Roads and Rails in Pittsburgh’s North Hills: How Transportation Fast-Tracked 20th-Century Suburban Development

Posted by on Feb 24, 2025 in | Comments Off on Roads and Rails in Pittsburgh’s North Hills: How Transportation Fast-Tracked 20th-Century Suburban Development The North Hills of Pittsburgh today resembles the suburban landscape clustered around many other American cities, dotted with housing subdivisions, roadside shopping centers, schools and too many traffic lights to count. But a little more than a century ago, this part of Allegheny County was like a rural outpost, a sparsely settled land of forested hillsides, rolling farmers’ fields, and the...
read more

Editor’s Letter

Posted by on Feb 21, 2025 in | Comments Off on Editor’s Letter In the Spring 2024 edition of Pennsylvania Heritage, we looked at the World War II experience of Steelton’s Thomas Mosley, one of the first Black men to serve in the U.S. Marines since the Revolutionary War. In this issue we continue our focus on World War II as we approach the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge and highlight the role of Pennsylvanians in that decisive conflict. In the...
read more

The Historic National Road

Posted by on Dec 1, 2023 in | Comments Off on The Historic National Road Distinctive seven-sided toll houses like the one shown on this early 20th-century postcard marked the route of the National Road in southwestern Pennsylvania. The National Road was the first highway planned and funded by the federal government and was intended to connect the East Coast with the country’s western frontier by opening a route through the Allegheny Mountains. Construction of the...
read more

Pinchot Roads: Paving the Way for Progress

Posted by on Jul 24, 2023 in | Comments Off on Pinchot Roads: Paving the Way for Progress In the early years of travel, Pennsylvania’s roads were difficult and even dangerous to navigate. Margaret van Horn Dwight struggled to traverse the roads of Franklin County by carriage. She wrote in 1810, “I was so lame and so [tired] that for an hour I did not know but I must set down and die — I could not ride — the road was so bad, it was worse than walking.” A few weeks later she had a...
read more

The Early Days of the William Penn Highway: How Present-Day U.S. Route 22 Got its Start

Posted by on Nov 30, 2021 in | Comments Off on The Early Days of the William Penn Highway: How Present-Day U.S. Route 22 Got its Start At the dawn of the automobile age, the major roadways crossing Pennsylvania were rutted, dusty, farm-to-market thoroughfares traveled mainly by horses and wagons. Many of these were still privately owned turnpikes, some with wooden-plank road surfaces. Most towns had improved streets, but the paving, if any, usually ended at the city line. Stagecoach lines still operated here and there, but...
read more

Editor’s Letter

Posted by on Nov 29, 2021 in | Comments Off on Editor’s Letter Pennsylvania is home to some of the most acclaimed mural paintings in the nation, including those in our own State Capitol created by Violet Oakley, the first woman in the country to receive a public mural commission in 1902 (see “To Form a More Perfect Union,” Fall 2019), and those found on the walls of many U.S. post offices in the state, installed as part of public work projects between 1934...
read more

The Pennsylvania Turnpike, From Tollbooths to Tunnels: Rediscovering America’s First Superhighway at 75

Posted by on Apr 12, 2016 in | Comments Off on The Pennsylvania Turnpike, From Tollbooths to Tunnels: Rediscovering America’s First Superhighway at 75 Few Pennsylvania-born celebrities have made the kind of splash that the Pennsylvania Turnpike did when it first arrived on the scene in October 1940. Its 160 miles of limited-access, four-lane paved highway across the Alleghenies were hailed as America’s answer to the Autobahn, Germany’s highly regarded network of high-speed “super roads.” After the war, as the United States’ population expanded...
read more