D. Leech & Company ⎯⎯⎯ Western Transportation Company

Pittsburgh, PA

When Allegheny County was carved out of Westmoreland and Washington counties in 1788, its seat at Pittsburgh was already a generation old — laid out in 1764 at the strategic forks where the Allegheny and Monongahela join to form the Ohio, a gateway that had drawn soldiers, traders, and settlers pushing west. Incorporated as a city in 1816, Pittsburgh grew into one of the great engines of American industry, its furnaces and mills pouring out the iron and steel that earned the region its "Workshop of the World" reputation. The county's story runs straight from a frontier river junction to the smoke-and-fire heart of the nation's industrial age.

Bradys Bend Township, PA

For a third of the nineteenth century, the bend of the Allegheny River at Brady's Bend roared with the work of one of America's great early ironworks. Founded in 1839 as the Great Western and later reorganized as the Brady's Bend Iron Company, it grew into one of the largest iron operations of its era, drawing on the coal and iron ore of western Pennsylvania. Most remarkably, it became the first works to roll iron rails on the western side of the Allegheny Mountains — feeding the very railroads that were then stitching the growing nation together. When it closed in 1873, it left behind a company town and the memory of a place where American heavy industry came of age beyond the eastern seaboard.

Belpre, OH

When New England pioneers laid out Belpre on the north bank of the Ohio in 1789, they were among the first waves of settlers pushing into the newly organized Northwest Territory, farming the rich bottomland and trading along the river highway that carried people and goods west. The settlement was well enough established by the early 1800s to greet the Lewis and Clark expedition as it made its way downriver toward the frontier. A century later the same current that floated flatboats of grain was harnessed by locks and dams, and barge traffic turned the old farm town into a working industrial river port.

Belpre, OH

In 1791 the Ohio country was raw frontier, and the settlers clustered near Belpre—many of them Revolutionary War veterans who had come west with the Ohio Company—needed a reliable way to turn grain into flour. Jonathan Devol, a resourceful millwright, answered by mounting a gristmill on two boats anchored in the Ohio River, letting the current itself drive the stones. Sheltered beside Farmer's Castle, the fortified stockade built during the Indian wars of the early 1790s, his floating mill ground 25 to 50 bushels a day and served families scattered across some thirty miles of riverbank.