Charleroi: The Glass Town They Built to Order
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
In eighteen ninety, a consortium of investors bought farmland along the Monongahela River south of Pittsburgh and named their new town after Charleroi, Belgium, the glass-making capital of Europe. The name was a recruitment tool. They wanted skilled Walloon glassworkers from Belgium, and they got them.
Within a year the Charleroi Plate Glass Company was operating, competing directly with Pittsburgh Plate Glass. For decades the town hummed with furnaces, plate glass, specialty glass, and the immigrant Belgian families who ran the trade. Pittsburgh Plate Glass eventually took over the local plate glass operation, and it later closed.
The Belgian workforce stayed. Their churches, social clubs, and neighborhood names remain woven into the borough. The name itself is the whole story: a town designed from scratch to lure an industry and the people who knew how to run it.
