10/12/2026
You know us, but do you know the town?
McKees Rocks didn’t get its name from a slogan. It got it from a landmark.
The “McKee” comes from colonial trader Alexander McKee. The “Rocks” comes from the big rock point on the Ohio River, a bluff that Native travelers and river boatmen used as a navigation point for generations. It wasn’t a cute nickname. It was how you knew where you were.
Long before that, there was already a sacred hill here. The McKees Rocks Mound is marked as the largest Native American burial mound in Western Pennsylvania, about 16 feet high, built by the Adena people centuries before Pittsburgh existed. A later cemetery sat on the mound, and photos from around 1896 still show it standing in town.
Before there was a Pittsburgh, there was a sacred hill in McKees Rocks.
In 1753, a young George Washington and his guide, Christopher Gist, traveled this river corridor on a mission toward the French. Local history says they met Native leader Guyasuta at the Indian Mound, and that Gist wanted a British fort on the spot.
The borough itself came later. McKees Rocks incorporated in 1892, just as mills, rail yards, and immigrant neighborhoods were exploding along the Ohio and Chartiers Creek. In 1899, Pressed Steel Car Company opened here and became one of the world’s big freight-car builders. At its peak, the plant employed thousands of mostly immigrant workers. This town wasn’t just near industry. It was industry.
In 1909, those workers walked out. The Pressed Steel strike was bitter, heavily immigrant, and violent enough to make headlines far beyond Pittsburgh. It is still one of the major labor stories in American history.
In 1909, McKees Rocks was on the front page of America.
Down in the Bottoms, Irish, Slovak, Polish, Italian, Ukrainian, Croatian, and other families packed into a riverfront neighborhood of churches, bakeries, social clubs, and corner bars. It was a city inside the borough, and a lot of Pittsburgh food culture starts in places exactly like that.
The Roxian Theatre opened on Chartiers Avenue in 1929 as a grand movie palace and later came back as a live-music room. The McKees Rocks Bridge opened in 1931 and became the town’s front door, tying The Rocks to Pittsburgh’s North Side across the Ohio.
Then, in January 1932, Father James R. Cox of Old St. Patrick’s in the Bottoms led thousands of jobless men toward Washington, D.C. Cox’s Army was one of the first great protest marches of the Great Depression, before the better-known Bonus Army. Later that year, he even ran for president on the Jobless Party ticket.
A navigation point. A sacred mound. A Washington visit. A borough built by immigrants. A railcar plant. A strike that made national news. A movie palace. A bridge. A march on Washington.
That’s McKees Rocks.
ROX PROUD!
