Imagine southwestern Pennsylvania over 16,000 years ago. A band of nomadic hunters shelters beneath a sandstone overhang as ice-age winds blow across a wild landscape. This place – known today as Meadowcroft Rockshelter – would one day yield some of the oldest evidence of human habitation in North America . Here, Paleo-Indian hunters stalked megafauna and gathered wild plants, adapting their tools and techniques to survive in a harsh tundra climate. As the glaciers receded and millennia passed, their descendants of the Archaic period witnessed forests of oak and chestnut blanket the hills. They learned to fish the rivers and hunt agile deer in the dense woods, adjusting to a world warming and changing around them.
By around 1000 BCE, a new cultural tradition had taken root along the Ohio River Valley. Known as the Adena culture, these early Woodland people began constructing ceremonial earthworks. At a site now called McKees Rocks Mound, just a few miles downriver from Pittsburgh’s Point, they heaped soil into a great dome to honor their dead . Generations later, the Hopewell culture added to this mound, burying goods crafted from distant copper and seashell – evidence of an extensive trade network and a complex spiritual life . These “Mound Builders” left an enduring mark on the land, suggesting that the junction of the rivers was a significant gathering place long before European contact.
Centuries after the last Hopewell mound was raised, a new community flourished in this region. The Monongahela people (c. 1050–1635 CE) built their villages along the winding banks of the Monongahela and Ohio rivers. They lived in circular, stockaded villages of wooden houses – some settlements holding as many as 50 to 100 structures . In the fertile floodplains, Monongahela farmers grew the “Three Sisters” crops of corn, beans, and squash to supplement their hunting. They forged pottery with distinctive designs and traded with neighboring tribes (and indirectly with far-off Europeans via native middlemen) . For nearly six centuries, the Monongahela thrived, creating a rich culture tied to the land and rivers. Then, abruptly, their villages fell silent in the early 1600s. Scholars debate their fate – perhaps European diseases swept through before Europeans ever arrived, or they were absorbed or driven out by powerful rivals  . By the time European eyes first saw the Forks of the Ohio, the ancient mound at McKees Rocks was overgrown and the Monongahela people were a mystery. Their departure set the stage for another group to claim this strategic land.
Haudenosaunee Dominance: “Jaödeogë’” – Land Between Two Rivers
In the aftermath of the Monongahela’s disappearance, the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois Confederacy, expanded their influence into the Ohio Valley. By 1700, the mighty Five Nations of the Iroquois – Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk – held dominion over the upper Ohio Valley, declaring it their hunting ground . The Seneca, known as the “Keepers of the Western Door” of the Confederacy, were the predominant Iroquois presence in what is now Pittsburgh. They gave the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela a name in their own tongue: “Jaödeogë’,” meaning “between two rivers.”  To the Iroquois, this fork of the rivers was a prized and strategic location – the key to the Ohio River, which opened a gateway to the west and south.
For decades, the Iroquois carefully controlled this region. They themselves established no permanent towns at the Forks, reserving it as a vast wilderness domain for seasonal hunting and fur trapping . Game was plentiful in the dense forests and fertile valleys, and the Iroquois became adept middlemen in the fur trade that was starting to span the continent. The Confederacy did allow displaced tribes to resettle here under their sufferance: the Lenape (Delaware), pushed west by colonial expansion in eastern Pennsylvania, and the Shawnee, migrating up from the south, were permitted to live in the Ohio country so long as they acknowledged Iroquois overlordship . By the mid-18th century, a patchwork of Native peoples inhabited the greater Pittsburgh region – Seneca and Mingo (western Iroquois) in authority, Delaware and Shawnee in local villages, all trading and competing.
The strategic importance of this area was clear to the Haudenosaunee. Control of “Jaödeogë’” meant control of the vital trade networks flowing along the Ohio. Every spring and fall, flotillas of canoes laden with furs coursed downriver to trade with French or British posts. Iroquois diplomats and warriors guarded the region as a buffer against other tribes and as a bargaining chip in their dealings with empires. For generations, they maintained a careful balance – but that balance was about to be upended by the ambitions of two European powers converging on the Forks of the Ohio.
