I'm here in North Versailles Township overlooking the Monongahela River.

This area might look like a wasteland, but this road was one of the original ways to get down to one of the original settlements in Allegheny County, a town that's now been lost to time.

What happened?

Well, let's find out together.

This is the story of Port Perry, Pennsylvania.

I'm Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain.

The story of Port Perry begins, like any good western Pennsylvania story, with the British defeating the French at Fort Duquesne in 1758, on the same day that General Forbes declared the area to be under British control and renamed it Fort Pitt.

He sent out a squad of 14 soldiers to the mouth of Turtle Creek to build a sawmill there, which would provide lumber for the new Fort Pitt.

Right across Turtle Creek was Braddock's Field, where the English General Braddock had been defeated by the French and their Native American allies just three years prior.

Oh, the history of Braddock's Field in Port Perry would be forever linked.

It might be an exaggeration to call it a town just yet, but Port Perry had begun.

A settler named John Perry laid out the streets and lives in 1793.

It was advertised as a prime location.

Lots of virgin timber, access to the river, access to Turtle Creek.

But there was one natural resource that Mr.

Perry had not anticipated.

There was a lot of coal in the big hill behind town, and it began to be mined in 1835.

Remember that this area was still the frontier well into the 19th century.

One of the first guys to travel out here was a guy named Zadok Cramer, who wrote this series of guidebooks called The Navigator, where he told you how to travel the waters between the Alleghany Mountains and New Orleans.

He provided places like towns and forts where you could resupply and spend the night, and he included places to be avoided, like sandbars and snags.

In the 1802 edition of The Navigator, he lists Perry's town at the mouth of Turtle Creek and says that there is a long, difficult rapid at the mouth.

He doesn't say much else about it.

He does, however, mention Braddock's defeat right across the creek.

In the 1811 edition of The Navigator, Cramer again mentions the long, difficult rapids, but this time he doesn't even name the town.

He just says it, quote, has not progressed.

Meanwhile, he mentions in Braddock's Fields that farmers are plowing up the bones of fallen soldiers and that trees there bear the marks of musket balls.

So that's pretty metal.

There isn't a whole lot of evidence of this being a road as we walk down, except for some of the asphalt that gets washed away, or I should say, gets exposed when the leaves get washed away.

But I'd like to point this out that even the old roads in Pittsburgh have huge potholes.

The town was bypassed by the early roads, and it was slow to grow until the 1840s, when a new street map was drawn up and lock and dam number two were built across the Monongahela River.

More trade meant more residents, including the lock keeper and his family.

In 1840, just before the lock and dam were built, only eight families had called the place home.

It became a typical western Pennsylvania river town of the time, populated mostly by men who never actually came ashore.

Boat captains and coal traders with their flat boats, but their wives and children lived in town.

By 1850 there was a post office and there was a methodist Episcopal church.

In 1888, there was one notable event that drew a lot of attention to the town.

So the locks are closed on Sunday, right?

No traffic.

You can't do work on the Sabbath?

Well, there's one boat captains coming up river with the tow of empty barges, and he apparently has somewhere very important he needs to be.

But unfortunately, he doesn't reach lock number two in Port Perry until early Sunday morning.

He pleads with the lock keeper.

He says, please, I have to go through.

The lot keeper says, sorry, Bud, you're stuck.

The way we do things around here, you're not moving through.

On Sunday.

So the boat captain goes okay, pulls his boat as close to the lock keeper's house as he possibly can, and pulls on his steam whistle in varying tones.

High pitch, low pitch for 15 continuous hours from 9 a.m.

Sunday until midnight on Monday, when the locks reopened.

Quite a crowd had gathered.

It was written about in newspapers at the time, and the lock keeper, to his credit, was a man of principle because he was not budged.

He just put up with it.

That's Port Perry.

Port Perry was growing so rapidly that for Sales Township had to be split in two.

In 1869, North for sales retained the bustling river port you see, just 12 years earlier, in 1857, something came along that changed the quiet little village forever.

The Pittsburgh and Connellsville Railroad, later owned by the Baltimore in Ohio, was begun in 1854, and in 1857 it came to Port Perry, connecting with the Pennsylvania Railroad in Turtle Creek.

