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In the midst of the Golden Triangle the Smithfield Evangelical Church raised a finger to God—a spire constructed of wrought iron. But Frick, Carnegie and the Mellons had left a city which was closer to man—a city in which was concentrated all the evils and ailments and shocks and problems of the nation's industrial age.
The Golden Strand. That destiny had been fixed since the day a British soldier from Fort Pitt loaded a canoe with black coal from Mt. Washington and paddled off happily to build a fire in his barracks. The fort became a village and a forge, a town of sawmills, tan yards, lime kilns, brick kilns. Coal brought iron, and Pittsburgh opened its first blast furnace in 1790. It supplied shot and shell for Jackson's cannon at New Orleans and iron for the Civil War.
By 1870 railroads had threaded through its gullies, Henry Bessemer's newfangled converters were vomiting out molten steel. The city's face was already black with its industry—the grime from which it has never since been free.
But grime meant money. Men's ingenuity knew no limits, and the supply of fresh laborers from the villages of Europe was seemingly as inexhaustible as the great coal fields under the Alleghenies. Pittsburgh grew and kept on growing.
And through all of that growth and most of the city's history, like a golden strand, ran the name of Mellon.
The strand began in the middle of the 19th Century when Thomas Mellon left his father's farm at nearby Poverty Point and on Smithfield Street hung out his shingle as a lawyer. He knew all the laws on foreclosures and he traded in other men's recklessness. In 1870 he had founded T. Mellon & Sons and had gone into private banking. Into this enterprise went two of his shrewdest sons—Andrew William and Richard Beatty.
The time was ripe for shrewd men.
The Moneymakers. Henry Clay Frick came to T. Mellon & Sons for a loan one day. Thomas' son Andrew eyed him up & down. That day began an association which was to last for 42 years. Nothing and no one was too big for H. C. Frick. He armed his agents with coke forks, kitchen knives and flintlocks and subdued his rebellious labor. He turned on the great Andrew Carnegie himself and fought a battle for power which ended in the mergers that became U.S. Steel Corp.
The Mellons fought the battle from their bank. The Mellons were never engineers, chemists, inventors, or even builders. They were moneymen. They manipulated the wealth required for the projection of other men's ambitions and dreams. They bought up real estate, financed railroads. They underwrote the development of the miraculous new light and silvery aluminum. With nephew William Larimer, son of Thomas' second son James, Andy and "R.B." financed the gigantic Spindletop gusher in Texas.
Thomas Mellon faded into senility and Andy and R.B. ran the show. Andy—shy, diffident, frail, and pale-eyed, fingering his thin cigars; R.B.—hearty, affable, horsy, married to Jennie King, a lively lady who wore a red wig—two brothers quite unlike in most respects but exactly alike in their acquisitiveness and the accuracy of their financial calculations.