Mount Washington

Mount Washington. Pittsburgh's Industrial Legacy. , When the War of 18 12 cut off the supply of British goods, the nation turned to Pittsburgh with its resources like coal, sand and river transportation. The City quickly became a hub of manufacturing for iron, brass, tin and glass products. For a short while in the mid-1800s, salt production became an important industry. In 1835, numerous railroads operated at the base of Mount Washington, transporting locally mined coal for the glass and steel industries. During the second half of the nineteenth century, steel manufacturing grew considerably as the railroad and ship building industries rapidly expanded. This led to Pittsburgh becoming known throughout the world as the Steel City., Glassmaking In Pittsburgh, By 1817, there were four glass factories in Pittsburgh, making use of abundant supplies of riverbed sand and coal. Glass production continued to grow steadily, until, by the 1850s and 1860s, local glass suppliers became national suppliers, and, by the end of the century, Pittsburgh led the nation in glass production., Coal Hill, Coal Hill, now called Mount Washington, earned its name because of its rich seam of bituminous (soft) coal, called the Pittsburgh Seam. As early as 1760, George Washington noted workers extracting coal from drift mines cut into an accessible seam along the hill, sometimes risking their lives to climb to work. A few years later, on the north face of the Mount, workers configured chutes to slide coal down to canoes and barges on the Monongahela River; and over time, dogs pulled sleds of coal out of Mount Washington's mines. Uniquely suitable for the production of coke, a key ingredient in the steel-making process, Mount Washington's coal was of central importance until the 1900s when improvements in steel production brought an end to mining on Mount Washington., (Captions):, In 1912, it was written that Pittsburgh was regarded as the "cradle of the glass industry in America" because of the city's improvements in the process of making glass., Bessemer Converter, around 1900 , Pittsburgh leaped to the forefront of the steel industry in large part because of Andrew Carnegie. He popularized the Bessemer Process in America, which allowed for inexpensive mass production of steel. By blowing air through molten iron, impurities are removed, which results in a purer, hotter iron for easier conversion into steel., Elevation Schematic of Mount Washington, The Pittsburgh Coal Seam , The Pittsburgh Coal Seam was the thickest and most extensive coal bed in the Appalachian Mountains., "Red Beds" , Mount Washington is also comprised of several layers of "red beds," sedimentary rocks that have taken on a rusty color. Red beds are a primary source for material to produce bricks, a major ingredient of building construction in Western Pennsylvania.