Steel City

Explain Pittsburgh's growth, and locate it.

Warm-up, learn, try it together, practice, then a quick check. About 15 minutes.

What children learn in Level 13

America was building: railroads, bridges, and tall buildings. All of them needed steel, a strong metal made mostly from iron.
Pittsburgh, in western Pennsylvania, became the Steel City. Find it here.
Why there? Coal lay nearby to heat the furnaces. Rivers and railroads brought iron ore in, and carried steel out. Immigrants and other workers came for jobs.
Andrew Carnegie, an immigrant from Scotland, built a giant steel business there. Mill work paid wages, but the days were long, hot, and dangerous.
Other places grew for their own reasons. After the Civil War, the South kept growing cotton and tobacco, and the Great Plains filled with wheat and cattle.

Georgia Standards of Excellence in Social Studies:

SS5G2.a — Locate primary agricultural and industrial locations between the end of the Civil War and 1900 and explain how factors such as population, transportation, and resources have influenced these areas (e.g., Pittsburgh's rapid growth in the late nineteenth century).
SS5G1.a — Locate important man-made places; include the Chisholm Trail; Pittsburgh, PA; Kitty Hawk, NC; Pearl Harbor, HI; Montgomery, AL.; and Chicago, IL.