A Look At the Upper Monongahela by Richard Bissell

Brownsville Pa. Looking south

A description of the towns and sights along the Monongahela River from Brownsville to Fairmont in the late 1940s, written by the pilot of the towboat COAL QUEEN:

You would never think, to walk the streets of Brownsville today, that the town is old and filled with history and legend. Monongahela Valley towns just do not look the part as do Lexington and Concord and Portsmouth and Gloucester and Boston and Philadelphia. For famous Redstone Old Fort, now Brownsville, is another "industrial town," and aside from the Greek Revival, postColonial Playford House on Second and Market Streets, little romance is visible.
Colonel James Burd selected the site of Redstone Old Fort in 1758 because of the presence there of an early Indian fortification, and built his stockade. In 1785 Thomas and Basil Brown founded the town, which in the years to follow played an important part in the westward movement. It was at Brownsville that the weary emigrants saw the end of their toilsome struggle over the mountains and took to the calm waters of the Monongahela for the next lap of their journey. As the steamboat rose to fame and fortune on the western waters and industrial activity in the valley grew, the Brownsville-Pittsburgh trade developed. Even before the slack-water system had been completed to Brownsville in 1844, there were about two hundred steamboat arrivals annually at Pittsburgh from upriver points. After the locks and dams went into service, there was a daily packet line between Pittsburgh and Brownsville.
There is an old iron bridge in Brownsville that I inspected one time when we were laid up in drydock out at the Hillman shipyard. This bridge is on Market Street near Bank, and it has a tablet on it which says it is the first iron bridge west of the Alleghenies. It was apparently built in the period 1836-1839 of iron forged in Iocal furnaces. Before this bridge was built, Henry Clay's carriage overturned near this spot, dumping the great man into Dunlap's Creek. They say that Clay "gathered himself up with the remark that Clay and mud should not be mixed in that place again." Clay then returned to Washington to his senator's post and shortly afterwards an order was issued for the construction in Brownsville of an "iron span, carrying the road high above the stream."

Maxwell Lock looking south

After we go under the Brownsville Highway Bridge, height 50.2 feet above low water, span 386 feet, we come to Dam 5, and after locking through, we pass the Alicia Marine Ways of the Hillman Company and then are pretty much out in the country, except for coal mines and tipples at regular intervals. There's Vesta tipple and Frick Mine Light, Fox Mine Light and the H. C. F. Coke Company tipple, Vestaburg and Fredericktown and the bend around to Tenmile Creek, and Emerald Tipple, Pumpkin Run, Klein's Sawmill Light, Crucible Fuel Company tipple, and Light, Weirton Steel Company tipple, National Steel Corporation Pier, Buckeye Coal Company tipple, Browns Run, Little Whiteley Creek, Robena Mine Light and tipple, Pittsburgh Steel tipple, Duquesne Light Company tipple, Jacobs Creek, and then around the bend to Dam 7.


Vesta 5 Tipple looking south

Below Dam 7 are Greensboro on the starboard side, and New Geneva on port. New Geneva boasts a population of 410 souls, more or less, and was named for the native city of its famous early settler, Albert Gallatin. Gallatin came to this country without friends or influence, and by the sheer power of his personality and ability (and despite the handicap of a monumental French accent) achieved appointment as a member of the President's Cabinet within ten years of his arrival. A man of many talents, Gallatin served in the Revolutionary War, then became a French instructor at Harvard. Later he journeyed to Richmond on business and there became an intimate of Governor Patrick Henry, who advised him to go west to the wild lands of opportunity out by the Monongahela. Gallatin settled in Fayette County, a few miles from New Geneva and in a short time established the first glassworks west of the Alleghenies. In 1789 he built Friendship Hill, a 2 1/2-story, ivy-covered residence, still standing and open to the public.He began to enter local politics, filling several state and federal posts, and in 1801 was appointed secretary of the treasury by President Jefferson. He served in this post during both of Jefferson's presidential terms, the.whole of President Madison's first term, and until February, 1814, in the second, something of a record in Cabinet tenure. After retirement from the Cabinet this energetic adopted son of the new Republic held several diplomatic posts and finally, between 1831 and 1839 was president of the National Bank of New York.
Patrick Henry said Albert Gallatin was one of the most extraordinary men he had ever seen. He was surely of keen intellectual powers and magnificent ability in political and diplomatic affairs--the model statesman. At Friendship Hill the dignified retirement of Gallatin was embellished in 1825 by a visit from "his long tried, his bosom friend," the Marquis de Lafayeffe. Of this sumptuous affair an old Monongahelite, James Veech (writing in 1858), said: "Who that was there can ever forget the 'feast of reason'--and other good things, and the 'flow of soul'-and champagne? The like of which old Springhill [Township] had never seen--may never see again."