First European Eyes on the Forks: French Exploration and Rivalry
In the summer of 1669, the calm waters at the Forks were disturbed by an extraordinary sight – Europeans venturing into what they considered uncharted territory. French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle led an expedition through the Ohio River Valley that year. La Salle is traditionally credited as the first European to set eyes on the site of Pittsburgh, during his 1669 trek down the Ohio . Paddling through lands well known to the Shawnee and Seneca, La Salle marveled at the abundance of game and the strategic meeting of rivers. Though he left no settlement, his journey opened the region to France’s gaze. In his wake came coureurs des bois – roving French fur traders – and Jesuit missionaries, all eager to tap the riches of the land.
By the early 18th century, French traders had built a thriving fur trade in the Ohio Country, cementing alliances with many Native nations through mutual benefit. From their strongholds in Canada, the French sent iron tools, muskets, blankets, and brandy into the forests, and in return Native hunters supplied countless deerskins and beaver pelts. The fur trade bound the French and their Indigenous allies together, each dependent on the other’s goods and goodwill . Throughout the Great Lakes and down the Ohio, France cultivated friendship with peoples like the Ottawa, Huron, Shawnee, and Delaware – a vast network to check British ambitions. French trappers could be seen in native villages along the Allegheny, laughing and bartering in Algonquian tongues, forging ties sealed by gift-giving and occasional intermarriage.
To the east, British colonists in Pennsylvania and Virginia watched these developments with growing unease – and envy. The British colonies were booming in population, and land-hungry traders and settlers began pressing over the Appalachian Mountains. Pennsylvania traders such as William Fraser and George Croghan trekked into Ohio Indian towns to compete for furs, while Virginia aristocrats formed the Ohio Company, eyeing land grants in the west. By the 1740s, British and French claims in North America overlapped in the Ohio Valley, and a collision was looming. The Native inhabitants, savvy in diplomacy, often played one side against the other, but tensions were rising. As one contemporary noted, the Forks of the Ohio became “the prize of North America” – whoever controlled it could dominate the interior.
This imperial rivalry in the wilderness remained a cold war of words and treaties until the early 1750s, when both France and Britain moved to fortify their claims. In 1753, French forces began building a string of forts stretching south from Lake Erie toward the Forks of the Ohio, determined to block British influence from penetrating their frontier . That same year, the royal governor of Virginia, Robert Dinwiddie, decided on bold action. He dispatched a talented yet inexperienced 21-year-old major, George Washington, on a diplomatic mission into the Ohio Country. Washington arrived at the Forks on a raw November day in 1753 and beheld the strategic landscape – the two rivers merging to form the Ohio – with soldier’s eyes.
George Washington’s 1753 map of the Ohio River and its tributaries, drawn during his mission, shows the strategic Forks. In his journal, Washington noted the point of land “extremely well situated for a Fort, as it has the absolute Command of both Rivers” . Indeed, the site of present-day Pittsburgh made a deep impression on the young emissary. After meeting local Iroquois chiefs and leaving his horses at Logstown (a multi-tribal trading village down the Ohio), Washington pressed on to deliver Dinwiddie’s ultimatum to the French. At Fort Le Boeuf (in today’s northwest Pennsylvania), he handed the French commander a letter demanding the withdrawal of French forces from British-claimed territory. The French officer, with politeness and wine, declined to concede any ground to the British . Washington returned east with the French reply: a firm refusal. The stage was now set for war.
Clash of Empires: The French and Indian War (1754–1763)
In the spring of 1754, the contest for Pittsburgh’s strategic point exploded into open conflict. Governor Dinwiddie rushed a small detachment of Virginia militia under Captain William Trent to start building a British fort at the Forks of the Ohio . These men hastily laid logs and dug earthworks on the triangular point of land, hoping to stake Britain’s claim before the French arrived in force. It was the first European habitation on the site of Pittsburgh , a crude stockade named Fort Prince George. But time was not on the British side. In April 1754, a flotilla of French canoes carrying some 500 soldiers glided down the Allegheny River and landed at the Forks . The half-built British fort was no match for this force. The French commander, Claude-Pierre Pécaudy de Contrecoeur, courteously ordered the outnumbered Virginians to withdraw, which they did without a fight . Immediately, the French set about demolishing the British works and erecting a much larger fortification of their own. Tons of earth were moved and timber cut to raise the star-shaped walls of Fort Duquesne, named for the governor of New France . By summer, a formidable French fort stood at “the Point,” flying the fleur-de-lis flag and commanding “the Forks” (modern Pittsburgh) where the Allegheny and Monongahela meet . The convergence of the Three Rivers had become a battleground of empires.
