Bildungsromans; Communities -- Juvenile fiction; First loves -- Juvenile fiction; Pittsburgh (Pa.) -- History -- Juvenile fiction
Old Pittsburg did not vanish with the little girl, however. But she
went on her way steadily, industriously. The new century came in with
great acclaim. Shipbuilding prospered. Iron foundries sprang up. The
glass works went from the eight pots and the capacity of three boxes
at a blowing to double that number, then doubled it again. The
primitive structure erected by George Anshuts before the century ended
was the progenitor of many others sending their smoke defiantly up in
the clear sky. And all along the Monogahela valley as well as in
other places the earth gave up its stores of coal as it had given up
its stores of iron.
And in 1816 Pittsburg was incorporated as a city and had a mayor and
aldermen and her own bank. It was a new Pittsburg then, a hive of
human industry, where one business after another gathered and where
fortunes were evolved from real work, and labor reaps a rich reward.
There are not many of the old things left. The block house built in
1764 by Colonel Bouquet still stands. A great depot covers the site of
the ancient Fort, and the spot of Braddock's defeat. But there are
Duquesne Heights, all her hills have not been levelled, if most of the
old things have passed away. She is the workshop of the world now, one
writer calls her "the most unique city in the world." And she has not
neglected the finer arts of beautifying. She has magnificent
buildings, fine libraries, and cultivated people, musical societies,
and half a hundred benevolent institutions. And we must not forget
that in six days after the firing on Fort Sumter a company of
Pittsburgers marched to Washington and offered their services to the
secretary of war.
If the little girl had vanished, Daffodil Bartram found much happiness
in the new home. M. de Ronville was not only delighted, but grateful
over his two children who were not of kindred blood, but of the finer
and higher kin of love. There came children to the household, three
boys and one golden-haired girl, but he did not quite reach the years
of his friend Duvernay. And when the two older sons were grown they
cast their lot with Allegheny City, which in the course of time grew
into a lovely residential city, free from smoke and dust and noise,
and theirs proved a noble patrimony. The Bartrams still had a son and
daughter, and the journey to Pittsburg no longer had to be made in a
stage coach.
Felix Duvernay Carrick made one of the notable citizens of the town,
the author of several useful inventions and a most thriving business
man, not needing any of his sister's fortune, for grandad left him
one, beside the one he was making with his brains and industry. And
Barbe was a happy grandmother to a merry flock, but she would never
leave the old house, though the farm was cut up by streets and houses
crowded in upon them. And she kept her bed of daffodils to the very
last.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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