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The Ohio River is a 981-mile (1,579 km) long river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing in a southwesterly direction from western Pennsylvania to its mouth on the Mississippi River at the southern tip of Illinois. It is the third largest river by discharge volume in the United States and the largest tributary by volume of the north-south flowing Mississippi River that divides the eastern from western United States. It is also the 6th oldest river on the North American continent. The river flows through or along the border of six states, and its drainage basin includes parts of 14 states. Through its largest tributary, the Tennessee River, the basin includes several states of the southeastern U.S. It is the source of drinking water for five million people.
Brownsville is a borough in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, United States, first settled in 1785 as the site of a trading post a few years after the defeat of the Iroquois enabled a post-Revolutionary war resumption of westward migration. The Trading Post soon became a tavern and Inn, and was soon receiving emigrants heading west, as it was located above the cut bank overlooking the first ford that could be reached to those descending from the Allegheny Mountains. Brownsville is located 40 miles (64 km) south of Pittsburgh along the east bank of the Monongahela River.
The Monongahela River, sometimes referred to locally as the Mon, is a 130-mile-long (210 km) river on the Allegheny Plateau in north-central West Virginia and Southwestern Pennsylvania. The river flows from the confluence of its west and east forks in north-central West Virginia northeasterly into southwestern Pennsylvania, then northerly to Pittsburgh and its confluence with the Allegheny River to form the Ohio River. The river includes a series of locks and dams that makes it navigable.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was the first common carrier railroad and the oldest railroad in the United States with its first section opening in 1830. Merchants from Baltimore, which had benefited to some extent from the construction of the National Road early in the century, wanted to do business with settlers crossing the Appalachian Mountains. The railroad faced competition from several existing and proposed enterprises, including the Albany-Schenectady Turnpike, built in 1797, the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825, and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. At first, the B&O was located entirely in the state of Maryland; its original line extending from the port of Baltimore west to Sandy Hook, Maryland, opened in 1834. There it connected with Harper's Ferry, first by boat, then by the Wager Bridge, across the Potomac River into Virginia, and also with the navigable Shenandoah River.
The Allegheny Mountain Range, informally the Alleghenies, is part of the vast Appalachian Mountain Range of the Eastern United States and Canada and posed a significant barrier to land travel in less developed eras. The Allegheny Mountains have a northeast–southwest orientation, running for about 400 miles (640 km) from north-central Pennsylvania, southward through western Maryland and eastern West Virginia.
The Wheeling Suspension Bridge is a suspension bridge spanning the main channel of the Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia. It was the largest suspension bridge in the world from 1849 until 1851. Charles Ellet Jr. designed it and supervised construction of what became the first bridge to span a major river west of the Appalachian mountains. It linked the eastern and western section of the National Road, and became especially strategically important during the American Civil War. Litigation in the United States Supreme Court concerning its obstruction of the new high steamboat smokestacks eventually cleared the way for other bridges, especially needed by expanding railroads. Because this bridge was designed during the horse-and-buggy era, 2-ton weight limits and vehicle separation requirements applied in later years until it was closed to automobile traffic in September 2019.
The Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) is a 150-mile (240 km) rail trail between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cumberland, Maryland. Together with the C&O Canal towpath, the GAP is part of a 335 mi (539 km) route between Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., that is popular with through hikers and cyclists.
John Edgar Thomson was an American civil engineer and industrialist. An entrepreneur best known for his leadership of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) from 1852 until his death in 1874, Thomson made it the largest business enterprise in the world and a world-class model for technological and managerial innovation. The railroad's first Chief Engineer became its third President.
Moncure Robinson was an American civil engineer, railroad planner and builder and a railroad and steamboat owner, who is considered one of America's leading Antebellum period civil engineers. He was educated at the College of William and Mary and at the Sorbonne; his most noted project was the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad.
The Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad, also known as the "Little Giant", was formed on May 11, 1875. Company headquarters were located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The line connected Pittsburgh in the east with Youngstown, Ohio in the Haselton neighborhood in the west and Connellsville, Pennsylvania to the east. It did not reach Lake Erie until the formation of Conrail in 1976. The P&LE was known as the "Little Giant" since the tonnage that it moved was out of proportion to its route mileage. While it operated around one tenth of one percent of the nation's railroad miles, it hauled around one percent of its tonnage. This was largely because the P&LE served the steel mills of the greater Pittsburgh area, which consumed and shipped vast amounts of materials. It was a specialized railroad deriving much of its revenue from coal, coke, iron ore, limestone, and steel. The eventual closure of the steel mills led to the end of the P&LE as an independent line in 1992.
The Pittsburgh and West Virginia Railway was a railroad in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Wheeling, West Virginia, areas. Originally built as the Wabash Pittsburgh Terminal Railway, a Pittsburgh extension of George J. Gould's Wabash Railroad, the venture entered receivership in 1908 and the line was cut loose. An extension completed in 1931 connected it to the Western Maryland Railway at Connellsville, Pennsylvania, forming part of the Alphabet Route, a coalition of independent lines between the Northeastern United States and the Midwest. It was leased by the Norfolk and Western Railway in 1964 in conjunction with the N&W acquiring several other sections of the former Alphabet Route, but was leased to the new spinoff Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway in 1990, just months before the N&W was merged into the Norfolk Southern Railway.
