Source:Saunter/content
When going to and fro in this town, and walking up and down in it, did you ever pause in Brewery alley and reflect a bit? Oh, you don't know where it is. Well, there are many born and bred Pittsburgers who would say the same, yet Brewery alley is worth knowing. The knowledge of such as it has often been the making of a man. That is a fact, little as it may appear to be. There was here yesterday an account of the acquisition not many years ago of a most unpromising piece of ground which is yielding an annual income of nearly $2,000, ad [sic] almost every dollar there is in that property came out of that unpromising piece of ground. The man who owns it had such knowledge as here referred to, and he owns it because he had that knowledge—of the possibilities there were in the development of the city. Then and since young men, as he was, went west to grow up with the country. Meanwhile how much have they grown? Few of them not half as much as he has. The making of him was his knowledge of what the town was, and his clear guess at what it would be. He judged rightly the future by the past. Here yesterday there was something about the past of the town that others might rightly judge of its future and their own opportunities. Partly for that purpose, something more of the kind.
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From Water street and Duquesne way, as one makes the round of the Point, he sees enormous manufacturing wealth, and the beginnings of that were in Brewery alley, which is no longer called by that name, but by the more appropriate and suggestive one of Exchange alley, which it had doubtless from the Merchants' Exchange. Through an oversight of a single word there was a mistake here yesterday as to the site of the brewery which gave the alley its original name. The maps in City hall indicate that as the original one.
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In May of 1782 five citizens, of whom one was Thomas Girty, brother of the celebrated renegades, joined in a petition to Gen. William Irvine, commanding at Fort Pitt, as no civil government existed in Pittsburg them [sic], that he would be pleased "to take it into consideration that several of the officers and soldiers of this town have of late made a constant practice of playing at long bullets in the street that goes up by the brew house, and that a number of children belonging to us, who are dwellers on the same street, are in danger of their lives by the said evil practices." One Sunday forenoon men of one of the mines in the Chartiers valley were amusing themselves by pitching round stones, as big as the fist or bigger. What [sic] that the game described by Girty and the others as long bullets? It was one which, played in a street, might be dangerous to passing children. Where was that street on which those citizens lived? Likely just outside the wall of the fort, about where Fort street is, which was once Marbury, after Capt. Marbury. Thomas Vickroy assisted George Wood in laying out the town, and Neville B. Craig "often heard Vickroy talk about playing ball against what he called the wall of the fort, meaning what military men call the revetment. This ball playing may perhaps have taken place in that very part of the ditch where Marbury street was laid." However that may have been, those citizens say in their petition that the street they speak of "goes up" by the brew house, which seems to say, across Penn from Fort street and southeastwardly to some place on Exchange alley above Bell's, which latter ran from Penn to Liberty, but is cut off at Exchange alley by the freight station. Near there, one may conclude, was the brew house, and may conclude also that it was there before the Revolution. But that brewing was hardly for a commercial purpose; it was to supply the troops with beer, some of whom doubtless were employed in making it.
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Just before the Penns resolved to dispose of their manor in town lots Isaac Craig and Stephen Bayard bought from them three acres, or such a matter, at the Point, and after the town was decided upon, accepted "a deed describing the ground, not by the acre, but by the metes and bounds fixed by the plan of the town." They set up a distillery, and did they not do so in that old brew house? They bought the land in January of 1784; in July of that year Craig wrote to his partner that he "a party employed in the preparation of timber for the cistern, pumps, etc., for the distillery." Prior to this there were numerous private stills to supply home consumption; Craig and Bayard are credited with having been the first within the bounds of Pittsburg to make whisky for the market, and with having been the first of Pittsburg's manufacturers.