The ouster of the British fort-builders did not end the contest – it only began it. Dinwiddie dispatched George Washington, now a lieutenant colonel, back into the fray with about 150 men. Washington marched northwest, determined to strike a blow before French reinforcements grew. On May 28, 1754, guided by allied Mingo warriors under Chief Tanacharison, Washington’s party ambushed a French detachment in a rocky glen not far from present-day Uniontown. In the brief and bloody Battle of Jumonville Glen, muskets flashed in the dim morning light and thirteen Frenchmen were killed, including their officer Ensign Joseph de Jumonville . It was a spark that ignited a global war. Washington hastily fell back and scrambled to build a makeshift defense, which he aptly named Fort Necessity, in a meadow at Great Meadows. Within weeks, a larger French force from Fort Duquesne retaliated. On July 3, they surrounded Fort Necessity in a drenching rainstorm and poured fire into the soggy stockade. By nightfall, Washington was forced to surrender, marching his troops back to Virginia after signing a surrender document (written in French) that inadvertently implicated him in Jumonville’s “assassination” . The first round had gone to the French, and the frontier roiled with uncertainty. The French and Indian War – the American theater of the Seven Years’ War – had begun in earnest.
Britain responded to these frontier clashes by sending professional troops. In 1755, General Edward Braddock arrived with a column of 2,100 British regulars and colonial militia, including Washington as an aide-de-camp. Braddock cut a road through the wilderness (following a route partially surveyed by Washington) and advanced toward Fort Duquesne with great confidence . On July 9, 1755, Braddock’s army forded the Monongahela a few miles from the French fort, drums beating and bayonets gleaming. But as the redcoats marched forward, French and Native forces sprung a deadly ambush in the forest shadows . In the Battle of the Monongahela (often called Braddock’s Defeat), musket fire and war whoops erupted from the dense trees on both flanks . Confused and suffering heavy casualties, the British line collapsed. General Braddock himself was shot off his horse and mortally wounded as chaos engulfed his troops. Survivors, Washington among them, managed a desperate retreat. The defeat was total: nearly 1,000 British and colonial soldiers were killed or wounded on that bloody day . The victory emboldened the French and their Native allies, who secured control of Fort Duquesne and the Ohio Valley for the next several years.
From 1755 to 1758, Fort Duquesne was the western cornerstone of French power in North America. Its small garrison, augmented by Native allies, launched devastating raids on the British frontier. Settlements in western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were terrorized by attacks; farmsteads burned and scalps were taken, all under the coordination of officers at Fort Duquesne . The fort’s position at the Forks made it a perfect staging ground – French war parties could strike in any direction along the river valleys. Pittsburgh’s three rivers thus carried war downstream in all directions. For the British colonists, Fort Duquesne became a fearful symbol of French aggression on their border.
By 1758, the tide of the larger war had begun to turn in Britain’s favor. That year, British General John Forbes led a new expedition, determined to capture Fort Duquesne and drive the French out of the Ohio Country. Learning from Braddock’s fate, Forbes advanced methodically, building a road and forts along the way. He also negotiated with Native groups, successfully persuading many Delaware and Shawnee to abandon the French cause. In October 1758, the British victory at Fort Frontenac (on Lake Ontario) cut off French supplies to the Ohio forts . Isolated and outnumbered, the French at Fort Duquesne faced grim prospects. In early November, their Native allies began slipping away to prepare for winter or to make peace with the British . Knowing a large British army was closing in, the French commander at Duquesne, Captain François-Marie Le Marchand de Lignery, made a fateful decision. On November 24, 1758, with General Forbes’s forces just a day’s march away, the French blew up the fort’s powder magazine and set Fort Duquesne ablaze, then fled down the Ohio by cover of night . The next morning, British troops cautiously approached the smoking ruins and planted the Union Jack amid the charred timbers. The crucial Forks of the Ohio were theirs at last.