In the five miles upriver from New Geneva to Point Marion, where the Cheat River enters the Monongahela, no less than five coal tipples are busy dumping Pennsylvania coal into waiting barges. Point Marion has a large glassworks and a sand and gravel company which owns a baby Diesel towboat with a steam boiler for operating the steering rig and blowing the whistle, a quaint arrangement unique in my experience.

Morgantown looking east around 1928

Around a few bends and beyond more tipples, Morgantown rises on the hills to port. Ah, Morgantown, with your glass factories and coal mines and spaghtetti at Capellanti's and houses all peeling from chemical fumes in the air! On Saturday nights in spring the boys and girls from the University of West Virginia, perched up on the hill at the end of Main Street, mingle on the sidewalks down by the courthouse with coal miners and fanners and glassworkers. To us on the Coal Queen, Morgantown was everything, our metropolis--the hot bath, the glass of Tube City beer, the lump-in-throat in the movies, the Girl, paradise, purgatory--we knew them all in Morgantown. But Morgantown knew little of us. Steamboaters, with their excitable and noisy ways, are not invited to tea parties. I can call every bartender and short-order waitress in town by name but the mayor and I have yet to shake hands. Above Morgantown the Monongahela is a beautiful narrow stream running between high hills--"mountains," we always called them. The locks are small, the traffic is light, and there is a friendly intimacy benveen boat crews and lock tenders. The locks are so close that in a six-hour watch you might make seven or eight locks. After a few months of this, running those locks seemed automatic. That's pretty country up in there from Morgantown to National Mine, and pretty again above Jordan, especially in the spring, when the trees and flowers are all in bloom. And then, half blinded sometimes by the smoke from the railroad yard, we come to Fairmont, and beyond it the "Dark Bridge" (no lights on it), which we all hated, and then there was the point, where the Monongahela ended, a point with a big tree on it, a good mark and easy to pick up with the searchlight on a bad night.

The Monongahela is formed by the West Fork River and the Tygart River, which join here at Fairmont, 128.73 miles south of Pittsburgh. The tipple where we loaded coal was at Kingmont, up the Tygart, two miles above head of navigation on the Monongahela, and we would snake our loads out of there in a river so narrow you could nearly jump across.

Now just imagine, in the old days you could take a good big steamboat from Fairmont, West Virginia, at the headwaters of the Monongahela, down to Cairo, up the Mississippi and Missouri to Fort Benton, Mont.--3,623 miles, or about as far as from the North River in New York to the East India Docks on the Thames at London. In fact the stern-wheeler E. H. Durfee made regular trips between Pittsburgh and Fort Benton in the years 1872 to 1876. Wouldn't that be something, to raise steam amidst the roar of industry on the Monongahela and keep that paddle wheel splashing until you began to run into buffalo and Sioux and the Rocky Mountains ?

This is taken from the book The Monongahela by Richard Bissell, part of the Rivers of America series, Rinehart & Co., Inc., New York, 1952, pp. 70-83. He wrote several outstanding books on towboating and the river life. The accounts are gritty and very realistic. He also wrote several successful Broadway plays including The Pajama Game.

