Blog

By Bill Coffin, Class of 2004

Inside the Chicago Motor Club Building, on John Warner Norton’s 1928 mural United States Map, the name of Pennsylvania’s Steel City was misspelled as Pittsburg. The city’s final h, never heard, was now nowhere to be seen. But if Norton was confused about the city’s proper spelling, he was not alone.

In 1758, John Forbes, a Scottish general, captured Fort Duquesne from the French and renamed it Pittsbourgh after English Prime Minister William Pitt. Later, when the area was surveyed, it was called Pittsburgh, without the o, and that same spelling was used when the city was incorporated in 1816. Printed copies of the original incorporation charter misspelled the name as Pittsburg, without the h, and some books and newspapers adopted that misspelling. But Pittsburgh, with the h, was the city’s official name. There was a bit of confusion, and there was more to come.

In 1891, striving for standardized spelling, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names determined that all place names ending in burgh should omit the silent h. Refusing to follow the federal fiat, Pittsburgh’s city government continued to include the h on all official documents. The U.S. Post Office and other federal agencies, however, dutifully dropped the letter, and most of the city’s residents and businesses dropped it, too.

Bowing to political pressure, the Board of Names reversed itself in 1911; the silent h in the city’s official spelling was now okay with the U.S. government. Confusion reigned, however, because some never got the memo. So in 1921, the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce issued a pamphlet. Entitled “How to Spell Pittsburgh”, it was sent to major newspapers across the country and presumably across town, too. That same year, the Pittsburg Press finally added the h to its masthead.

If the pamphlet was sent to Chicago, its lesson was not learned here. As late as 1928, as Norton painted Pennsylvania’s principal cities on his map, the Chicago Daily Tribune published several editions in which both Pittsburg and Pittsburgh appeared – sometimes in the same article. Similarly, the New York Times published an article whose dateline included the troublesome h but whose headline did not.

Norton’s mural kept the h out of Pittsburg, but its zigzag mountain ranges and straight ocean currents make it an admired piece of Art Deco, a decorative style of often straight, simplified and flat motifs. Modern in 1928, the mural‘s map and misspelled municipality mirrored the times. Americans marveled at modernistic design and motor cars, and they had cause to be confused about the proper spelling of Pittsburgh.

Source:

Van Trump, James, “The Controversial Spelling of Pittsburgh, or Why the h?”, Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation, December 21, 2000, accessed September 10, 2019
https://phlf.org/2000/12/21/the-controversial-spelling-of-pittsburgh-or-why-the-h/