By 1819 a tiny village had taken root at the intersection of Beaver Indian Trail and Sharon Road, with a few log cabins and traces still visible of the old military road between Fort Pitt and Fort McIntosh that Colonel Daniel Brodhead had built through the wilderness to fight Indians in the Ohio Country. Old freight wagons hauled by oxen or horse, occasional stages, and mostly farm wagons traveled the dirt roads, and a 1940 aerial photo showed mostly fields and woods. Sharon Village later became Carnot after confusion at the Post Office led in 1887 to a request for a new name; France's recent prominence through the Statue of Liberty, the Suez Canal, theories of the French military engineer and physicist Sadi Carnot that inspired the Diesel engine, and the election of his nephew Sadi Carnot as President of France helped inspire the choice. The first settler commerce nearby was the Meek Sugar Camp, and by about 1828 William McGinnis had opened a blacksmith shop at Sharon Village, followed later by blacksmiths including McMillen, Vandervort, Aaron Beer, Peter Earhart, James Belford, and James Donnan, who in 1932 closed his shop and built the first motorcar garage. Wagon shops were common, early owners included James Miller and Alf Shay, and by 1899 about 15 log cabins and stores could be seen from this area. When a new school building was built, Mrs. Shrodes' General Store opened in the old school, followed later by stores run by A H Syke, Samuel Meanor, and the Mercers, and in the 1890s Robert Winter operated a brick factory at Carnot. Findings of 77 chert projectile points along the old Indian Trail, Beaver Grade Road, may represent trade goods of Adena or Monongahela people who lived here thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Deer skin, or buckskin, became a standard unit of trade called a buck, and in 1767 Fort Pitt traded 282,629 deerhides, with values also given for beaver, raccoons, foxes, fishers, otters, elk, shirts, shoes, gun powder, and tin kettles. After World War II the area changed rapidly as growth spurted and business boomed, bringing a succession of later businesses visible from here.