From the Preface:

Away from the sprawling, built-up area of greater Pittsburgh, much of southwestern Pennsylvania consists of pleasing if unspectacular rural landscapes, a rolling countryside of woodland, small farms, and a few not noticeable bustling towns. Two hundred years ago this section lay on the pioneer fringe of the nation: farmland and sites for new settlements were carved out of what seemed to some of its early white inhabitants an earthly paradise. Looking at the area from either a contemporary perspective or, in the mind's eye, the decades around 1800, one finds it hard to realize that it was for many years home to one of the nation's greatest and most distinctive mineral-based economies.

From pages 7-9:

Southwestern Pennsylvania before the Coke Age

The Connellsville region was opened by European pioneers, the military, and then by settlers a century before it became renowned for coke making. Fort Necessity, on the east side of Laurel Ridge, was a control point established by George Washington. Following the French and Indian Wars, settlers reached the Youghiogheny Valley. After a period of frontier settlement, southwestern Pennsylvania became a zone of passage and source of supplies for those moving farther westward. A route from the Potomac led northwest by a narrow portage to the Youghiogheny and from there to and beyond the Monongahela, a course that with further improvement became the National Road. Along this route Uniontown, settled in 1767, was one of the first small communities, nuclei that would grow into towns, and so become fixed points through the various stages of economic development. Connellsville and Greensburg were established two or three years later, Brownsville was laid out in 1785, and Mt. Pleasant in 1797. Westmoreland County was formed in 1773, and Fayette County ten years afterward.

Life in such frontier lands was hard in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In 1791 the Reverend Thornton Fleming was assigned to Methodist service some way farther up the Monongahela in the Clarksburg circuit of what was to become West Virginia. More than forty years later, he looked back on his early days in the area: "When I came to my apointment this whole country appeared as a howling wilderness. Settlements were quite thin, quite remote from one another in many parts, and little cultivated. In many places the living, manners, state of society and morals of the people seemed to correspond."5 The fact that Fayette County was one of the centers of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 was a sign it shared both the remoteness and some of the human characteristics of Fleming's Clarksburg.

A decade after the Whisky Rebellion, Thaddeus Harris, traveling in the areas west of the Alleghenies, found a happier situation. Along the valley of the Monongahela, economic development and diversification were underway: "The settlements on both sides of the Monongahela river are fine and extensive, and the land is good and well cultivated. Numerous trading and family boats pass continually. In the spring and fall the river seems covered with them. The former, laden with flour, whiskey, peach-brandy, cider, bacon, iron, potter's ware, cabinet work, etc, all the produce of the country, and destined for Kentucky and New Orleans or the towns on the Spanish side of the Mississippi. The latter convey the families of emigrants, with their furniture, farming utensils, etc, to the new settlements they have in view."6 The region was becoming agricultural, but though contemporaries such as Harris described the soil as fertile and well farmed, there is evidence -- admittedly from many years later -- that farming in this area was in fact not very prosperous. . . . As a local paper recalled much later, during the 1830s the area was characterized by poor farmland.7 . . . . Long before this some had realized that the natural wealth of the area could be found beneath rather than within its soil. The earliest of its mineral-based developments were in iron.

On 1 November 1790 the first blast furnace west of the Appalachians -- though owned by a Philadelphia partnership -- was blown in on Jacobs Creek, Fayettee County. The Alliance Ironworks also included a forge. Five months later the Union furnace was at work on Dunbar Creek four miles south of Connellsville. In 1792 a forge was built along the same stream. Plumsock Forge had been built in Menallen Township, Fayette County, by 1794. Two years later a sixth part of Laurel furnace, its ore bodies, and forest lying within two miles of the Youghiogheny was advertised in Pittsburgh.8

These furnaces and forges supplied a variety of markets. . . . In the early days the castings and forge products of ironworks between the Youghiogheny and Monongahela had been hauled in teams for fifteen to as much as thirty miles across country to Brownsville. From that river port the goods were taken on flatboats down the Ohio and Mississippi and traded in frontier communities for corn, pork, whiskey, and other products, which in turn were carried on to New Orleans and there exchanged for sugar and molasses. These were sent by sea to Baltimore, where they were disposed of for groceries, dry goods, and other items that, loaded on Conestoga wagons, were hauled some three hundred miles over the Appalachians to the furnace or forge communities from which the iron products had been dispatched. Barter was the basis of the whole system according to Pechin, who quoted an old furnaceman who conducted business continually for three years and in that time saw only ten dollars in money.9

The following exerpt is from Big Steel, Part One, The Gary Era.

From Origins: The Creation of the United States Steel Corporation, pages 15-19:

During 1900, tensions and stakes were raised still higher by the reconstruction of some old companies and the beginnings of new ones, though the latter were as yet insignificant in relation to the established producers. Republic Iron and Steel Company was formed in 1899 as an agglomeration of rolling-mill operations. It also controlled five blast furnaces and a few, generally ill-located, steelworks. It set in train a purposeful reconstruction, concentrating its powers in the Youngstown area. Above Pittsburgh, Union Steel Company was intending to enter the wire-rod trade and considering supporting these operations with steel capacity and blast furnaces. One of the main rail makers, Lackawanna, having decided to move operations from Scranton, was now constructing a new works on a greenfield lakeshore site just south of Buffalo. The ferment in steel also threatened the good order of the railroad business. Carnegie was actively planning new lines to release him from the Pennsylvania Railroad. At the same time he vigorously criticized it for high freight charges that made it difficult to continue to deliver structural steel into Chicago at a time when Federal had decided to spend $10 million to build its own structural steelworks.18