Introduction to the Allegheny Chronicles
by Chase Putnam
Rising from its source as a tiny spring in Potter County, Pa., the Allegheny River flows nearly 300 miles to Pittsburgh, its waters carrying with them a broad and compelling history--a record that encompasses generations of human activity on our original western frontier. A product of the Ice Age, the Allegheny drains nearly 12,000 square miles, fed along its length by more than 20 tributaries.
Following a pattern laid down by the Native Americans, explorers and frontiersmen used the Allegheny as their highway during the earliest years of occupation and settlement. As the land on and near the river became ever more attractive to those seeking permanent homes, the lumbering trade—particularly in the river’s upper reaches—began a century-long harvest of the white pine and hemlock forests of northwestern Pennsylvania. Allegheny lumber rafts measuring 50 by 360 feet regularly made the trip from Warren during the high-water season in late winter and early spring.
Before the large-scale lumbering came to an end, soon after 1900, farmers, oilmen and industrialists were at work along the entire length of the Allegheny. The age of rapid growth and development had begun in earnest by the mid-1800’s and the river, along with the Ohio and the Mississippi, became a vital commercial link to the west and a new frontier. River craft in their various forms, from the canoe and keelboat to the flatboat and steamboat, were the conveyances for people and their goods. The immense lumbering industry accounted for millions of board feet of sawed lumber rafted annually to Pittsburgh, Louisville and beyond from the head of the high-water navigation in Warren.
With the advent of flood control (the Kinzua Dam) and the consequent abandonment of a long-standing plan to build additional navigation dams on the upper river, commercial traffic has for some time been restricted to the lower river below East Brady, Pa. While the towboat is still a fixture downstream, the upper Allegheny continues to attract broader recreational use, especially on the Allegheny Reservoir and the surrounding Allegheny National Forest lands. Hunting, fishing, pleasure boating and camping opportunities abound, and the Allegheny remains, in the language of the Native American, “ the beautiful river.”