GreeneScene of the Past

Boom! Photographer Roberto M. Esquivel of the HeraldStandard snapped this freeze frame moment of demolition as the old truss bridge that connected Greene and Fayette counties for 88 years imploded, and then disappeared into the dust cloud of history on September 28, 2013. The steel-cutting explosives that brought it down were carefully placed to protect the new bridge beside it; after the fractured spans fell into the Monongahela River, Penn Dot crews retrieved the steel and shipped it off to be recycled. The 21st century now had four broad lanes to roll on, just in time for the massive truck traffic that would come with the Marcellus shale industry.

That day, crowds of onlookers and media gathered in the parking lot of St. George Serbian Church on the Greene County side to watch and document the spectacular moment; CBS and ABC captured it live for the evening news. The Observer-Reporter interviewed residents about the good old days, when it cost a quarter, or was it a dime, to drive across the bridge - a nickel for pedestrians. A nickel was big money back then. Back in 1925, it cost Greene and Fayette counties $600,000 to build it and tolls, not tax dollars, would be collected until December 31, 1945 to recoup the cost.

Before the bridge was built, ferries were used to cross the river, as they had done since settlers first came to this corner of the Western Frontier. Dr. Robert C. McClelland’s 1962 book Masontown and its Environs captures first hand accounts of the history embedded in this stretch of river and its high bluffs of fertile land. James Flenniken and Harry Jenning came from Virginia to settle Carmichaels in 1767 and built the first ferry. Christened The Republican Ferry, it became McCann’s Ferry, named after the family that operated it. McClelland notes it was not good business in low water months because the river could be crossed on rock paths that local tribes had used for centuries.

It was these paths that earliest frontiersmen used in the 1730s before settlers arrived. When Wendill Brown and his sons set up camp near Grays Landing, “they packed meat and corn to supply Washington’s Army when it camped in Great Meadow in 1754.” After Washington’s defeat at Fort Necessity, settlers would wait for the end of the French and Indian war to venture west. But it was still dangerous times.

When a group of Germans, including Johanias Mansonga and his wife Apalgonia arrived in the mid 1770s, they built a blockhouse for protection that, luckily, was never used as a fort but soon became the village meeting house.

Outcroppings of coal along the river banks were an indicator of the industrial age to come but for now these industrious German immigrants built grist mills and stills and made flour and rye whisky for cash crops that were transported by packet boat to markets in New Orleans.

When the new Federal Government imposed a tax on whiskey in 1791, indignant “Whiskey Boys rallied around Fort Mason and organized in opposition to the government.”

When Federal troops arrived the Whiskey Boys retreated without firing a shot.

The 19th century was on its way when Johanias parceled out a ”certain tract of land called ABBINGTON” on Catts Run in German Township in 1797 with lots that would sell for half a Spanish milled dollar or any other silver or gold coinage of similar value to be found in the newly minted Commonwealth. Although Johanias Mansonge signed the deed on the “twenty ninth day of May Anno Domini 1798,” his name on the deed was forever changed to John Mason.

John and Abigail Mason and their four daughters and sons in law left Germantown in 1803 and “moved on west, where he took up a large section land just west of where East Palestine, Ohio, now stands.”

In time Germantown would be renamed Masontown in honor of its founder. McClellend’s sources report decades of small town rural living in Germantown where nearly every need could be made by hand or bought from local craftsmen or shopkeepers. Salt wells, tanneries and gun factories were the industries of the day and farming, milling, distilling and lumbering kept the local economy thriving.

The region missed its chance to become as prosperous as Pittsburgh when Fayette County voted no in 1834 to Baltimore and Ohio’s plans to bring its railroad west to the Ohio River through the mountains south of Uniontown, through German Township and down Brown’s Run to the Monongahela River. Instead the railroad went through the wilds of what would become West Virginia to Parkersburg in 1854 as political tensions conjured up the Civil War. The railroad effectively ended Route 40’s dominance as an economic artery and Brownsville and the rest of the businesses and towns that thrived on that economy became a backwater to the changes that the new industrial age would bring.

Masontown became a borough in 1873, the first gas well was drilled on the Sangerton farm in 1879 and by the Centennial year 1898, “the big coal rush began. …Frick started it, Hillman Coal and Coke and other companies followed.”

Life in Masontown changed almost overnight.

