Brownsville Road

Brownsville Road is a road between Pittsburgh, at Eighteenth Street and South Avenue in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania eastwards through Mount Oliver and generally highlands situated along or near the hilltops often overlooking (and sometimes taking shorter paths cutting across the loops of the meanders of) the Monongahela River. It has had several names over its history, and was also known at the Red Stone Road and the period it was a Plank Road managed as a toll road, the Brownsville Plank Road, or the Brownsville Turnpike, or locally, as the area grew into a city, Southern Avenue.

Along its route, it would also travel through Westmoreland County and end at its start terminus in Brownsville, Fayette County, Pennsylvania. It was a heavily used emigrant trail during the post-Revolutionary War surge in expansion west over the Allegheny Ridge to settle the now safer, now open lands of the Northwest Territory until well into the 1850s as an westward emigrant trail.

The road follows the route of ancient trails and footpaths as did many Indian roads, along the highlands and connected to the road along the descent from the Cumberland Narrows mountain pass (later descended via the upland community of present-day Uniontown, Pennsylvania) to the ford Monongahela River below the bluffs known as Redstone Old Fort (Later became Brownsville with the "forks of the Ohio" (eventual site of Pittsburgh, a distance of 26 miles (42 km). It later became the road connecting Pittsburgh with Brownsville, Pennsylvania, and from there via Nemacolin's Path to Virginia and points further east and further West to a similar crossing at present-day Wheeling, West Virginia. Brownsville was attractive as a point on the Eastern Emigrant Trails where travelers could reach river boat construction on the water levels of the Mississippi watershed—or continue across Washington County on the wagon roads westward to cross the (West) Virginia pan handle to reach lower central Ohio and points west.

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