THE HISTORY OF CLAIRTON, PA
The
following is from "Early History of The Peters Creek Valley and The
First Settlers
Compiled by Noah Thompson 1973 - 1974
Land occupancy in the Clairton Area began in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The first survey record—that of Benjamin Kirkindall (or Kuykendahl)—is dated September 27, 1769. It resulted in the “Ravensburg” patent granted to Sarah and Moses Kirkindall (Kuykendahl) on February 10, 1791. This patent covered lands in the northern or, as later known, Wilson district of the area. A second tract, toward the west, was surveyed for Moses Kirkindall (Kuykendahl) on December 8, 1783, but was not granted until December 26, 1822, when, as the “Gamaliel” patent, it became the property of John Gormly. A third tract, in the southerly part of the area, was surveyed by Samuel St. Clair, September 8, 1784, and under the title of the “Bruce” patent was conveyed to Samuel Willie (Wylie) on September 22, 1788. A fourth tract, surveyed for John King on July 7, 1783, was granted by the “Concord” patent to John McIhany on September 20, 1787.
No legal patent to land in what is now Allegheny County antedated April 3, 1769 when a land office for the western region was opened by the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania, i,e., the heirs of William Penn under the Royal grant of March 4, 1681 from King Charles ii. It is significant that the first survey in the Clairton Area was entered just five months later, and did not ripen into a patent until twenty-two years thereafter.
By the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, through what was called “The New Purchase,” the Proprietaries- acquired by fair and legal sale those Indian lands in Western Pennsylvania, ownership of which had been barbarically contested for fourteen years. The infamous Treaty of Albany In 1754 had tricked the Indians into a territorial surrender which they neither understood nor intended to make. Attempts of adventurous and non-too-scrupulous pioneers to take advantage of that rascally instrument by seizing lands in the vicinity of the Forks of the Ohio~ had led to bitter frontier warfare, and had established in the minds of the cheated aborigines that hatred and distrust of Englishmen which was to bear sinister fruit in the defeat of Braddock’s expedition and in the three years of bloody war which followed
Honest men admitted the fraudulent and unjust nature of the Albany Governor Morris denounced it as an affront to the conscience of the world. The proprietaries refused to make grants in the contested tern-and forbade its settlement. As early as 1763, King George III, proclaimed such settlements illegal, and threatened to hang or imprison any a invading the western lands whether for hunting and trapping, barter, farming.
The scruples of Royal Governors and the Penns, and the angry authority of the Crown, however, meant little or nothing to hundreds of fur traders, farmers, and merchants who had entered the western country. A few of these held lands there with some dubious show of right of virtue of conditional military warrants issued to them by the Commandant of Fort Pitt on the ground or pretext that they were purveyors of the garrison. The greater part of them, however, were frankly interlopers and squatters, truculent, greedy, and unbashed by law or authority.
It may have been that Benjamin Kuykendahl was already in the western country, either with or without warrant, at the time of the New Purchase, or that he was one of those Pennsylvania Dutch farmers who began streaming into the territory with the regularization of land titles. At all events, he, his kin Moses and Sarah, and their future neighbors in the Clairton Area obtained their lands honestly and regularly by grant from the Proprietaries.
It may have been that Benjamin Kuykendahl was already in the western country, either with or without warrant, at the time of the New Purchase, or that he was one of those Pennsylvania Dutch farmers who began streaming into the territory with the regularization of land titles. At all events, he, his kin Moses and Sarah, and their future neighbors in the Clairton Area obtained their lands honestly and regularly by grant from the Proprietaries.
Holding their property by patents from the Penns, they undoubtedly considered themselves to be Pennsylvanians, although there must have been times when they were by no mean certain that they would be permitted to remain so. Virginia, among other things, claimed all lands west of the Monongahela, and, under color of that pretension, had made extensive grants to the Ohio Company which had obtained a Royal charter in 1748. Robert Dinwiddie and Laurence and Augustine, the elder brothers of George Washington, were large shareholders in the Ohio Company. It is possible that the assertion of Virginia’s alleged rights to, and the interest of the Ohio Company in, the Western Pennsylvania lands, quite as much as a patriotic devotion to the cause of British dominance in North America, motivated Governor Dinwiddie in dispatching young Major George Washington on his mission of protest and warning to the French at Fort LeBoeuf in 1753. However that may have been, the Old Dominion continued to prosecute her claims vigorously, even to the extent of armed assertion in the so-called Dunmore’s War; and it was not until 1784 when by agreement between Pennsylvania and Virginia, their common boundry was extended westward on the parallel of latitude 39 degrees, 43 minutes and 26 seconds, that the struggle for the control of lands in this region ended. Then only could the folk of the Clairton Area be certain of their allegiance to Pennsylvania and the security of their titles to the farms which had been carved out of the Ravensburg, Gamaliel, Bruce, and Concord patents.