For General Forbes, the victory at “the Point” was momentous despite the enemy fort’s destruction. “I have used the freedom of giving your name to Fort Duquesne,” Forbes wrote to British minister William Pitt, christening the site “Pittsbourgh” (Pittsburgh) in Pitt’s honor . Immediately, Forbes’s soldiers set to work building a new fortification, Fort Pitt, on the same ground . Fort Pitt, constructed between 1759 and 1761, was a massive five-bastioned stronghold – one of the largest British forts in North America  . Its stout walls of earth and timber rose where Fort Duquesne had stood, now flying British colors. With the French gone, British America now stretched to the Mississippi (on paper, at least). The confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela that had been known as “Jaödeogë’” was now officially Pittsburgh – and under British rule.
The collapse of New France in 1760 and the Treaty of Paris in 1763 confirmed Britain’s triumph in the French and Indian War. Yet victory brought new challenges on the frontier, as the British would soon learn at Fort Pitt.
Aftermath of Conquest: Pontiac’s Rebellion and the Siege of Fort Pitt (1763)
With the French threat eliminated, British troops occupied former French forts in the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley – including Fort Pitt. But the indigenous nations of the region soon found British rule far less conciliatory than the French had been. British officers like General Jeffery Amherst curtailed the tradition of gift-giving to tribes and settlers began encroaching on Native lands. Resentment smoldered among many tribes who had formerly allied with France. In the spring of 1763, that resentment erupted into a broad uprising known as Pontiac’s War. Chief Pontiac, of the Ottawa, forged a coalition of tribes from the Great Lakes through the Ohio Country to resist British occupation. In western Pennsylvania, Seneca war leader Guyasuta and others rallied warriors to the cause. That summer, Native forces swept across the frontier, and soon all but three British forts west of the Appalachians had fallen to the insurgents .
By June 1763, Fort Pitt found itself an island under siege. After news arrived that Pontiac had attacked Fort Detroit in May , the Delaware and Shawnee surrounding Pittsburgh quickly took up arms. Small frontier farms and villages around Fort Pitt were raided and burned; panicked colonists from the countryside crowded inside Fort Pitt’s walls for refuge . Hundreds of warriors, primarily Seneca, Delaware, and Shawnee, soon encircled the fort, cutting off its supply lines. Among the leaders was Guyasuta (Kiyashuta), the Seneca chief who had once guided a young George Washington through these same lands a decade earlier. Now, in July 1763, Guyasuta and his allies sought to drive the British out of the Ohio Country once and for all. They attacked Fort Pitt’s outbuildings and exchanged gunfire with the fort’s 230-man garrison, but Fort Pitt’s thick walls and cannon proved difficult to overcome . A tense standoff ensued, with the British barricaded inside and native forces camped in the woods beyond musket range.
The siege dragged on for weeks in the sweltering summer. Inside Fort Pitt, conditions were dire. Food was rationed among soldiers and civilian refugees; smallpox had broken out in the crowded fort, adding to the misery . Desperate to break the siege, the British resorted to a brutal and infamous tactic. On June 24, during a parley, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, the Swiss-born commander of Fort Pitt, handed two Delaware emissaries blankets and a handkerchief from the fort’s smallpox hospital . His hope was chilling: that these items, infected with smallpox scabs, would spread the disease among the besieging Lenape and weaken their resolve. Historical records confirm this act of early biological warfare – Ecuyer himself noted in his journal, “I hope it will have the desired effect,” after giving the infested blankets . This plan, sanctioned by Amherst in correspondence, would make the “smallpox blankets” of Fort Pitt a notorious footnote in history . Whether or not the disease took hold among the attackers is uncertain, but by late July the native camp was contending with smallpox outbreaks.
