Bridgeville, Pennsylvania

Bridgeville, just southwest of Pittsburgh, takes its name from the most practical of landmarks: the first bridge built across Chartiers Creek at the south end of what is now Washington Avenue. An old local saying, meet me at the bridge, gave the growing village its identity. By the nineteen tens, Bridgeville had become the largest unincorporated village in all of Allegheny County, with nearly two thousand residents and no official charter to show for it.

That changed on July twenty-seventh, nineteen oh one, when Bridgeville was formally incorporated as a borough. Industry followed quickly. The C. P. Mayer Brick Company opened in nineteen oh three, mining clay from the surrounding hillsides to build one of the largest brick manufacturing operations in the region. Local coal mines peaked at eighty-seven thousand tons per year by nineteen twenty, fueling the kilns. Bridgeville spent the next century as a working-class suburb, the kind of place that built Pittsburgh from just outside its borders.