First Mining of Pittsburgh Coal
Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
This State's bituminous coal industry was born about 1760 on Coal Hill, now Mt. Washington. Here the Pittsburgh coal bed was mined to supply Fort Pitt. This was eventually to be judged the most valuable individual mineral deposit in the U.S.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Around 1760, colliers began digging into the hillside then called Coal Hill—today's Mt. Washington—to fuel the garrison at Fort Pitt. It was the first working of the great Pittsburgh coal seam, a bed of bituminous coal that would prove astonishingly rich. In time this deposit was reckoned among the most valuable single mineral finds in the country.
Why it matters
This modest wartime dig marks the birth of the bituminous coal industry that powered America's steel age and made Pittsburgh an industrial capital.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Around 1760, the land where three rivers meet was a raw and contested frontier. The site of the future Pittsburgh was a strategic prize in the struggle for control of the Ohio Valley, and its anchor was Fort Pitt, a British stronghold guarding the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela form the Ohio.
A garrison on the frontier needed fuel — for warmth through hard winters, for cooking, for the forge. And rising directly across the Monongahela stood a steep rise then known as Coal Hill, today's Mt. Washington, with a seam of coal running through it that was almost absurdly easy to reach.
This was still colonial America, decades before the country existed as a nation. Yet in that ordinary act of digging fuel out of a convenient hillside, something enormous was quietly beginning.
People & events
The event the marker records is modest on its face: colliers began mining coal from the hillside to supply Fort Pitt. There were no grand ceremonies, no famous names — just the practical work of extracting fuel for a frontier post from the nearest and most obvious source.
What they had opened, without knowing it, was the Pittsburgh coal bed — a bituminous seam of extraordinary richness. What started as a wartime convenience became the first working of a deposit that would be mined for generations.
The hill made it almost inevitable. With coal lying so close to the surface and a river running right below to carry it, the geography practically invited the industry into being. Fort Pitt's need was the spark; the seam did the rest.
Its place in the American story
That first dig on Coal Hill is remembered as the birth of Pennsylvania's bituminous coal industry — and it is hard to overstate what grew from it. The Pittsburgh coal bed came to be judged the most valuable single mineral deposit in the United States.
Coal from this region would feed the furnaces of America's steel age, and steel from Pittsburgh would build the railroads, bridges, and cities of a rising industrial nation. The fuel first scraped out to warm a frontier garrison became the foundation of an industrial capital.
So the marker points to a true origin point. The immense industrial story of Pittsburgh — and a good share of the nation's rise to industrial power — can be traced back to colliers working a colonial hillside for the humble purpose of keeping a fort supplied.
If you visit
The best way to grasp this one is to get up high. Mt. Washington — the old Coal Hill — rises steeply above the rivers, and from its heights you get one of the most famous city views in America: the point where the waters meet, spread out below you.
As you look down, hold two pictures in your mind at once. First, a frontier fort and a wild hillside being dug for fuel around 1760. Then, the industrial city that the seam beneath your feet helped build. The whole arc of the story is visible from a single overlook.
It fits beautifully into a Pittsburgh road trip. Ride up to the heights, take in the view, and let the marker remind you that the spectacular skyline below began, improbably, with someone digging coal out of the hill you're standing on.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · Mining of the Pittsburgh coal bed
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Clinton Furnace
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2004
When the Clinton Furnace fired up near here in 1859, it became Pittsburgh's first successful blast furnace for making pig iron, fueled by Connellsville coke. Its success proved a technology that would be scaled up into ever-larger furnaces capable of producing iron in enormous quantities. Operating until 1927, Clinton Furnace helped launch the city's rise as the iron and steel capital of America.
John A. Roebling (1806-1869)
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1996
John A. Roebling was a German-born engineer whose faith in twisted wire cable transformed how Americans crossed their rivers. Here in Pittsburgh in 1846 he built one of the first wire-rope suspension bridges to carry a road over the Monongahela, proving a design he would refine across the country. His genius culminated in the Brooklyn Bridge, whose plans he drew before his death in 1869 left its completion to his son Washington.
Westinghouse Electric Corporation
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1986
In the 1880s a fierce rivalry raged over how to deliver electric power, and George Westinghouse bet on alternating current. Founding his company in Pittsburgh in 1886, he built the motors, generators, and transformers that let electricity travel over long distances rather than only a few blocks. That gamble on AC would light cities and power factories far from any generating plant.
Pittsburgh Glass Works
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1997
In 1797, frontier entrepreneurs James O'Hara and Isaac Craig lit the furnaces of Pittsburgh's first glass factory on this site, making bottles and window glass for a growing western settlement far from eastern suppliers. The works ran until the 1880s, an early link in what became a mighty industry. Fueled by cheap coal and river transport, Pittsburgh would grow into the nation's leading glass producer.