By 1861, the line was open to Pittsburgh, following the swooping curves of the Monongahela River.

The whole way.

The end of the riverboat arrows rapidly arriving the rails, were the future.

By the time of the Civil War, about 3500 people lived in Port Perry.

Its sawmill manufactured more than 2 million rifle stocks for use in the war.

It had a small boatyard, a railroad car repair shop, a Cooper, a stone quarry, a flour mill, a bakery, and 13 saloons.

Speaking of saloons, I don't quite know what to make of this statement, but I can't not include it.

The mud at the upper end of town was black, at the lower part yellow, and at Hamburg, a little settlement near the border of Port Perry.

It was red, the color of mud on a man, shoes denoting where he got his whiskey.

It was no Pittsburgh, but it wasn't a small village anymore either.

By 1871, the Pennsylvania Railroad, which passed through the nearby Turtle Creek Valley, was getting exponentially busier each year.

And all that traffic between the East Coast and the Midwest was being funneled right through downtown Pittsburgh.

So the directors of the railroad decided to build a couple of bypasses.

I've explored the brilliant branch on this channel, a now inactive bypass line which sent freight cars up through the Allegheny Valley.

But 30 years before the Brilliant branch, there was the Port Perry Branch, which moved freight traffic between the PRR mainline in Turtle Creek and the Monongahela Division in Duquesne.

The path of least resistance for this line was, of course, right through Port Perry.

The PRR blasted the Port Perry Tunnel through the hill behind town, and built the Port Perry Bridge across the town and the river.

They were rebuilt in 1903 to upgrade their capacity, but have since been reduced back to a single track.

In the many years since.

In 1883, the Pittsburgh, McKeesport and Youghiogheny Railroad, later owned by the Pittsburgh in Lake Erie, opened from the south side of Pittsburgh to Connellsville, using the south side of the Monongahela River as its route, until swinging across the river between Homestead and Rankin, and then paralleling the B & O and route through Port Perry.

So Port Perry was no Pittsburgh, but it was beginning to look like a miniature.

Not only were steamboats docked there at all hours of the day, but each year every railroad got busier and busier.

And then in 1875, Andrew Carnegie's first integrated steel mill, the Edgar Thompson Works open for business right across Turtle Creek in the same field where General Braddock had been defeated in 1755.

And we're soldiers.

Bones were being tilled at the turn of the prior century, and the Edgar Thompson steel mill, which was being prosperity and riches to nearby Braddock, was truly the beginning of the end for Port Perry.

The last railroad to plow through port area was the Union Railroad, which was formed in the 1890s by a merger of various local railroads for the purpose of interchanging materials between all the local steel mills.

The railroad stretched as far as Hayes in the west and Clairton in the south.

In the summer of 1898, the first trains rolled across the Union Railroad's Port Perry Bridge, carrying iron ore from the north to be turned into steel in the Mon Valley.

Of the four bridges built by the Union Railroad, only the Port Perry Bridge is still in service.

Remember what I said in this video?

That Pittsburgh had the highest freight tonnage of any place in the world in the early 20th century?

Well, there's one place in particular, not technically in Pittsburgh, but in the Pittsburgh Industrial District that actually had the very highest freight tonnage.

If you're looking at a daily basis, do you want to guess where that place was?

It's in the title of the video.

It's Port Perry.

Over 133 million tons of freight moved through this tiny town in 1914.

Adjusted for inflation, that's worth over $19 billion in 2025.

That's six times the amount of freight that moved through the Suez Canal in 1914, and twice the amount from New York and Liverpool combined.

By the late 1800s, the coal had begun to run out, and while Braddock's population climbed port, Perry's dropped to about 1100.

Yet there were still about 40 houses, an elementary school, a hotel made of beautiful yellow brick, and three grocery stores.

As the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette reported in 1904, amid this wide and pronounced prosperity, one of the oldest towns in the county is rapidly being blotted off the map, despite the fact that it is a river port that five railroads pass through it, and that at its door is the largest pig iron and steel rail plant in the country.

They note that Port Perry became a town of some consequence long before Homestead or Duquesne were thought of.

And while Braddock was still principally a cornfield for the first century of America's existence, Port Perry was a pretty prominent place in history and in geography, while Braddock's Field was something of a historical footnote.

