The site of our Union Iron Mills was then, and many years later, a cabbage garden.
General Robinson, to whom I delivered many a telegraph message, was the first white child born west of the Ohio River.

I saw the first telegraph line stretched from the east into the city; and, at a later date, I also saw the first locomotive, for the Ohio and Pennsylvania Railroad, brought by canal from Philadelphia and unloaded from a scow in Allegheny City.

There was no direct railway communication to the East.

Passengers took the canal to the foot of the Allegheny Mountains, over which they were transported to Hollidaysburg, a distance of thirty miles by rail; thence by canal again to Columbia, and then eighty-one miles by rail to Philadelphia--a journey which occupied three days.[12] [Footnote 12: "Beyond Philadelphia was the Camden and Amboy Railway; beyond Pittsburgh, the Fort Wayne and Chicago, separate organizations with which we had nothing to do." (_Problems of To-day_, by Andrew Carnegie, p.187.New York, 1908.)] The great event of the day in Pittsburgh at that time was the arrival and departure of the steam packet to and from Cincinnati, for daily communication had been established.

The business of the city was largely that of forwarding merchandise East and West, for it was the great transfer station from river to canal.