Monette, John W. History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi, by the Three Great European Powers, Spain, France and Great Britain, and the Subsequent Occupation, Settlement, and Extension of Civil Government by the United States, Until the Year 1846, in two volumes, Volume II . New York: Harper and Brothers, Publishers, 1846. [format: book], [genre: history]. Permission: Schingoethe Center for Native American Cultures, Aurora University
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In the mean time, Pittsburgh had been rapidly increasing its population and business. Already a printing-office had been established by John Scull and Joseph Hall, two industrious young men, who had embarked their whole means in the enterprise. On the 29th of July, 1786, they had issued the first number of the "Pittsburgh Gazette," and the first newspaper printed west of the mountains, ²¹⁶ and more than a year before the first newspaper was printed in Kentucky. It was not until March, 1787, that a town meeting in Pittsburgh first resolved to establish a weekly market, and to erect a market-house.

[A.D. 1788.] As late as the year 1788, Pittsburgh was a small frontier town, thirty miles distant from the county seat of Westmoreland county, to which it pertained. Hannahstown was the county seat, to which the people of Pittsburgh had to repair on county business, twelve miles east of Chestnut Ridge. On the 24th of September of that year they were released from these journeys by the organization of "Alleghany county," taken from Westmoreland and Washington counties. From that time Pittsburgh became the county seat for Alleghany county, ²¹⁷ and began to assume importance as a trading and manufacturing town; mercantile and trading establishments began to appear, mechanics flocked to it for employment, and manufactures and trade began to extend. The inhabitants on the Monongahela and Yough had already found agriculture a profitable employment; and the produce of their fields, in the form of flour, whisky, and other surplus products of a new country, had already passed Pittsburgh, and found its way down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans. A new class of hardy pioneers, under the name of "boatmen," now sprang up, who carried the products of the Monongahela and its tributaries to the more recent settlements of Kentucky, and to the Spanish provinces of Louisiana and West Florida. Thus commenced the first regular trade between Pittsburgh and New Orleans.

Manufactures had already begun to flourish in Western Pennsylvania. Iron had been found in great abundance from its first settlement, and the great demand for it, connected with the difficulty of transporting it from the east side of the mountains, soon prompted the erection of furnaces and iron-works. The first blast-furnace west of the mountains was "Union Furnace"

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