The lands conveyed by the original patentees were vested in settlers, many of whose names are still associated with the region. In the Wilson District, the Abers, McGogneys, Wilsons, and Woods held title; in Blair it was the Walkers, Blackburns, Blairs, and Bradshaws; and in what was later to be the Borough of Clairton, it was the Wylies, Larges and Deans. Among farm owners in the area adjacent to the present city were the Paynes, Larges, and Bickertons.
For a hundred years after the grant of the Ravensburg patent, the Clairton region was a purely agricultural one; and the community—if such it could be called— consisted of a few rather widely separated households. The first hamlets—too tiny to be called villages— arose contemporaneously with, and largely as the result of, the discovery and initial exploration of coal, clay and shale deposits somewhat later than midpoint of the nineteenth century. Among these were Coal Valley at the mouth of Pine Creek and Frostburg on Roberts Run—both mining settlements —and the embryo towns of Peters Creek, Wilson, and Blair.
Coal mining aside, the first appearance of industry in the area occured in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the erection of brick kilns by John T. Chambers in Blair. In 1889 the Mendelssohn Piano Company built a small factory at Peters Creek and gave its name to the little workers’ town that gathered about the plant In 1889 the Goff Manufacturing Company erected, a mill on a small river frontage in Wilson, at approximately the size of the present Clairton-Glassport bridgehead. The same year saw the establishment of the short-lived Keystone Cotton Tie Company for the manufacture of cotton bale bands. This plant was later acquired by the Morris and Bailey Steel Company, predecessor of the Oliver Iron and Steel Company. The works of the Monongahela Tube Company were opened in 1899. Both the Oliver and Monongahela mills were located on the river plain between the Clairton-Glassport Bridge and the present benzol plant of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Company.
While industry was supplanting farming in the Wilson District, a parallel development was going on in Blair where T. Campbell and T. O’Leary set up their respective glass works. The O’Leary enterprise lasted but a short time, but the Campbell concern persisted for a number of years, only to give place at length to the rapidly expanding iron and steel industry.
Presently, the major industries of Clairton are the steel, coke, and benzol plants of the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation which occupy a major portion of the lands between the State Street river bench and the Monongahela harbor line, and provide employment for a large number of workers resident in the city. Other industries adjacent to the city, employ a considerable number of Clairton people.
Before the erection of Allegheny County by an Act of Assembly approved September 24, 1788, the Clairton Area was in Washington County. The township, or parts of townships of the old county incorporated in the new one, were sections of Cecil, Peters, and Robinson Townships and all of Dickinson, the latter having been carved out of Peters in 1784. At the December term 1788, the Court of Quarter Sessions for the County of Allegheny erected seven townships, viz.: Elizabeth, Mifflin, Moon, Pitt, Plum, St. Clair, and Versailles. The Ravensburg, Gamaliel, Bruce, and Concord patents were in the new Mifflin Township.
Mifflin was one of the three largest of the original townships. Highways were exceedingly bad or non-existant. Citizens residing in the southerly portion of Mifflin found it very difficult to reach the distant polling place of the township and impossible to persuade the authorities to provide them with passable roads. Pursuant to a petition for relief, the court appointed John Behan, David Coon, and Nobel Calhoun, a committee to investigate the conditions complained of. Acting upon a recommendation by these gentlemen, the Court of Quarter Sessions at No. 10 April term 1827 erected Jefferson Township by joining the southerly part of Mifflin to a portion of St. Clair. The area of Jefferson Township at the time of its creation was 19,469 acres. Later the size of the township was reduced, first by the erection of Baldwin and Snowden Townships in 1845 and later by the incorporation of the boroughs which were eventually to merge as the City of Clairton. In 1889 the area of Jefferson Township was approximately 12,000 acres.
The Borough of Clairton was erected on April 25, 1903, the Borough of Wilson (including the unincorporated towns of Wilson, Coal Valley, and Peters Creek or Mendelssohn) was chartered on January 4, 1907; and the Blair District became the Borough of North Clairton on March 27, 1915.
Thus the Clairton Area was divided politically into three separate jurisdictions, each of which was free to enact ordinances and set tax levies independent of the others. Economically and socially no such arbitrary division existed. The great industries upon which the livelihood of the citizens and the financial maintenance of local government so largely depended, operated and paid taxes in all three boroughs. Actual or potential duplication of municipal service for schools, public works, and public safety threatened to be increasingly costly and uneconomic. By the close of World War I, the folly of the artificial separation of a single community into three political jurisdictions had become evident to a majority of the people in the area; and a movement looking toward municipal unification was begun. At an election held in November 1920, the electors of the three boroughs voted to merge them in a single municipality; and on the first Monday of January, 1922, the City of Clairton was incorporated as a city of the Third Class with a population estimated at approximately 11,000 souls.