Connellsville’s Second Founding
by John Soisson
James Cochran
On April 1st, 1843, one of the most important events in Connellsville’s history took place. That was the day Little Jim Cochran and his brother Sample pushed their homemade flat-bottomed boat into the rushing spring current of the Youghiogheny River and headed 300 miles south to Cincinnati. Their cargo? 12,000 bushels of high-grade coke they had produced themselves in two coke ovens they rented near Dawson. It was a trip that in 50 years made Connellsville the energy capital of the world. It’s hard to imagine today the courage it took to make that trip. In 1843 there were no flood control dams on the river system, no reservoir at Confluence to contain and control the spring rains and runoff in the Yough. Some people surely thought that those two young men were on a fool’s errand. Little Jim had already made the run downriver to Pittsburgh several times, and sold barges filled with sand he dug from the river bank near his home in Dawson. But a trip on the spring flood waters all the way to Cincinnati with a load that big was another thing. And they had only the barest hope for a sale of their untested coke at the end of their wild ride. A few years ago, my friend Paul Whipkey and I followed the Cochrans’ wake as far as Pittsburgh. We made the trip in a 30-year-old 16-foot Mohawk canoe – a stable craft that was easy to maneuver and that only carried a load of a few hundred pounds. We canoed the route in August, when the water in the Yough was low and slow. So, we used our imaginations and tried to guess what it was like for the Cochrans. The speed of the water. The struggle to control the barge. The eddies that pulled them towards shore. The constant danger of running aground or being flipped by an unexpected boulder. Paul and I took three days to get to Pittsburgh, canoeing a gentlemanly six to eight hours a day. We slept nights in warm, dry beds back in Connellsville. The Cochrans had no such luxury. They floated day and night and slept – if they slept at all – on their barge atop the coke. When they got to Cincinnati, they found a man who owned a foundry – Miles Greenwood – and convinced him to give their coke a try. Greenwood was reluctant. Connellsville coke had never been tried and he had a bias against the fuel because of the poor coke he had 13
tried in the past. But the young boatmen were persuasive and Greenwood gave it a test. No promises. Yet the results were so good that he bought the entire load for 7 cents a bushel. A total of $840 dollars (that would be about $30,000 today). This was the first Connellsville coke sold for money and with the sale the Cochrans demonstrated that there was a market for coke made from the rich Connellsville coal seam. The sale marked the beginning of an industry that brought millions upon millions of dollars and tens of thousands of people to Fayette County. Six years after the Cochrans made their groundbreaking trip, Henry Clay Frick was born in nearby West Overton. By 1880, when he was barely 30 years old and Little Jim was pushing 60, Frick had outpaced the Cochrans in the mining of coal and the production of coke in Fayette and Westmoreland counties and Connellsville coke had become an essential ingredient in the manufacture of steel in Pittsburgh, the steel that was used to build America and drive the industrial revolution westward across the United States. By 1900 – about 60 years after the Cochrans’ fateful river run – Connellsville had become the energy epicenter of the world, the Saudi Arabia of the 19th century. Little Jim was a skillful river pilot and for 25 years after that first trip to Cincinnati he piloted boats three or four times a year down the dangerous channel from the Yough to the Monongahela to the Ohio, a feat that very few other men could perform. When he died in 1894, the business he headed owned 1,200 coke ovens and thousands of acres of coking coal. But it was that first courageous trip 179 years ago, when he was only 20 years old, that started it all and that made Connellsville more than a wide place at which to cross the Youghiogheny River. That’s something worth at least a brief moment of reflection once in a while. John Soisson was born in Connellsville and returns to his roots there almost every summer. These days, he lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.
