1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Tarentum (Pennsylvania)

TARENTUM, a borough of Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on the Allegheny river, about 20 m. N.E. of Pittsburg. Pop. (1890) 4627; (1900) 5472 (1173 being foreign-born); (1910) 7414. Tarentum is served by the Pennsylvania railway and by an electric line connecting with Pittsburg. Among manufactures.are plate glass and bottles, table ware, paper, bricks, iron and steel articles, and steel sheets and billets. Coal mining is an important industry, and the borough is supplied with natural gas. Tarentum was first settled in 1796, was laid out in 1829 at the direction of Henry Marie Brackenridge (1786–1871),^[1] who by marriage had come into possession of the site, and it was incorporated as a borough in 1842. The first glass manufactory was established in 1872.

1. Brackenridge was a prominent lawyer, a native of Pittsburg, who practised in Maryland, Missouri and Louisiana, was a district judge in Louisiana in 1812–1814, secretary of the U.S. commission sent to South America in 1817, U.S. judge for the western district of Florida from 1821 to 1832, when he returned to Pennsylvania, and the author of a Voyage to South America in 1817–1818 (1820), a History of the Late War between the United States and Great Britain (1817), Recollections of Persons and Places in the West (1834), and a History of the Western Insurrection (1859).