City of Pittsburgh City Map Poster

About City of Pittsburgh

The city is home to the world's first commercial and industrial hydroelectric power plants, its first electric streetcar network, the nation's first movie theater, and one of the first indoor shopping malls. Pittsburgh was named in 1758 by General John Forbes as "Pittsbourgh" in honor of British statesman William Pitt. As Forbes was a Scot himself from Scotland , he also inadvertently named Pittsburgh after his own hometown Edinburgh . The current pronunciation , which is unusual among English-speaking people who are not familiar with Scottish accents (or certain other regional accents), is almost certainly a result of a printing error in some copies of an 1845 map with alternative spellings provided for both "Pittsburg" and "Pittsbourgh". It has been claimed that this new pronunciation was created by Union soldiers during the American Civil War through their association with Scotsmen who frequently spoke it while visiting their camps; however this theory may be apocryphal since there are no contemporaneous sources to verify it.