Yoder got in a crop big enough to ship to New Orleans and invented the flat boat on Redstone Creek, inaugurating the water craft construction businesses which made the town an industrial powerhouse for the next seventy years.
When Brown traveled to or actually purchased the lands is murky, but it is accepted he formally founded the town of Brownsville, Pennsylvania in 1785, and he was further documented as personally laying out plots and boundaries himself at the age of 47 in that same year[1] then advertising them for sale 'back east'.
[8] Brown could not anticipate that his town would become the major steamboat construction center on the Mississippi watershed, but was arguably a forward thinker, a man forward thinking enough that he acted before the early 1780s[9]—whilst the Indian threat was diminishing but still very real, and the French-Canadians were a similar but more remote threat— to realize the land at the Monongahela crossing ford of The Nemacolin Trail would be a valuable parcel.
Either the preferred switch to traveling on the river or the trails would bottleneck settlers at Fort Burd and so offered great opportunities to outfit them on their westward trek.
The booming businesses of Brownsville and surrounding communities did precisely that starting in 1782 (first flat boat built on Redstone Creek by ) even before Thomas Brown personally came west into the settlement and until sometime in the 1870s–1880s when large numbers of pioneers stopped taking boats to Missouri to connect with the California, Mormon, or Oregon Trails[notes 3] cop