Margaret and Michael: Their Meeting

Margaret McCloskey was about 24 in the 1840 census--she and her mother were living in Allegheny, PA, which was the town/city north of the Allegheny and Ohio rivers ("Pittsburg" was the city south of the Allegheny and north of the Monongahela, so Allegheny was just across the river.

The area seemed to Ben Franklin's correspondent an unlikely place, a pig in a poke, according to this history.

    With less than 300 inhabitants in 1800, Allegheny Town grew modestly when a glass works was started on out lot 13 (opposite the head of Brunot's Island) and a rope "walk" (factory) on Lynndale Ave. Twenty-five years later it was a struggling country village of 85 houses, thirteen of them brick, and a population of 792. To the Western Penitentiary, the Western University of Pennsylvania, the Western Theological Seminary were given parts of the Commons. In 1828, the year before the canal to Leechburg was opened, the territory "across the river" was made a borough, and on July 17, 1839--two years after the accession of Queen Victoria in England--it was made a full-fledged city. [Actual date Allegheny finally made a city was not July 17, 1839, but April 13, 1840.]

    source  The above explains how Michael and Margaret met--Western U was there.:-P
    From further down: ctually the history of Allegheny City from 1850 forward is the history of not one city, but two. To the west of Sandusky St. grew up a city of a few Irish Catholics, many Scotch Presbyterians, a hundred or more steel millionaires. Along Canal St., Irwin, Western, North and Beech Aves., and, above all, Ridge Ave., there millionaires--the Snyders, the Robinsons, Laughlins, Alexanders, Chalfants, Painters, Olivers, Byers--built immense and astounding feudal castles, owned their coaches-and-four, entertained in the grand manner. The A. M. Byers house at Ridge and Galveston, for instance, built in 1898 at a cost of $500,000, contained 90 rooms and 15 bathrooms.