Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
for the attractive Allegheny Park, one portion rising in a very steep
hill, almost at the edge of the Allegheny River. Upon its top, seen
from afar, stands a Soldiers' Monument, a graceful column, erected in
memory of four thousand men of Allegheny County who fell in the Civil
War. Soldier statues guard the base, and look out upon the smokes and
steam jets of the busy city below, and thousands climb up there to
enjoy the grand view.
COAL, COKE AND GAS.
The four counties adjoining Pittsburg turn out over thirty millions of
tons of bituminous coal in a year. To carry this coal away, besides
railways, the city has about a million and a half of tonnage of river
craft of various kinds, a greater tonnage than all the Mississippi
River ports put together. Its coal boats go everywhere throughout the
Western water ways, and two thousand miles down the Ohio and
Mississippi to New Orleans. Its stumpy but powerful little tugs, with
their stern-wheels, will safely convey fleets of shallow flatboats,
sometimes over twenty thousand tons of coal being carried in a single
tow. These flatboats are collected in the rivers about Pittsburg,
waiting for the proper stage of water on the Ohio; and to regulate the
depth at the city the curious movable dam was constructed at Davis's
Island, four miles below Pittsburg, at a cost of $1,000,000, the dam
opening when necessary to let freshets through, and having a lock five
hundred feet long and one hundred and ten feet wide to pass the boats.
The Monongahela River above Pittsburg has for miles a series of coal
mines in the high bordering banks, the river being lined with coal
"tipples," which load the flatboats; and it is also provided with a
series of dams, which aid navigation and divide the channel into a
succession of "pools." The very crooked Youghiogheny flows in at
McKeesport, fifteen miles above Pittsburg, another river of coal
mines, whose name was given as a signification of its crookedness by
the matter-of-fact Indians, the word signifying "the stream flowing a
contrary, roundabout course." This river comes northward out of the
chief coke district of America, in the flanks of the long Chestnut
Ridge, the Connellsville coke region sometimes turning out ten
millions of tons annually from its ovens. Railways run in there on
both river banks to Connellsville, a town of six thousand people, in
the midst of the coke ovens, and about fifty-six miles south of
Pittsburg.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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