I Love This Place

I Love this Place

RYERSON STATION, PA

by Colleen Nelson

When is a fort not a fort? When the fighting ends, it seems.

The village of Ryerson Station, with its history of frontier forts, block houses and nearby massacres is easy to find on a map but hard to see when driving through on State Route 21.It’s a scattering of houses at a crossroads that runs from Aleppo to Nebo Ridge - and watch out for those Marcellus trucks that thunder by in both directions! What’s left of the village sits at the foot of a winding hill leading to Wheeling and the Ohio River. During the unsettled and unsettling years after the American Revolution, Ohio is where raiding parties came in. A string of forts was built from Fort Pitt south to Fort Ryerson as indigenous people were pushed into the Ohio territories and settlers, mostly Revolutionary War veterans, moved west to find their promised land. Land speculators like Robert Morris, one of the financiers of the Revolution, were already purchasing neat 400-acre squares of property in this hilly corner of the state and Virginia patents were being parlayed for land grants. Morris sold a tract called Valladolid to Thomas Ryerson and there’s an historic marker bearing his name in Wind Ridge celebrating one of the three blockhouses built by Captain James Paul’s company in 1792 during the last years of the “Indian uprisings.” According to Bates History of Greene County, “the authorities of Virginia had a fort built” at the confluence of the north and south forks of Dunkard branch of Wheeling Creek “to the defense of which Captain James Seals was sent.” Thomas Lazear and a man named Teagarden arrived with him. After the battle of Fallen Timber in the Ohio territories ended the Indian Wars in 1795, those three blockhouses became dwellings and the hand-hewn timbers of Ryerson Fort were most likely repurposed by frugal frontier farmers.

Today, the land surrounding the confluence flanked by Wheeling Creek and Buckland roads is a woody glen, but descendants of those first settlers and militiamen still live here in “this fine stretch of valley with lines of interminable hills sweeping up on all sides.” And yes, Mr. Bates, now that a couple of centuries of farming has come and mostly gone, those hills lay fallow once more, covered with “luxuriant foliage.”

One last handsome vestige of the prosperous farming days that followed still stands where Bristoria Road intersects with Rt. 21 then drops into the valley that is Ryerson Station - a big early 19th century brick house with five chimneys and a front yard facing the road. It was once a stagecoach stop and some still refer to it as the “old Supler place.” A 1977 article in the Tampa Tribune tells us that Pittsburgh attorney Valera Grapp Blair owned it in the mid 1970s and had it open for a year as the Ryerson Station Inn, specializing in desserts. Now it is the residence of Mitch and Leslie Swisher, who, from the looks of its well-tended grounds and the new pond in the bottom, are good stewards of this fine piece of the past.

While the south fork meanders into town along Aleppo Road, the north fork runs through Ryerson Station State Park along Bristoria Road before dodging the hill to Wind Ridge on its way to the Ohio River. A plaque along the bank by the park office marks the spot where members of the Davis family were attacked and murdered in 1787. Later, a covered bridge took descendants of Thomas Lazear across the creek through rich bottomland to their stately brick home where park manager Allan Johnson now lives. Theirs was a prosperous farm that would one day be a park when the state bought it in the late 1950s, built a dam and named the captured waters Duke Lake.

Joyce Baldwin Coss graduated West Greene in 1963 and lives in Waynesburg but she remembers how much fun it was to be a kid growing up on that big north fork that once powered Vannatta’s Steam and Water Mill back in the day. “After a storm they’d open the spillway on the dam at the park and the water would rise. We kids would get truck tires and float past where you say the fort was.” Her grandfather George Minton Baldwin owned the big house across the road from the old Baptist church in the village. Under its wooden clapboard siding lurked the logs of another one of Captain James Paul’s blockhouses.

Joyce remembers when Ed and Sally McCracken owned the store beside the church and popsicles were a nickel. McConnell’s Map of Greene County shows J.S. McClellan had a store there in 1865. My memories of the old building come from going to meetings there twice a month when it was Aleppo Grange. One memory worth saving was Tuesday, April 3, 2001 when a truck hauling a load of 34,000 pounds of wet cement lost control on that winding hill and plowed into Jim and Theresa Carroll’s home. It sat on the lot between the church and the grange and thankfully no one was home that morning. But the grange was open for a yard sale that week and some members were inside getting ready for another day of shopping when it happened. My eyewitness report appeared in the Observer-Reporter that Friday: “Broken on its foundation, it creaked and swayed for hours until a push from a front-end loader sent it tumbling down into dry kindling. As friends, neighbors and family members gathered the next day to salvage what was left, the Carrolls found the saw, painted by Sandy Whipkey of Graysville just weeks before, spattered with concrete but otherwise unscathed, in the ruin of the living room.”

Granger Lorraine Keenan made spaghetti and invited workers over for lunch. Television crews and insurance adjusters came and went and by Thursday the neighborhood turned out to watch Tommy Chess and the firefighters of Richhill Township hose down the walls of the grange and church, then do a controlled burn. Venison stew was on the menu and I still had time to make my deadline for the Friday paper.

As the long wall panels of Bailey Mine came calling from Enon at the eastern edge of Nebo Ridge, times changed once again.

Like South Wheeling Baptist Church, Aleppo Grange accepted CONSOL Energy’s offer to sell its coal rights and relocate. We packed our regalia, rounded up our assets and rechartered with Harveys Grange in Graysville to become Harveys Aleppo Grange. You can see our 21st century electronic sign as you approach Graysville from the east or pass it from the west, advertising upcoming craft classes, cinch tournaments, bingos and monthly meetings. Come on down!

The old blockhouse is gone, but lives a new life in Peters Township as an historic restoration with the pedigree to prove it. Doug Grim built a fine new home on the shelf of hillside where the decommissioned fortress became an inn, providing food and lodging to travelers going to and from Wheeling before Francis Drake bought it and later sold it to the Baldwin family sometime in the 1880s.

Life goes on. And so do friendships made in little country villages.

Joyce’s memories of growing up in Ryerson Station when it had stores and kids to play with who became like family and neighbors up and down both forks of this branch of Wheeling Creek are warm.

Her dad and his friends had Harleys, Indians, Nortons, Hondas, and BMWs and went country riding on sunny days. Homes could pay an extra two dollars a month and have a separate phone line to Cameron, WV to save on long distance charges. She and her friends played cards at Paul and Elaine Lyons store around the bend on the way to Wind Ridge. Joyce grew up across the road from Lyons store and garage and the north fork was her back yard. Sometime in the 1970s, Lyons added a campground when Ryerson Station State Park began drawing out of town visitors but by that time Joyce was out of the nest and living and working in Waynesburg. Her favorite memory of childhood, she tells me, is getting her go-cart over to the cornfield on the other side of the creek to race with her friends on the weekends. “It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done!”

Coming back to Ryerson Station to write this story has been a wonderful walk through time, meeting old friends and digging deep into history to see the pattern of change that allows the present to be where we build on the best the past has to offer. The folks who live here wouldn’t have it any other way. Joyce’s childhood friend Jean McClelland Guthrie and Wind Ridge postal carrier Harvey Chambers share a property line on the land around the confluence and have invited me and Matt Cumberledge, director of the Greene County Historical Museum to poke around there and see what traces of the fort might be found. Stay tuned!