The unusual history of the spelling of our beloved city’s name is a tale told often, full of twists and turns over the centuries. Certainly the names of many famous American cities have undergone transformations, yet most relate to archaic spellings or obsolete names—changed for the better by the early 19th century. New Amsterdam and New Orange eventually British-ized into New York; Native-American Shikaakwa became Chicago; Charles Town morphed into Charleston (SC); Boston early on was called Trimount; Losantiville became Cincinnati; and settlers in 1850s Seattle thought New York-Alki would do nicely for the area.
But Pittsburgh with an h has never had it so easy, challenging from its beginnings and intermittently to identify as Pittsburg. Indeed, it started h-full in the days of namesake William Pitt (the Elder) and h-less using Pittsburg in the original city charter enacted in 1816 by the Pennsylvania legislature. Along the way the explanation for early adoption of its added h seems to be simply that Pitt was combined with a shortened form of borough. General John Forbes, capturing Fort Duquesne in the French and Indian War, was Scottish, and a Scotch variation uses burgh—as in Edinburgh. A 1758 letter from Forbes to William Pitt indicating the renaming of Fort Duquesne as Fort Pitt is headed with the sender’s address of “Pittsburgh.”
So, with most 19th-century maps and publications using Pittsburgh, why are there are so many printed items featuring an h-less city name for an odd period of a few decades, specifically 1891 through 1911?
Bureaucracy strikes, of course. The U.S. Board on Geographic Names (USGN) was created in 1890 to simply decide what to call things. In 1891 the USGN ordered all cities ending in “burgh” to leave off the h. The Board’s decisions governed federal agencies, including the Post Office, but other local newspapers and institutions freely adopted either spelling, although mostly opting for Pittsburg.
But then, after suffering the indignity of truncated and confusing nomenclature, in 1908 a Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce committee endorsed Pittsburgh as the city’s correct spelling. This was followed by a new official USGN proclamation singling out Pittsburgh: “At a special meeting of the United States Geographic Board held on July 19, 1911, the previous decision with regard to the spelling of Pittsburgh without a final H was reconsidered and the form given below was adopted: Pittsburgh, a city in Pennsylvania (not Pittsburg).” The city has remained “burgh” ever since.
There are many significant remnants of the quaint Pittsburg spelling from those years, and on these pages, more than just reviewing this history, we aim to visually display some fun examples of the days when Allegheny County’s citizens were met with a city that had temporarily lost its “rear end.”
We still have the sculpted vault details of the Union (Penn) Station rotunda (constructed 1898-1904) reading “Pittsburg 1900.” Lucky baseball card collectors can point to the uber-valuable 1909 “Pittsburg” Honus Wagner card and the “Pittsburg Base Ball Club” score cards and 1909 team pennant-win promo. Researching old newspaper front pages will reveal Pittsburg Press and Pittsburg Post mastheads. Our venerable department stores, Joseph Horne Co. and Kaufmann’s, adopted the h-less spelling in their ads and printed booklets during these years.
Most of all, one easily gathers dozens of old city-related postcards from the early 1900s that identify our location as Pittsburg—an endearingly nostalgic appellation that is so clearly shown in the accompanying images.
Strip! editor Greg Suriano collects vintage paper ephemera of all types and is nostalgic about anything “old-Pittsburg[h].”