The Panic of 1837 and the Shephard family’s move to a new life and tide in Pittsburgh amid expanding Antebellum Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and the westward-bound United States

Pittsburgh (seen above in 1849) and its antebellum fortunes, would undergo substantial changes in the several decades before the Civil War. Manifest Destiny had proffered the perfect confluence at the point where the southern flow of the Allegheny River and the northern flow of the Monongahela River formed the Ohio River and the Gateway to