Brownsville is a borough in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, United States, first settled in 1785 as the site of a trading post a few years after the defeat of the Iroquois enabled a resumption of westward migration after the Revolutionary War.

The trading post soon became a tavern and inn and was receiving emigrants heading west, as it was located above the cut bank overlooking the first ford that could be reached to those descending from the Allegheny Mountains.

The limited-access toll road PA Route 43 connects the town to strategic points and southern Pittsburgh at Clairton.

As an outfitting center, the borough provided the markets for the small-scale industries in the surrounding counties, as well as for Maryland shipping goods over the pass by mule train via the Cumberland Narrows toll route.

The borough developed in the late 19th century as a railroad yard and coking center, with other industries related to the rise of steel in the Pittsburgh area.

With all the rivers and streams tributary to the Monongahela, Youghiogheny, and Allegheny Rivers, there is little known about the region's precise role in the Beaver Wars of the 17th century, but when French, Dutch and Swedish fur traders penetrated to the Greater Ohio Basin in the 1640s and 1650s, the one thing that seemed clear to those observers was that the lands later termed the Ohio Country seemed empty and unpopulated.

Before the 1750s, the area was "colonized" by weakened remnant tribes such as the Delaware and the few Erie and the Susquehannock survivors that the Iroquois allowed to move there as tributary peoples (climbing the gaps of the Allegheny).

These migrations occurred over the 70 to 80 years before the French and Indian War in the 1750s, where today's historians usually report the lands were long held as "hunting territories"[f] of the powerful Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy.

[5] The fort was constructed during the French and Indian War on the bluff above the river near a prehistoric earthwork mound that was also the site of historic Native American burial grounds.

[6] In 1774, a force from the Colony of Virginia garrisoned and occupied the stockade during Lord Dunmore's War against the Mingo and Shawnee peoples.

It commanded the important strategic river ford of Nemacolin's Trail, the western path to the summit; this was later improved and called "Burd's Road".

Entrepreneur Thomas Brown acquired the western lands in what became Fayette County, Pennsylvania, around the end of the American Revolution.

[7] He realized the opening of the pass through the Cumberland Narrows[8] and the end of the war made the land at the western tip of Fayette County a natural springboard for settlers traveling to points west, such as Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio.

In the 1780s, Jacob Bowman bought the land on which he built Nemacolin Castle; he had a trading post and provided services and supplies to emigrant settlers.

As an embarkation point for travelers to the west, Redstone/Brownsville, blessed by several nearby wide and deep river tributaries that could support building slips, soon became a 19th-century center for the construction of riverine watercraft, initially keelboats and flatboats, but later steamboats large and small.

[11] Steamboats were gradually supplanted in the passenger-carrying trade after the American Civil War as the construction of railroad networks surged, but concurrently grew important locally on the Ohio River and tributaries as tugs delivering bargeloads of minerals to the burgeoning steel industries growing up along the watershed from the 1850s.

The first all–cast iron arch bridge constructed in the United States was built in Brownsville to carry the National Pike (at the time a wagon road) across Dunlap's Creek.

Brownsville tightened its belt during the Great Depression, but the local economy resumed growth with the increased demand for steel during and after World War II, when many infrastructure projects improved and rerouted U.S. Route 40 over the new high-level Lane Bane Bridge, clearing up a perennial traffic congestion problem.

According to Mike Evans in his book Ray Charles: The Birth of Soul (2007), the singer developed his hit "What'd I Say" as part of an after-show jam in Brownsville in December 1958.

[14][15] Brownsville is located at 40°1′12″N 79°53′22″W / 40.02000°N 79.88944°W / 40.02000; -79.88944 (40.020026, −79.889536),[16] situated on the east (convex) side of a broad sweeping westward bend in the northerly flowing Monongahela River on the northwestern edge of Fayette County.

The opposite river shore of Washington County is, uncharacteristically for the region, shaped even lower to the water surface and is generally flatter.

Historically the area was a natural river crossing, and it was the site of development of a ferry, boat building and a bridge to carry roads.

Archeologists and anthropologists have since determined that many prehistoric Native American cultures in North America along the Mississippi River and its tributaries built massive earthworks for ceremonial, burial and religious purposes over a period of thousands of years prior to European encounter.

For instance, the Mississippian culture, reaching a peak about 1150 CE at Cahokia in present-day Illinois, had sites throughout the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, and into the Southeast.

The Frank L. Melega Art Museum, located with the Heritage Center, displays many examples of this local southwestern Pennsylvanian's famous artwork, depicting the coal and coke era in the surrounding tri-state region.

Before the highway construction of the late 1950s was completed in the early 60s, two additional branchlike housing concentrations existed, the lined either side of "California Road" which intersected Old U.S. 40 in the heart of the small business district at landmarks, Paci's Restaurant and Cuppies Drive-In Theatre;[25][26] the former set in a 17th-century stone Inn.