Point State Park, The Confluence That Made Pittsburgh
Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
There are places whose geography makes history inevitable. This is one of them. You are standing at the exact point where the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River converge to form the Ohio, the gateway to the entire interior of the continent. Whoever controlled this confluence controlled the trade routes to the west. French, British, and American armies all understood that, and they fought over this ground for decades.
The French built Fort Duquesne here in seventeen fifty-four. The French destroyed it as the British approached in seventeen fifty-eight, and the British then built the far larger Fort Pitt. Pittsburgh grew up around the fort and became the jumping-off point for American westward expansion, flatboats and keelboats departing from this very tip carrying settlers, supplies, and livestock down the Ohio into the frontier.
By the twentieth century the Point had become a derelict industrial waterfront, packed with aging warehouses and railroad infrastructure. In the nineteen thirties and forties, urban planners proposed clearing the site for a state park. It took decades of political battles, but demolition of the old structures began in the nineteen fifties, and Point State Park opened in nineteen seventy-four. Excavations during construction unearthed foundations and artifacts from every era of the fort's history.
The park's most recognizable feature is its fountain, a hundred-and-fifty-foot jet of water that erupts from a circular basin at the very tip of the point. Some accounts say the fountain draws on groundwater from beneath the point. On busy summer days the fountain shoots water high enough to be visible from the bridges overhead.
Point State Park is today a National Historic Landmark. The Fort Pitt blockhouse, built in seventeen sixty-four, still stands at its edge, the oldest surviving structure in western Pennsylvania, surrounded now by park grass rather than earthworks and cannon.
