message upon the street. And there was the additional satisfaction to
the boy himself, that a great man (and most men are great to
messengers), stopped upon the street in this way, seldom failed to
note the boy and compliment him.

The Pittsburgh of 1850 was very different from what it has since
become. It had not yet recovered from the great fire which destroyed
the entire business portion of the city on April 10, 1845. The houses
were mainly of wood, a few only were of brick, and not one was
fire-proof. The entire population in and around Pittsburgh was not
over forty thousand. The business portion of the city did not extend
as far as Fifth Avenue, which was then a very quiet street, remarkable
only for having the theater upon it. Federal Street, Allegheny,
consisted of straggling business houses with great open spaces between
them, and I remember skating upon ponds in the very heart of the
present Fifth Ward. 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]