Even as disease threatened the besiegers, relief was on the way for Fort Pitt. Colonel Henry Bouquet, leading a column of 500 British troops, was marching west from Carlisle to rescue the garrison. Learning of Bouquet’s approach, Guyasuta and the native commanders decided to intercept him before he could reach Fort Pitt. In the first days of August 1763, the Native warriors withdrew from Fort Pitt’s vicinity – ending the direct siege – and moved to ambush Bouquet’s army in the wooded hills about 30 miles to the east. They met on August 5-6 at the fierce Battle of Bushy Run. Bouquet’s troops, though ambushed and suffering heavily, fought the attackers off in a two-day engagement marked by brutal close-quarters combat . Bouquet then pushed on, and by August 20, 1763, his battered column arrived at Fort Pitt, lifting the siege . The long ordeal was over. Fort Pitt’s survival broke the back of Pontiac’s regional offensive; the Ohio tribes, unable to capture the fort or stop Bouquet, gradually sought terms. Pontiac’s War would sputter out by late 1764, ending in a tenuous peace.
The British had held Pittsburgh, but Pontiac’s Rebellion starkly demonstrated that the Three Rivers remained contested ground. In response, the British government issued the Proclamation of 1763, attempting to reserve lands west of the Appalachians for Native peoples and prevent colonial expansion – an edict largely ignored by settlers hungry for land  . Fort Pitt, however, stayed garrisoned and became a crucial post for British Indian diplomacy. In 1764, after the conflict, Colonel Bouquet constructed a red brick blockhouse at Fort Pitt – a small defensive outpost that still stands today as Pittsburgh’s oldest surviving structure . Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, Fort Pitt and the surrounding settlement were on the verge of yet another upheaval: the American Revolution.
Revolution on the Frontier: Pittsburgh in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783)
By the eve of the American Revolution, a modest village had grown up around Fort Pitt. What had begun as a rough encampment for soldiers was now “Pittsborough,” a frontier town of perhaps a few hundred traders, families, and craftsmen living in the shadow of the fort’s walls. When colonial rebellion against Britain broke out in 1775, Pittsburgh’s location made it vitally important. The fort at the Forks of the Ohio became the headquarters of the western theater of the Revolutionary War for the Americans . Far from the battlefields of Boston or Yorktown, Fort Pitt was the anchor of Continental Army operations in the Ohio Valley, guarding the crucial gateway to the west.
During the war, Fort Pitt was a bustling hub of military logistics and diplomacy. Continental Army officers and militia gathered there to plan expeditions into Indian country and (aspirationally) against British-held Detroit  . It served as a supply depot, shipping gunpowder, lead, and provisions down the Ohio to American forces and frontier settlers. Perhaps most critically, Fort Pitt was a meeting ground for negotiations with Native American nations – whose allegiance could tip the balance in the west. The war split the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that had once united to control this land. The Oneida and Tuscarora nations chose to support the American patriots, while the Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, and Onondaga sided with the British – dividing the Six Nations in a veritable civil war . Along the Ohio, Shawnee and Delaware tribes were courted by both British and American agents . Many Shawnee and a large faction of the Delaware (Lenape) ultimately fought with the British, spurred by promises that British victory would halt American expansion. Yet some Lenape, like Chief White Eyes and his band, initially aligned with the Americans – even signing the Treaty of Fort Pitt in 1778, the first treaty between the United States and an indigenous nation, in which the Delaware agreed to aid Americans in exchange for protection and a potential Indian state. Tragically, that alliance crumbled when White Eyes died (under murky circumstances) and distrust prevailed. The Revolutionary frontier war became merciless, marked by massacres such as Gnadenhutten (where American militia slew neutral Lenape)  and destructive raids by both American and British-allied forces.
Through these turbulent years, Pittsburgh remained a Patriot stronghold. In 1777, British Colonel Henry Hamilton in Detroit (the notorious “Hair Buyer,” known for allegedly paying for American scalps) attempted to incite the tribes to attack Fort Pitt and the western settlements . Congress, alarmed, sent a commission to Fort Pitt to investigate and improve the frontier’s defense . American commanders like General Edward Hand and later General Lachlan McIntosh operated out of Fort Pitt, organizing campaigns to neutralize hostile war parties. In 1778, General George Rogers Clark used the vicinity of Fort Pitt as a staging area – recruiting frontiersmen at Redstone Old Fort (Brownsville) on the Monongahela, just south of Pittsburgh – before launching his daring expedition down the Ohio to capture British posts in Illinois Country . Clark’s men floated past Fort Pitt in May 1778, receiving supplies and well-wishes, then went on to take Kaskaskia and Vincennes, dealing a major blow to British influence in the West . Pittsburgh thus indirectly contributed to one of the Revolution’s great frontier victories.