Ten Mile Trivia # 3

Robert Morris, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an early official of the federal government, once owned 41,000 acres of land in Greene County. Much of his widespread acquisition of land was accomplished with borrowed money. That helped lead him into financial difficulty and eventually bankruptcy. Earlier, George Washington was the largest landowner in this section of Pennsylvania, some in Greene.
The first Boy Scout troop sponsored in Pennsylvania, it is believed, was that at Waynesburg Presbyterian Church in 1911, organized by future state governor Gen. Edward Martin.

In the late 1790s, one of the gun factories that supplied the young United States with weapons was established at New Geneva in Fayette County, shortly before the national armory was placed at Harpers Ferry, then in Virginia. However, the government competition was too much for private industry, and the New Geneva plant went out of business. The course of U.S. history would have been greatly changed had the government installation been placed at New Geneva instead of Harpers Ferry.

Former President Richard Nixon had a Western Pennsylvania heritage through his mother's family, the Milhouses, and other maternal ancestors. As early as 1795, Anthony and Lydia Smith took up residence along the south branch of Tenmile Creek near Waynesburg. Several generations of descendants lived in Greene County before the president's mother's ancestors moved westward in the mid-1800s.

An earlier version of today's illegal parking towaways was the regulation in Washington, Pa., that prohibited hitching horses to shade trees. Constables were empowered to impound the horses in public stables until a storage fee was paid.

The first telephone company to operate in Greene County was the Waynesburg and Blacksville Telephone Co., organized Jan. 20, 1887. The first two telephones were placed in the Strosnider Hotel in Blacksville and in the J.T. Rogers drug store in Waynesburg. By the spring of 1889 Jefferson, Charmichaels, Waynesburg and Rices Landing were joined by telephone. Within the next several years, several other small independent phone firms were started. Patrons on one system could not call those on another, which caused quite a bit of dissatisfaction. At one time, there were 38 different small companies within Greene County alone, all of which were ultimately merged into the South Penn Telephone Co.

A cemetery inscription at the Greene County-West Virginia border area near Blacksville reads:
"Some women have children,
And some have none,
But here lies the mother of twenty-one."

An English geologist, Sir Charles Lyall, who came to Southwestern Pennsylvania in April 1846, wrote after his study of geological formation:
"I was truly astonished, now that I had entered the hydrographical basin of the Ohio, at beholding the richness of the seams of coal which appeared everywhere on the flanks of the hills and at the bottoms of the valleys, and which are accessible to a degree I never witnessed elsewhere. The time has not arrived when the full value of this inexhaustible supply of cheap fuel can be appreciated. To properly estimate the net advantages of such a region, we must reflect how the three great navigable rivers, the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio, intersect it and lay open on their banks the level seams of coal. I found at Brownsville a belt 10 feet thick of good bituminous coal, commonly called the Pittsburgh seam, out in the river cliffs near the water's edge."
The accuracy of his statements has been borne out by the later appreciation of this vast coal supply and what it has meant to the area in the years since.

Sept. 30, 1939 -- Waynesburg College played Fordham at New York in the first experimentally televised football game. Although the Yellow Jackets lost, Bobby Brooks of Greensburg scored the first touchdown on TV. In 1875, Waynesburg College President Alfred B. Miller and some of the students began the process of making bricks to build what became the main college building -- Miller Hall. Clay was obtained from a campus site and another nearby point, and three kilns were constructed on campus to "burn the brick." They were able to produce as many as 4,000 bricks daily, during which time the boys hauled "hundreds of barrels of water." Miller explained that to mold the 803,000 bricks made there "almost exhausted Ten Mile Creek for water to moisten the clay." Masons then erected the structure as money permitted, but it wasn't completed until more than a decade later.


Miller Hall courtesy of Waynesburg University

One Saturday in 1888, 11 male Waynesburg College students went to Masontown and indulged in "drinking beer and other liquors." Brought before the college faculty, they acknowledged their offenses and were allowed to remain students on condition that they sign a pledge of total abstinence.

