Chartier's Old Town: A Shawnee Crossroads

Before Tarentum was a town, this spot on the Allegheny River was a Shawnee village known as Chartier's Old Town, named for the French-Indigenous trader Pierre Chartier, whose father Martin had been a French explorer. Pierre operated a trading post here in the early seventeen forties, sitting at the intersection of several major Indigenous travel paths. It was a crossroads in the truest sense, a place where goods, news, and people moved between the eastern settlements and the contested Ohio Country to the west.

In eighteen twenty-nine, a man named Henry Brackenridge laid out town lots along the Pennsylvania Canal and named the new settlement Tarentum, after an ancient Greek city in what is now southern Italy. The Shawnee world that gave this place its first name had long since been pushed away.