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In one respect, like him who rounded Peter's dome and groined the aisles of Christian Rome, they builded better than they knew. During the French and Indian war, Pennsylvania supported its bills of credit with money obtained by a tax on spirits, and in the Revolution attempted to do so, but in the west the people took advantage of a clause exempting spirits held for domestic use, by declaring that all they made was for that use. After the Revolution, Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, determined to raise a revenue off distilled liquors, and he consequently soon had an insurrection to deal with. "There was nothing at that day disreputable in either drinking or making whisky. No temperance societies then existed; to drink whisky was as common and honorable as to eat bread, and the fame of 'Old Monongahela' was proverbial both at the east and west." It was one of the chief elements of barter. The value of the amount of grain which a horse could carry over the mountains when the pioneer went east for sugar, salt, or iron, was not worth considering; it would not pay the cost of transportation, but the case was different when the grain was converted into whisky. This tax raised the wrath of the people. They said that they had cultivated their lands for years in the face of hostile savages, receiving little or no assistance from the general government, and now by taxation they were to be robbed of the fruit of their toil; that "when by extraordinary efforts they were enabled to raise a little more grain than their immediate wants required, they were met with a law restraining them in the liberty of doing what they pleased with the surplus." Water transportation was cheap, but the Spaniard controlled the Mississippi, and at will closed the port of New Orleans to the trade of the west, of which Pittsburg was the center. The manufacture of whisky brought to the test the question as to whether or not the federal government could compel respect for its laws, and it hastened the purchase of the immense Louisiana territory. A lot of meaning there was in that enterprise in Brewery alley. That had its own share in forwarding those memorable events.
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The distillery was in operation in 1787, affording the neighboring farmers a steady and excellent market for their rye, barley, corn, etc." How long it continued so cannot be stated; the guess is that it was closed when the insurrection begun, but that is only a guess, for the government tried a plan by which it hoped to avoid the necessity of sending an army into this region. It prosecuted individuals who refused to pay the revenue tax; it seized all the whisky in course of shipment from districts in which opposition to the tax was overpowering; through its own agents, instead of through contractors, as formerly, it bought for the army whisky made by those who were known to have complied with the law. Craig was a federalist, on principle committed to the administration, and it may have been that such and as a respector of the law, he found in the government a customer for all the whisky he had to sell.
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September 23, 1813, George Shiras, for James O'Hara, announced in the Mercury, that "the Pittsburg Point brewery is in operation." Where was it? Two of the earliest directories to be had mention it, but do not say where it was situated. An inference is that it also was in the alley, where it remained until 1825, at least, as in that year it is reported to have produced 2,500 barrels of porter and 1,500 of beer. In the summer of the following year Mr. Shiras was to erect near the Point a new brewery, with a capacity of 5,000 barrels annually. As the statement is worded, that was not to be an additional brewery, but one in place of the old. In 1815 there were four breweries in the town, sending out 10,000 barrels of beer, porter and ale annually, the more important of which were the Point and the Union, the latter on the west side of Liberty street, near the head of Market, and owned by Hamilton, Brown & Co. A decade later the Union had become the Pittsburg, and was owned by Brown and Verner. As to that, no matter. But was not the Point brewery originally in the Craig and Bayard distillery, as that was in the brew house referred to in the petition to Gen. Irvine? The language of the petition does not leave much doubt as to the whereabouts of the brew house, and that pretty clearly indicates the site of the first manufactory in Pittsburg, near the crossing of Bell and the Exchange alleys.
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The directory of 1815 has this entry: "Bell, Thomas, boat-builder, east side of Penn, between Hay and Marbury." Rather on the south side of Penn, and as we should say, between Fort street and First. Bell's alley, one would conclude, has its name from the boat-builder. His calling is suggestive of commerce, and not less so is the freight station which covers one-half of that alley, and ranges itself along the other, daily filled with wagons backed up against the side of the station to receive loads of goods. Brewery alley is certainly not the most attractive portion of Pittsburg, but take out of Pittsburg all that the alley stands for, and how much would be left? The alley is not a beauty, but it is not therefore to be despised. Since it came to be Exchange alley, and suggestive of finance, what a lot of people thought to better themselves by going west to grow up with the country, and how many of them added so much as a cubit more to their stature than if they had remained in Pittsburg? For the average person the opportunities not to have been had here needed hardly to have been sought elsewhere, and so it is yet. Brewery alley was of the day of small things, but see them now.