Allegheny Islands State Park is a 43-acre (17 ha) Pennsylvania state park in Harmar Township, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania in the United States. The undeveloped park is composed of three alluvial islands located in the middle of the Allegheny River northeast of Pittsburgh. The islands are just north of the boroughs of Oakmont and Plum, and southwest of Cheswick. Bridges for the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the Bessemer and Lake Erie Railroad Branch of the Canadian National Railway cross the Allegheny River at the middle island.
The Pennsylvania Canal was a complex system of transportation infrastructure improvements including canals, dams, locks, tow paths, aqueducts, and viaducts. The Canal and Works were constructed and assembled over several decades beginning in 1824, the year of the first enabling act and budget items. It should be understood the first use of any railway in North America was the year 1826, so the newspapers and the Pennsylvania Assembly of 1824 applied the term then to the proposed rights of way mainly for the canals of the Main Line of Public Works to be built across the southern part of Pennsylvania.
Benjamin Wright was an American civil engineer who was chief engineer of the Erie Canal and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. In 1969, the American Society of Civil Engineers declared him the "Father of American Civil Engineering".
The Beaver and Erie Canal, also known as the Erie Extension Canal, was part of the Pennsylvania Canal system and consisted of three sections: the Beaver Division, the Shenango Division, and the Conneaut Division. The canal ran 136 miles (219 km) north–south near the western edge of the state from the Ohio River to Lake Erie through Beaver County, Lawrence County, Mercer County, Crawford County, and Erie County, Pennsylvania.
New Orleans was the first steamboat on the western waters of the United States. Owned by Robert Fulton and Robert R. Livingston, and built by Nicholas Roosevelt, its 1811–1812 voyage from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to New Orleans, Louisiana, on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers ushered in the era of commercial steamboat navigation on the western and mid-western continental rivers.
William Milnor Roberts was an American civil engineer. Roberts was one of the most prolific and prominent civil engineer of his generation in the United States. As a young civil engineer, he was involved in the construction of the Eads Bridge, held the title of the chief engineer of Northern Pacific Railroad, and was president of the American Society of Civil Engineers scarcely two decades after its founding,
The following is a brief history of the North American rail system, mainly through major changes to Class I railroads, the largest class by operating revenue.
Lake Monongahela was a proglacial lake in western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. It formed during the Pre-Illinoian ice epoch when the retreat of the ice sheet northwards blocked the drainage of these valleys to the north. The lake formed south of the ice front continued to rise until it was able to breach a low divide near New Martinsville, West Virginia. The overflow was the beginning of the process which created the modern Ohio River valley.
The Canal Age is a term of art used by historians of Science, Technology, and Industry. Various parts of the world have had various canal ages; the main ones belong to civilizations, dynastic Empires of India, China, Southeast Asia, and mercantile Europe. Cultures make canals as they make other engineering works, and canals make cultures. They make industry, and until the era when steam locomotives attained high speeds and power, the canal was by far the fastest way to travel long distances quickly. Commercial canals generally had boatmen shifts that kept the barges moving behind mule teams 24 hours a day. Like many North American canals of the 1820s-1840s, the canal operating companies partnered with or founded short feeder railroads to connect to their sources or markets. Two good examples of this were funded by private enterprise:
- The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company used vertically integrated mining raw materials, transporting them, manufacturing with them, and merchandising by building coal mines, the instrumental Lehigh Canal, and feeding their own iron goods manufacturing industries and assuaging the American Republic's first energy crisis by increasing coal production from 1820 onwards using the nation's second constructed railway, the Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad.
- The second coal road and canal system was inspired by LC&N's success. The Delaware and Hudson Canal and Delaware and Hudson Gravity Railroad. The LC&N operation was aimed at supplying the country's premier city, Philadelphia with much needed fuel. The D&H companies were founded purposefully to supply the explosively growing city of New York's energy needs.
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Marcks, Melissa. "Thomas Paschall Roberts." Biography of Thomas Paschall Roberts. 2005. Accessed June 22, 2020.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Dickinson College Archives. “Thomas Paschall Roberts (1843-1924),” 2005. http://archives.dickinson.edu/people/thomas-paschall-roberts-1843-1924.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Carhart, Daniel, M.C.E., Sc.D.D.D., L.L.D., James D. Moffat, D.D., L.L.D., John A. Brashear, Sc.D., L.L.D., and William J. Holland, Ph.D., L.L.D. Century Cyclopedia of History and Biography of Pennsylvania. Edited by George Irving Reed, A.M., Andrew A. Lambing, A.M., L.L.D., and Eli Sheldon Glover, M.C.E., Sc.D. Vol. 2. Chicago, IL: Century Publishing and Engraving Company, 1904.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Engineers' Society of Western Pennsylvania. "Thomas Paschall Roberts." In Proceedings of Engineers' Society of Western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh. 1st ed. Vol. 40. Pittsburgh, PA: William Penn Hotel, 1924.
- ↑ Smith, Percy F. Notable Men of Pittsburgh and Vicinity. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh Printing Company, 1901.
- 1 2 3 Scott, Kim Allen. “Historical Note.” Thomas P. Roberts Papers, 1827-1944. Montana State University, Special Collections and Archival Informatics, 2011.
- ↑ "Membership of the American Association." Science 15, no. 381 (1902): 616-20. Accessed June 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/1628661.
- ↑ Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission; Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Pennsylvania (State). Death certificates, 1906–1967; Certificate Number Range: 012001-015000.
