Pittsburgh's Scottish Heritage

The Scots Who Were There First

Before the Irish came to Pittsburgh, before the Italians, before the waves of eastern European immigration that filled the steel mills in the early twentieth century — there were the Scots. Or more precisely: the Scots-Irish, the Presbyterian Ulster Scots who had already made one crossing from Scotland to Ulster before making another to the American colonies.

By the 1750s, Scots-Irish settlers from the Great Wagon Road were pushing into western Pennsylvania. They were the culture of the Pennsylvania frontier — harder-edged than the Quaker east, Calvinist in religion, self-reliant by necessity. When Fort Pitt was established at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers in 1758, the communities that formed around it were already deeply Scots-Irish in character.

The Presbyterian churches they built — First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, dating to 1784, was one of the first — set the religious tone of the city's Protestant establishment for a century. The Scots-Irish notion of a community governed by its own elders, sceptical of hierarchical authority, translated into a particular Pittsburgh political culture: tough, independent, resistant to being pushed around.

Andrew Carnegie: Dunfermline to the Monongahela

He was born on November 25, 1835, in a weaver's cottage in Dunfermline, Fife — in the shadow of Dunfermline Abbey, where Robert the Bruce is buried. His father, William Carnegie, was a linen weaver whose trade was being destroyed by the power loom. In 1848, when Andrew was thirteen, the family emigrated. They went to Pittsburgh, where relatives had already settled.

The Carnegie story is American mythology: the immigrant boy who started as a bobbin boy in a cotton factory at $1.20 per week; who became a telegraph messenger and taught himself Morse code; who befriended the Pennsylvania Railroad superintendent Thomas Scott and rose through the railway industry; who recognised, with a clarity unusual for his era, that steel was the material on which the industrial age would be built and who invested everything in that conviction.

By 1892, Carnegie Steel was the largest steel producer in the world. The Mon Valley mills — Edgar Thomson, Homestead, Duquesne — were together the most productive industrial complex in human history. Carnegie was the richest man on earth.

He never forgot Dunfermline. When he began giving away his fortune in the 1890s and early 1900s, Scotland received a disproportionate share. Dunfermline got a Carnegie Centre, Carnegie public baths, and one of the first Carnegie libraries. The birthplace cottage in Dunfermline is now a museum. The connection between the weaver's son from Fife and the steel city of western Pennsylvania runs in both directions across the Atlantic.

The Homestead Strike and Scottish Labour

The Homestead Strike of 1892 — one of the defining moments of American labour history — was a confrontation between Carnegie's steel company and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, whose skilled membership included a significant proportion of Scottish and Scots-Irish workers. The strikers who held Homestead for months against Carnegie's manager Henry Clay Frick's Pinkerton agents were, in part, the descendants of the same Presbyterian culture that had built the frontier West.

The defeat of the Amalgamated at Homestead broke the union and suppressed wages in the steel industry for decades. But it also established a Pittsburgh labour consciousness that persisted — the understanding, hard-learned, that capital and labour were in fundamental conflict, and that workers' power depended on solidarity. That consciousness shaped Pittsburgh's Democratic machine politics for the next century.

Carnegie's Legacy in Pittsburgh

The Carnegie legacy in Pittsburgh is architectural and institutional, not merely historical. Carnegie Mellon University — formed in 1967 from a merger of Carnegie's original Carnegie Technical Schools (1900) and the Mellon Institute — is today one of the world's leading research universities, a global centre for computer science, artificial intelligence, and engineering.

The Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh — the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Museum of Art — were founded in 1895 in Oakland, Pittsburgh's university district. Carnegie built them deliberately as institutions of working-class education, in the spirit of his famous essay "The Gospel of Wealth": that the rich man who dies rich dies disgraced, and that accumulated wealth should be returned to the community that generated it.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, also in Oakland, was one of the first Carnegie libraries anywhere. Carnegie funded 2,509 libraries worldwide between 1883 and 1929. The Pittsburgh library was the prototype.

The Pittsburgh Scottish Games

Pittsburgh's Scottish-American community maintains active Highland Games — an annual gathering of Scottish clans, pipe bands, heavy athletics, and cultural events typically held in the North Hills suburbs in summer. The Games draw participants and spectators from across western Pennsylvania and neighbouring states.

Clan societies represented at the Pittsburgh Games include many of the surnames that settled western Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Campbell, Morrison, Stewart, Scott, Douglas, Henderson, McDonald, Cameron, Graham. For many Pittsburgh-area families with Scottish surnames, the Games are an annual reaffirmation of an identity that has faded from daily life but not from family memory.

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