The gothic granite-stoned gate-house with its red-tiled roof at the Butler Street entrance to Pittsburgh's Allegheny Cemetery, a line of tall wrought iron fencing circumnavigates the entire wooded graveyard and separates the necropolis from the neighborhoods of the living--treeless Lawrenceville, Bloomfield, and Garfield, with their nineteenth-century red-bricked rowhouses and townhomes. There is a memorial deep within the cemetery displaying a surprisingly early birthdate of 1787 for this relatively young city built on what had once been the American frontier. A white headstone displaying an eroded relief of a dove with an olive-branch in its mouth marks the grave of Neville B. Craig, the place of repose for the almost completely forgotten man who in 1851 provided the city's first narrative in The History of Pittsburgh: With a Brief Notice of its Facilities of Communication, and Other Advantages for Commercial and Manufacturing Purposes--an attempt commensurate with the rising glory of the western metropolis.
"Our design in preparing our book was to give… a plain narrative of the steps by which the heavily timbered land, at the head of the Ohio, was converted into thriving and populous cities and villages," Craig writes in his preface. Locals will recognize both "Craig" and "Neville" from the names of streets in the Oakland neighborhood, though few would be able to tell you whom they honored. A veritable prince of Pittsburgh, Craig's father Isaac served as the Chief Burgess (effectively the mayor) of the city as part of the Federalist Party, and his matrilinear grandfather General John Neville was a wealthy Virginian who served with distinction in the French and Indian War, Lord Dunsmore's War, and the American Revolution, the rare aristocratic Cavalier amidst the rough-and-tumble frontier settlement. Born within the Fort Pitt Blockhouse the year that the Constitution was ratified, Craig was raised with the city whose history he would record. Working first as a lawyer, then as the editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette (for which he refused to print runaway slave ads paid for by Southern plantation owners), with intermittent stints in local politics, Craig developed historical interests when he began publishing a monthly magazine entitled Olden Times. As Craig discovered, "The annals of Pittsburgh… present greater variety of incidents than most American towns."