resolved .


The race resulted in a tie

Which won the race is unknown but in the end the smaller company lost out to the bigger in the trade. 1902 saw the end of the Monongahela River Packet company. She was laid up later that year and in 1903 was sold and moored in the Allegheny river above Pittsburgh's 6th street bridge. In 1904 the boat next to her , the OLIVETTE , caught fire setting the ELIZABETH ablaze. She was turned loose, drifted under the Union bridge , a covered wooden structure and set it on fire . She was then pushed to the bank "where she burned at leisure".

Fire was a big enemy of these large wooden structures, dried wood, countless coats of flammable paint ( anyone who has ever worked on any riverboat, of wood or steel, can tell you that the paint is applied at every opportunity ) , kerosene lamps ( until the 1890's ) , coal or coal oil stoves, strong winds often present on the river, all made it a real possibility. Most cities had large wharf front fires at different times that would destroy many boats at once. Other very real dangers were snags ( sunken trees poking into the hull, causing some boats to sink in less than a minute ) and other sunken obstructions, boiler explosions, groundings and Pilot errors. Most all were heavily insured so when for instance, the Str. NEW ERA was sunk then usually out came the NEW ERA # 2 in a few months. Even if a boat was lost due to fire, boiler explosion or sinking, the steam engine would always be salvaged. They seem to have been virtually indestructible and were often used in several different boats over many years. Some boats lasted 20 years and many just a few years. Packet boats ran year round and tended to wear out quicker than the bigger line haul towboats which ran somewhat seasonally.

Here's the ELIZABETH at Brownsville rounding to with her stacks knocked back to clear the wooden covered bridge there. On the left descending bank is the Str. EDGAR CHERRY, a packet that ran for several years between Pittsburgh and Morgantown until she hit the gates at old lock # 4 and sunk in 1904. One can see the front end of a packet boat on the Brownsville (left) side, this is the OLIVETTE, the boat that would two years later cause the fiery destruction of the Elizabeth in Pittsburgh ( see above ) .



Here she is in the 1890's, possibly at McKeesport, Pa. It must have been some kind of holiday.


Another boat running in this trade for the Mon River Packet Company was the Str. GERTRUDE. She was fancier than most Mon River packets, with a huge pilot house not often seen up here. She was built at Hawesville Ky. in 1895 and ran on the lower Ohio before she came to the Monongahela River in 1902. Before going into the trade she was given new floors and staterooms were added. She was also given a Texas ( small deck of cabins under the Pilot house ) so likely the pilot house was altered then. The big stage seen here was likely left off as they were not much used on the Monongahela. With our steep banks a plank seems to have been sufficient for most landings, and many of the towns had stone or brick wharfs or small floating wharfboats for packets to land on. In 1903 GERTRUDE too, was sold and later ran on the Chattahoochie River in Georgia.

Str. GERTRUDE on lower Ohio 1900.

Information for this was taken mostly from Ways Packet Directory, 1848 - 1994 by Fred Way Jr. Some images are from a great site about the Elizabeth Marine Ways that includes much detail about many Mon river and Mon river built boats, Steamboat Building in Elizabeth, PA . This wonderful site is maintained by Jay W. Mohney and his efforts are a priceless addition to river knowledge.