By 1781, British fortunes were waning. The surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown that autumn effectively decided the war in the Americans’ favor. But on the frontier, skirmishes continued until news of peace arrived. In the Treaty of Paris (1783), Britain relinquished its claim to the Northwest Territory – ceding the vast lands west of the Appalachians (including the Ohio Country and Pittsburgh’s region) to the new United States. Of course, these were lands that Native Americans still inhabited and claimed. The newly independent Americans wasted no time in asserting control. In October 1784, American commissioners summoned the Iroquois to Fort Stanwix in New York for a treaty. With the British gone and their villages ravaged by Sullivan’s American expedition in 1779, the Iroquois had little leverage. Under great pressure, **the Six Nations (led by the Seneca) were forced to cede all claims to the land south of the Great Lakes, including western Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh region  . In this Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784), the Iroquois effectively yielded a huge portion of their hunting ground – one quarter of the modern state of Pennsylvania – to the United States . The Ohio River boundary that had once been recognized in 1768 (in an earlier Fort Stanwix treaty with the British) was now unequivocally pushed west. The Seneca and their allies withdrew, bitter and dispossessed, as American surveyors and settlers prepared to flood into the Ohio Valley. Pittsburgh, no longer an embattled frontier garrison but a budding American town, stood at the vanguard of this westward surge.
Legacy of the Early Years: How Frontier History Shaped Pittsburgh
As the 1780s unfolded, the transformation of Pittsburgh from wilderness outpost to American town accelerated. The guns fell silent and Fort Pitt’s military role began to wane, but the legacy of its tumultuous early history would shape the city to come. In 1785, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania formally established Allegheny County, and the town of Pittsburgh – once claimed by Virginia – was unquestionably part of Pennsylvania . Surveyors laid out streets on the triangle of land at the Forks, and entrepreneurs rebuilt where war had destroyed. By 1794, Pittsburgh was incorporated as a borough (soon to be a city), its population swelling with immigrants, traders, and veterans drawn by the promise of the frontier .
Pittsburgh’s very location and name are lasting testaments to the era of conflict and convergence. The city sits where it does because of the strategic advantages so prized by natives and colonials alike – the elevated point above two navigable rivers that young George Washington recognized as “extremely well situated for a Fort” . The name “Pittsburgh” itself honors William Pitt, the British statesman under whose leadership Fort Duquesne was taken – a vestige of the British victory in the French and Indian War. Yet long before, this place was called “Jaödeogë’” by the Seneca and home to generations of indigenous peoples. That layered history is embedded in the city’s identity. Even today, at Point State Park, one can see traces of those origins: the outlines of Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt marked in stone, and the Fort Pitt Blockhouse (built 1764) still standing guard as a humble relic of empire .
The early crucible of conflict at the Forks of the Ohio forged Pittsburgh’s character as a gateway and a crossroads. The hard lessons learned – the importance of unity, resilience, and strategic vision – would serve Pittsburgh as it grew into the “Gateway to the West.” By the late eighteenth century, flatboats built along the Monongahela’s banks were carrying pioneers and goods down the Ohio River toward the Mississippi, using Pittsburgh as the launching point for America’s westward expansion. The rivers that had once carried war canoes and bateaux now carried commerce and settlers, securing Pittsburgh’s future as a hub of transportation and trade. Its earliest industries – iron foundries, boatyards, and trading houses – sprang directly from its frontier legacy as a military depot and meeting ground of cultures.
From the ancient hunters at Meadowcroft to the Iroquois diplomats at “Jaödeogë’,” from Washington’s soldiers at Fort Necessity to Pontiac’s warriors besieging Fort Pitt, the story of Pittsburgh’s beginnings is as dramatic as any in America. It is a story of adaptation and survival, of peoples – Native American and European – contesting and negotiating for this strategic point of land. Every chapter, from prehistoric times through the Revolutionary War, added another layer to Pittsburgh’s rich cultural tapestry. This legacy endowed the city with a strategic importance and a resilient spirit that would guide it through the centuries to follow. Pittsburgh would go on to become an industrial giant dubbed the “Steel City,” but it never forgot its roots at the confluence of the Three Rivers, where history – like the waters – flows together to create something new.