But with the rise of steelmaking, the inversion of those two statements couldn't be more pronounced.

Well, well, well.

How the turntables.

For a while after the mill opened, Port Perry actually thrived because of it.

Cheap housing close to the mill.

What's better than that?

Braddock was actually further from the mill than Port Perry was at this time, until the mill expanded and got a new furnace system that required more workers.

And then the availability of land in Braddock's field meant the greater availability of cheap housing there.

Port Perry was small.

It had no more room to grow, and as rail capacity expanded and necessitated the construction of ever more tracks.

Braddock's gain was Port Perry's loss.

Consequently, Lock and Dam Number two were demolished when the new lock and dam Number two were constructed in Braddock in 1905 to provide more slack water access for the mill.

By 1904, Port Perry was already a shell of itself, with fewer than 500 people living there.

Many longtime residents had moved to Braddock because that's where the stores and the doctors were.

Many houses went unrepaired under the constant threat of further railroad expansion in 1904, according to that article from the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette.

Debris from a row of demolished houses had been lying in place for more than a dozen years, and by 1904, Port Perry had been removed from the timetables of all the railroads that passed through it.

After an expansion to the mill in 1923, Port Perry was cut off completely from Braddock, leaving that skinny road heading up the hill.

The one that I entered town on as the only way into and out of town.

And here's a fun Google Earth find for you.

Old maps show the pre 1923 road crossing Turtle Creek and connecting to Braddock Avenue.

There is no evidence of a bridge, but there is an old tunnel passing underneath the tracks and it lines up with these old curves on Braddock Avenue.

Okay, so I made it down to the bottom of the hill to probably the last piece of infrastructure remaining in Port Perry, which is the old road bridge over the railroad branch that leads into the Port Perry Tunnel, which is right over there.

I really want to go further.

I really want to get closer to the Edgar Thompson works and see the railroad yard closer up.

But I don't know if you can tell how thin this shell of asphalt is on top of this bridge.

And there's like five holes in it that I could fit into right now.

So I really don't feel like falling 40ft onto a railroad for the chance of maybe seeing something that I can't already see on Google Earth.

This is as far as I'm going to go.

You get the gist of what I'm looking at here.

I'm going to spin the camera around.

I'm going to do it without my face in it as well.

So you can see what the town was, where it was.

But here's a good view, right?

You get Kennywood in the background, you get the Port Perry Bridge and the other railroad bridge there, and the railroad yards where town used to be spin it around.

Edgar Thompson works and I'll spin around one more time slowly.

I don't want to make you seasick.

The old road where I started my journey.

Up at the top.

There.

So that's it.

That's what's left of Port Perry.

This 1938 aerial imagery may be the last map to ever show Port Perry.

And it shows how much of the town had already been demolished.

The last house in Port Perry was raised in 1944.

Bricks from the demolished hotel were used to build the Mount Carmel Baptist Church here in Crest Terrace.

In 1927, many former residents of Port Perry ended up in this hilltop community.

That church was rebuilt in 1995, and it's the one you see here behind me.

But this bell proudly displayed in the front is the original grade school school bell from Port Perry.

We are so used to towns dying in western Pennsylvania, that Port Perry story hardly seems worth retelling, but I think it's important because it's not the same story that we've heard again and again and again.

It's not that the town died because the steel mill closed up, it's that the town died because the world's most successful steel mill became more and more successful.

If it weren't for the Edgar Thompson works, Port Perry would probably still be there, and Braddock might still be a cornfield.

Port Perry would probably resemble Georgetown in Beaver County, or Colter along the Youghiogheny River, former river towns that sure used to be a little richer, but are perfectly nice fine places to live nowadays.

But the mill had to expand, Pittsburgh's economy had to expand, and if it was at the expense of Port Perry, so be it.

It was just one link in the very long chain that eventually came back to mortally wound Braddock.

The town, not the person.

Homestead, Duquesne, Aliquippa.

So many other steel towns across the state.

Port Perry is the Industrial Revolution.

Port Perry is the 19th century in America, and Port Perry is no more.

Well, that's about all there is to see today.

So thank you for watching.

And if you want to see more videos like this, make sure to subscribe to the channel.

I will see you next time.