The last survivor of Braddock's infamous 1755 defeat by the French and Indians was reputed to be one Boon Buchanan, who died in Washington County in 1846 at the alleged age of 113. He was a black man who, it was said, served as a waiter with the British army.

Lone Pine in Washington County was originally called Pleasant Valley, along the south fork of Ten Mile Creek. Twin pine trees once towered there, but one was erased by lightning shortly before a post office was established there in 1869. When the Pleasant Valley name, already in use elsewhere, wasn't available for post office use, Lone Pine was chosen. A son of Albert Gallatin, James, supervised construction of his father's Friendship Hill mansion near New Geneva in Fayette County while the latter was in France in 1822-23. When Gallatin returned and saw the structure, he was quite unhappy with it but made the best of the situation. Shortly afterward, writing to a daughter, he described part of it this way: "The outside of the house, with its porthole-looking windows, has the appearance of an Irish barracks, whilst the inside ornaments are similar to those of a Dutch tavern."

Albert Gallatin's home, Friendship Hill
Perhaps the most significant of Albert Gallatin's accomplishments came as the result of his friendship with U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. In the early 1800s, Gallatin persuaded Jefferson to change the route of the National Road and take it through southwestern Pennsylvania. As originally planned, it would have gone around the state through Virginia ( West Virginia ).
A Greene County man is claimed to have been one of the first people in the U.S. to use natural gas for light and heating fuel. L.R. Strosnider, of Mt. Morris, shortly after the Civil War noticed gas escaping from an abandoned oil well on the property where he had a confectionery and restaurant. He placed a half-barrel over the well shaft, bored a hole in the barrel for a pipe, and ran the pipe into his building. He used this gas for cooking and frying oysters and later for light .
Zadok Cramer's 1814 book tells of a "curious cave" about a mile below Fredericktown in Washington County, along the Monongahela, called the "Panther's Den." It was described as entering the hill "about halfway from its base by a small fracture or rent in the rock. After going through a narrow or descending passage, you enter a wide but low room in which you can walk nearly upright. To the roof of this room, we found bats hanging in a stupid kind of sleep."
Near Clarksville, about half a mile upcreek from the Yablonski stone house, is a cave on the side of the high escarpment above Ten Mile Creek. This was also known as Panthers Den, likely named after the more well known one described above. Directly below it there is a large rock in the creek known as Clover Rock that was always a popular spot for fishing and swimming. This entire area is now posted as private property.

During a period of religious fervor between 1800 and 1807, a woman evangelist in the Washington-Greene border area was Rhoda Fordyce. She proclaimed "that if a person would abstain from all animal food and live on parched corn and sassafras buds ... his body would become so ethereal that he would be translated to heaven without passing through the gates of death." One man named Parker tried her theory. Instead of being "translated," he starved to death. Rhoda would not allow the body to be buried until after the third day, insisting that it would then ascend to heaven. At the end of three days, neighbors interposed and buried it. Nothing was heard thereafter of the Rhodianites, as her followers were called.


This from The Charleroi Mail of June 8, 1908 : Charmichaels Pa. In the center of prohibition Greene County (Temperance advocate) Carrie Nation today delivered her first speech since the Republican Presidential nomination. She scored the candidates. Mrs. Nation complimented the assemblage in the fact that the Merry Widow hat has not seriously inundated Greene County. In spite of the dry condition of Greene County enough ardent liquor was imported for the day to make a number of citizens loud, and the usual interruptions occurred. In a big grove 2,000 people listened to Mrs. Nation between showers. When it rained she sold her hatchets.
Last night, waiting at Rices Landing on a train, a young man lit a cigar and blew the smoke into Mrs. Nation's face. She tried to get the cigar and the young man threatened to throw her over the lock wall. The Kansas woman made an information against him before a justice of the peace, but later dropped the case.
These tidbits were taken from various books and internet sources including Robert B. Van Atta of the Greensburg ( Pa.) Tribune-Review.