University of Pittsburgh - Owl Yearbook (Pittsburgh, PA)

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IK K m of tko Unw n.«y of f.lt»bv.®K I known Ikon o. Wm.wn Unnorvty of f««vwyfw n.o) on PonyinM Aronvo K t ttoy d ho.0 f . WflKlow. y on (INfrlfOII b f« mown® 10 Ooklond Pitt in 1789 The students attending Pitt in 1789, the year the Constitution of the United States was signed, were the sons of farmers and fur traders from outlaying districts. No women attended. Tuition was£5 a year, while one could find board for £20. The students were attentive to classes while seated on split log benches, taking notes with their goose quill pens. There was no keeping up with a fast lecturer in those days—the pens had to be dipped in homemade ink boiled from oak and sumac bark. Flyers describing the curriculum at the time promised that students are to be taught to read English according to the most approved method, and English grammar; writing Arithmetic and Bookkeeping; the Latin, Greek, and French languages; Rhetoric, and Belles let-tres; Geography, and the most useful parts of the Mathematics: to which will be added an introduction to Natural, civil, and Ecclesiastical History, Astronomy, Natural Philosophy, Logic, Moral Philosophy, and Chronology. The announcement also noted that the lower class will be taught Orthography agreeable to the standards of first taste. A French and Dancing Master will also attend, for those who may wish their children instructed in these graceful parts of a polite education. And instead of the Board of Trustees passing resolutions pertaining to football tickets and tuition hikes. The 1789 trustees passed a resolution forbidding students to duel with one another or to carry weapons into the classroom. 7

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The morning sky was marred by black thunderheads as the tall trees swayed in the crisp autumn wind. Farmers raced over small plots of ground cut out of the forest, flintlocks at their sides in the wagons. K the fierce weather didn't force them to leave, the sudden Indian raids would. The date was September 17, 1787. The Scotch-lrish frontiersmen of this tiny village of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania waited for the peal of the morning breakfast bell. Eleven years earlier they had declared independence from the tyranny of English domination. Today, the bell would mark an independence of another sort. Philadelphia in 1787 was a large prosperous city. Pittsburgh was but a small trading post settlement, the last stop for Ohio trailblazers as they moved into the Northwest Territory. On the edge of the unknown, Pittsburgh attracted fugitives, the rowdy and the adventuresome. The majority of its occupants were transients. The tiny village had only thirty-six log cabins, no churches, one clergyman, four lawyers, and one doctor. Along the muddy streets, ramshackle, unpainted houses stood in a row, filled with makeshift furnishings. The majority of its citizens were ex-Revolutionary War officers stationed here to defend the upper Ohio Valley, plus a number of farmers and tavern owners. The pack horse was the principal mode of transportation and it wasn't until 1794 that the village passed an ordinance prohibiting townspersons from allowing their hogs to run free in the streets. Day by day since the first family of settlers had arrived at Fort Pitt in 1754, the need for a school had become more acute. Today, September 17, 1787, that need would be filled. Today, Pittsburgh would declare independence from Philadelphia, educationally speaking. In 1 786, a trade school was opened in Pittsburgh by a Mrs. Pride. A Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies had met in her front parlor. There, prospective homemakers learned the skills of plain work, coloured ditto, flowering, lace—both bobbin and needle, fringing, tabouring, and embroidering. Before a girl could enroll, she had to read English and knit. The male was less fortunate. Despite occasional lessons taught by traveling schoolmasters, the young boy of Pittsburgh found himself unable to obtain any formal education. The nearest institutions were two hundred to three hundred miles away in Carlisle or Philadelphia. The journey would require passage through some of the roughest territory west of the Alleghenies, and at a time of year they were most needed at home for planting and harvest. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, eminent lawyer, author, and ardent Democrat had reflected on Pittsburgh in 1786, This town must in the future be a place of great manufactures, indeed the greatest on the continent, perhaps in the world. These initial views on the city by Brackenridge brought him to the belief that the small town needed four things before it could fulfill its destiny. The Princeton graduate saw the need for a newspaper, an English-speaking church, a college, and status as a county seat. 6

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One of the first things that he did was to bring in John Scull, Joseph Hall, a printing press and some type from Philadelphia. The manpower and machinery enabled him to start the Pittsburgh Gazette. He then used this paper as a tool to obtain his other desires. After the paper had earned Brackenridge a seat in the State Assembly, he accepted responsibility for incorporating the Presbyterian congregation in Pittsburgh in 1787 and for creating Allegheny County in 1788, Pittsburgh being named as the county seat. In a Gazette column of September 2, 1786 entitled Observations on the Country at the Head of the Ohio River with Digressions on Various Subjects , Brackenridge laid out his case for education in the frontier town. Academies are the furnaces which melt the natural ore to real metal; the shops where the thunderbolts of the orator are forged. The function of the town of Pittsburgh is greatly to be chosen for a seat of learning; the fine air, the excellent water, the plenty and cheapness of provisions render it highly favorable. 8