Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Brownsville, PA

Brownsville is a borough in Fayette County, 40 miles south of Pittsburgh on the east bank of the Monongahela River, first settled in 1785 as a trading post where the colonial site was known as Redstone Old Fort.

The borough is named for entrepreneur Thomas Brown, who recognized that the spot - the first reachable river crossing west of the Allegheny Mountains - would be a natural springboard for settlers heading to Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

The first meeting of the Whiskey Rebellion was held at Redstone Old Fort in Brownsville on July 27, 1791, in opposition to the federal whiskey excise tax.

Brownsville stood on the historic National Road - the federal government's first road project - and the Dunlap's Creek Bridge built there in 1838 to carry the road was the first all-cast-iron arch bridge constructed in the United States; it is still in use today.

In 1814, Brownsville craftsmen built the Enterprise, the first steamboat powerful enough to travel down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and make the return trip back upstream.

Brownsville became a steamboat-building powerhouse - its boatyards produced more than 3,000 steamboats between 1811 and 1888.

Nemacolin Castle, also called Bowman's Castle, built by trading-post operator Jacob Bowman in the 1780s, overlooks the Monongahela River from Brownsville's Northside Historic District.

Brownsville's population peaked at 8,015 in 1940, when it was a busy railroad yard and coking center for the steel industry, but steel and railroad restructuring shrank it to 2,185 residents by the 2020 census.

At the 2000 census, Brownsville's 2,804 residents lived in 1,238 households, spread across just 1.1 square miles of borough land and river.

According to Ray Charles's biography, the singer developed his hit song 'What'd I Say' during an after-show jam session in Brownsville in December 1958.