After Wayne's victory at the battle of the Fallen Timber in 1794
and the signing of the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which ended
the earlier Indian wars of the Old Northwest and opened for
settlement the country beyond the Ohio, a great migration
followed into Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, and the commercial
activity of Pittsburgh rapidly increased. By 1800 a score of
profitable industries had arisen, and by 1803 the first bar-iron
foundry was, to quote the advertisement of its owner,
"sufficiently upheld by the hand of the Almighty" to supply in
part the demand for iron and castings. Glass factories were
established, and ropewalks, sail lofts, boatyards, anchor
smithies, and brickyards, were soon ready to supply the rapidly
increasing demands of the infant cities and the countryside on
the lower Ohio. When the new century arrived the Pittsburgh
district had a population of upwards of two thousand.

One by one the other important centers of trade in the great
valley beyond began to show evidences of life. Marietta, Ohio,
founded in 1788 by Revolutionary officers from New England,
became the metropolis of the rich Muskingum River district, which
was presently sending many flatboats southward. Cincinnati was
founded in the same year as Marietta, with the building of Fort
Washington and the formal organization of Hamilton County. The
soil of the Miami country was as "mellow as an ash heap" and in
the first four months of 1802 over four thousand barrels of flour
were shipped southward to challenge the prestige of the
Monongahela product. Potters, brickmakers, gunsmiths, cotton and
wool weavers, coopers, turners, wheelwrights, dyers, printers,
and ropemakers were at work here within the next decade. A
brewery turned out five thousand barrels of beer and porter in