Kittanning, Pennsylvania

Vandergrift is a planned steel town on the Kiskiminetas River, so the gritty, industrial-sounding name fits the smokestacks perfectly. But the name isn't a steel term at all. It's a man, and an oil man at that. George McMurtry of the Apollo Iron and Steel Company built this model town in eighteen ninety-five, even hired the firm of famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to lay out its curving streets. He named it for Captain Jacob Jay Vandergrift, a director of the company, a former steamboat captain who'd become a Pennsylvania oil and pipeline magnate and a major Standard Oil stockholder. So this steel town carries the name of an oil baron, not a metal or a millwright.