How did Saw Mill Run get its name?
In the star-studded and criminally underrated David Mamet satire, “State and Main,” part of the plot revolves around a Hollywood film crew invading a sleepy New England town to shoot a movie called “The Old Mill,” only for them to arrive and find out that there is no mill. The one that had existed burned down decades prior, and it becomes a running joke to hilarious effect.
This comes to mind in consideration of the origins of the name of Saw Mill Run, the 22-mile stream that begins in Bethel Park, meanders through Castle Shannon and more than a half-dozen south city neighborhoods and discharges into the Ohio River near the foot of the West End Bridge. Its eponymous boulevard is a stretch of Route 51 that is almost universally loathed by any Pittsburgher who’s ever operated a vehicle on it.
But Jack Frank of Tulsa, Okla. (by way of Saw Mill Run-adjacent Brookline), asks if there ever was an actual saw mill on Saw Mill Run.
In his query to The Neighborhood, which topped a reader poll of questions you want us to answer, he asked:
“Route 51 South is known as ‘Saw Mill Run.’ I assume there was a significant lumber operation around somewhere. Can you find out?”
Indeed there was a significant lumber operation on Saw Mill Run — so significant, in fact, that it quite literally helped build the city.
A Dec. 3, 2002, Post-Gazette article by E. Kenneth Vey, a former professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a Heinz History Center library and archives volunteer, succinctly writes:
“The earliest local saw mill was a water-powered mill erected on what has been subsequently known as Saw Mill Run, on the south side of the Ohio River, about one mile below the Point. The mill began working in 1759, when Gen. John Stanwix began the reconstruction of Fort Duquesne into a more formidable Fort Pitt.”
In his historical opus “Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City,” Stefan Lorent gives a bit more detail on the origins of the saw mill.
He quotes the 1759 writings of James Kenney, a storekeeper in the captured French Fort Duquesne at the confluence of the three rivers. Mr. Kenney was Pittsburgh’s first diarist, and he kept a detailed running of accounts, although with amusing details of daily life. These included stories, for example, of a drunken fight between prominent fur trader George Croghan and a Native American, Teedyuscung, so Mr. Kenney was more like Pittsburgh’s first nebnose.
Such stories aside, Mr. Kenney noted that on Aug. 24, 1759, “They have set to build a saw mill on ye other side of ye main river, down in sight of ye Fort, being on ye South side, and there are 9 saws going in one pit at ye fort.”
Then, a few days later, another entry:
“29th. This day ye General arrived here with his Train and set of music — he was very plainly dressed and seems not proud.”
Mr. Lorent explains: “This was General John Stanwix come to carry out [British statesman William] Pitt’s order to build a fort ‘strong enough to assure the undisputed possession of the Ohio.’ He brought with him army engineers and skilled workmen from the East, and soon the Forks was a hive of industry: sawmills, quarries, clay pits, tan yards, coal mines, forges — a faint anticipation of the Pittsburgh that was to come. By March 1760 the shell was up; in another year the fort was completed and inevitably named Fort Pitt.”
By virtue of that, Saw Mill Run has an absolutely indelible place in the early history of the City of Pittsburgh.
But since then … well, it’s not exactly the kind of local geographical landmark that invites much affection. To wit: In the PostGazette’s online internal database, which begins in January 1990, there are 1,028 mentions of the phrase “Saw Mill Run” in our publication to date, and nearly all of them have to do with flooding or traffic or both.
A July 10, 1968, Pittsburgh Press photo caption notes that sewage draining from West Liberty Avenue into Saw Mill Run is a “source of nauseating odors” and is “infested with foot-long rats.” A 1975 Press editorial called it “God’s gift to the engineering profession” because of the need for myriad flood remediation projects. In 1983 Rich Gigler (no relation to this writer) wrote in the Press of the orange hue the water takes near the intersection of routes 51 and 88 because of drainage from an abandoned mine.
Today, Saw Mill Run isn’t in quite as bad shape as it once was: even Venture Outdoors and Kayak Pittsburgh lead paddles through it from its mouth at the Ohio, and the area that winds through the Seldom Seen Greenway in Beechview is a bit of bucolic beauty, right in the middle of the city. Fish, birds and small reptiles and amphibians call the creek home.
Lisa Werder Brown is the executive director of Watersheds of South Pittsburgh, a nonprofit that is working to develop a comprehensive plan for economic development and environmental stewardship of both Saw Mill Run and Streets Run. She said that a comprehensive plan, several years in the making, is expected to be finished next month.
“One of our major initiatives is an integrated watershed management plan to address the multiple issues — flooding, sewage and a lack of riparian areas along stream bed,” she said. “We’re going to identify locations and projects that are going to have greatest impact on water quality with the least expense.”
None of this would be necessary if bygone city fathers had listened to an expert.
Ms. Brown said that in 1910, the Pittsburgh Civic Commission hired Frederick Law Olmstead Jr., one of the pre-eminent landscape architects and city planners in American history to look at uses for the corridor.
“He said it was too narrow and too prone to flooding, and since it was filled with greenspace, his recommendation was that it would be a wonderful linear park,” she said. “Of course, they didn’t do that at all.”
Instead its been the much maligned eyesore of a thoroughfare between the city and suburbs, routinely flooded and now home to dozens of used car lots.
“It’s disinvestment. The lowest possible denominator for development,” Ms. Brown said. “It would be impossible to do any kind of significant impact development without addressing the stream.”
She said that all the players are at the table, including the City of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, the 12 municipalities in the Saw Mill Run watershed, the Port Authority of Allegheny County and the Army Corps of Engineers.
“The stars have aligned moving forward,” she said, noting that a model of precedent exists: Maryland’s Sligo Creek in the Anacostia River Watershed in suburban Washington, D.C., where a trail system is popular recreation destination.
“The ultimate vision is to embrace the original vision of a linear park along there,” she said. “This stream could be a huge regional asset.”