Bridgeville: What's in a Name? August 29, 2019

Copyright © 2019                               John F. Oyler 

August 29, 2019

Bridgeville: What’s in a Name?

Most of us are familiar with the accepted story of how Bridgeville got its name. In the early days a Virginian named James Ramsey had a warrant for “Purity”, 102 acres in the western half of what is now Bridgeville. He assumed his property extended to the center of Chartiers Creek.

At the point where the Black Horse Trail, the main road from Washington, Pa. to Pittsburgh, crossed Chartiers Creek, Ramsey made significant improvements and stationed a toll collector there to charge the local farmers for passing through. 

This idea did not set well for the locals. In 1793 they built a barge at Canon’s Mill (Canonsburg), loaded it with flour, waited for a heavy rain and high water, and floated a cargo to the Ohio River for shipment onto New Orleans. This action prompted the Pennsylvania legislature to pass a bill declaring that Chartiers Creek was a navigable stream.

The main consequence of this was moving Ramsey’s property line back above the high-water line, making it possible for the local farmers to build a toll-free bridge there. The site was also significant because Colonel Noble’s “Trace”, a crude road connecting his storehouse at Noblestown with trade routes to the East, also crossed the creek at that point.

The bridge was an immediate landmark; “Meet you at the Bridge” became a popular saying. Naming the nearby village “Bridgeville” was an obvious consequence. We are sure there are flaws to this story, but in principle it probably is accurate.

Recently John Schneider asked me when Bridgeville actually got its name. I guessed, “In the 1830s”. Since then I have had the opportunity to search through old newspaper archives looking for the earliest appearance of the name in print. My source is a website called “Newspapers.com” which has archived thousands of old newspapers and provides a powerful search engine to its users.

Based on my research it appears my initial guess was good; the October 5, 1830, “Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette” includes an endorsement of “Shears” by John McDowell and Daniel Hickman, Bridgeville.

According to their statement, “We the subscribers have purchased and made use of Shears made by P. A. Bemis & Co., Pittsburgh, and consider them superior to any in use in this section of the country”.

Bemis & Co. must have found the endorsement to be effective; they ran it ten more times that year, thirty five times in 1831, and twice more in 1832. We presume Messers. McDowell and Hickman used shears to shear wool from sheep. At any rate this is the earliest mention of the name Bridgeville we have found in old newspapers.

The next mention was also in connection with an advertisement, this one for Darley’s Arabian Heave Remedy. It appeared in the December 26, 1851 “Monongahela Valley Republican”. The medicine was intended “for the cure of Heaves, Thick and Broken Wind, Coughs, Colds, and all diseases that affect the wind of Horses.” 

The advertisement utilizes five paragraphs to sing the praises of the product and ends with a list of local establishments where it can be obtained, including “H. H. Morgan, Bridgeville”. This of course refers to Hugh Morgan who had a well-known store (and Post Office) on the east side of the Washington Pike close to the location of our current post office. 

The November 4, 1854, issue of the “Pittsburgh Gazette” contains legal notice reporting the seizing of property owned by Jeremiah M. Sample as the result of litigation brought by John F. Wrenshall. The property in question is one and a half acres “situate in the village of Bridgeville, Upper St. Clair on which is erected a blacksmith shop”. The notice also indicates the property is bounded by McLaughlin Run; the blacksmith shop may well be the one that survived until the late 1930s.

Five months later, March 31, 1855, the same paper reported that property owned by Jonathan Middleswarth, in Bridgeville, “a two-story frame store house with back building” had been seized as the result of litigation by Samuel Freyer. Apparently our current obsession with going to court dates back to the earliest days of our community.

By 1856 politics had taken center stage in Pittsburgh. The September 18 edition of the “Pittsburgh Gazette” devoted four full columns to a description of a massive parade in support of John C. Fremont’s campaign for the Presidency as candidate of the brand new Republican party. According to the article a crowd of nearly 100,000 Pittsburghers enthusiastically witnessed the parade. 

Sure enough, the description of the parade is the report “The Rich Valley, Woodville, and Bridgeville delegations followed; every wagon was ‘loadened’ with flags and bushes”. Rich Valley was the Post Office for the Borough of Mansfield, the portion of what is Carnegie today east of Chartiers Creek.

On August 9, 1862 the “Pittsburgh Gazette” reported a “War Meeting at Bridgeville” at the hotel of Mr. Boyd. We presume this is the hotel in what is now “Lower End”, shown on the 1876 map as “Mrs. Jones’ Hotel” and later operated by Matt Mallory and then Lou Kaufman.

On June 30, 1867, the “Pittsburgh Daily Post” reported the discovery of an unidentified man who had drowned in Chartiers Creek in the vicinity of the County Poor House. “Esquire Shaffer, who resides near Bridgeville” empaneled a jury that declared the victim “found drowned” and had him buried at the Poor House.

Although the formal incorporation of Bridgeville as a municipality was still decades away, it appears that the name had stuck by the 1860s and was recognizable to the general public.