A new wave of immigrants from Europe arrived to work the mines and by the fall of 1904, new teacher J. S. “Mac”

McClelland remembers, “the town was a wide awake village

By Colleen Nelson

that had just emerged from a long sleep.” The Klondike coal rush was on and immigrant workers came flooding in, carrying their belongings as they were herded into mining camps. Their kids spoke little English and were coming to school ragged, hungry, sometimes barefooted. During an early strike at Frick Mine, “many miners were ejected from their homes and moved to West Masontown.”

Max writes “I had 78 pupils in my room and no room had less than 55. We were visited by school and curiosity seekers from cities as far away as Harrisburg.”

The environmental impact in and around Masontown was swift and fatal for the next 60 some years.

“Sulfur and other substances discharged into the creeks and river soon killed off all the fish, to the grief of the fisherman.”

From the vantage point of 1962, Max concludes his letter, “things improved with time.” Wages went up, kids were better dressed and these new citizen had homes of their own with tidy back yards in West Masontown. “Those who went home to visit relatives, soon returned to America.”

By the early 1960s fish were returning to Redstone Creek near Uniontown and strip mining was beginning to be regulated. Land was being reclaimed for farming as the coalmines and coke ovens of Fayette County closed. Federal grants were beginning arrive to preserve Fort Necessity, Jumonville and other historic sites along Route 40. The era of historic tourism and environmental justice was about to begin.

Today we can see just how far we’ve come and how much more there is to do.

Old photos and old written memories do have that power to make us reflect on time…..and what we could be doing next.

Ask Drew Colebank what inspired him to specialize and practice family medicine and he’ll tell you: it happened in church.

“There’s a lot of need here….and a lot of potential,” Drew tells me when I catch up with him between classes at Cornerstone Care Teaching Health Center in Mt. Morris.

He’s talking about Masontown, the town where he grew up, the town where nearly every church is part of the Klondike Clergy Association, the town where everybody knows your name. This homegrown ministerium, named after the Klondike coal boom days, is a unique, sermon-in-its-shoes brigade of churches and churchgoing neighbors working together to serve a community that is working hard to renew itself in an everchanging world.

“I’ve always wanted to do something where I could help people and use my mind – and build long lasting relationships with patients,” Drew admits. The precocious kid, who was on the Albert-Gallatin Zero Robotics team that competed in NASA’s International Space Station games while in high school, went on to study pre-medical sciences, neuroscience and religious studies as an undergrad at Pitt and earn his doctorate in Osteopathic Medicine at WVU. Drew discovered his specialty in 2019 while home earning money for medical school. “I remember it was Memorial Day weekend at the Brethren Church and the the pastor passed out. … He was turning gray and there was one other person who knew CPR. We took turns while I dialed 911….” That 15 minutes of CPR saved a life. “I decided to go into family medicine.

Plus, I made sure everybody learned CPR!”

Another year of residency with Cornerstone and Andrew Colebank, DO. can hang out his shingle.“I love my town and I hope to live here.”

Helping Hands Thrift

Store on Main Street is an important KCA project and so is the community soup kitchen, started by the First Presbyterian Church 17 years ago. There’s a meal every Tuesday, with hymns on the piano and a local pastor on site to commiserate, Masontown Matters board member Frank Martin tells me.

“Our monthly food bank serves 50 families.” He’s also happy to mention that the Free and Accepted Masons Valley Lodge 459 has been here for 150 years, has 200 plus members and does its part with Make a Wish and

By Colleen Nelson

aiding families in general.

The churches also get together for one Sunrise Service and one Vacation Bible program for all the kids.

When I contact Pastor Benji Zilka and Deacon Louie Diamond of Masontown Brethren Church about projects they participate in, the list of shared community events fills my screen. I pick my favorite: “The milk distribution happened during Covid….. it ended up distributing all kinds of food,” As a joint effort between firemen, police, the borough and business in Masontown, “We gave over 20,000 gallons of milk.”

This unique multi-church community will come together once again on May 21 for a CROP Walk, a nationwide movement sponsored by Church World Service to fundraise to end hunger and poverty in the US and the world.

How to find a photo that represents the loving egalitarian spirit of the churches and churchgoers of Masontown? Pastor Benji and his daughters found it in the cemetery by his church. Masontown native Mary Malinda Sterling (1859-1933) is listed as the first woman in America to be ordained as a Brethren Church pastor in 1889.

Her life reflects the quality of the education she received in Masontown’s public school and her degree from Monongahela College in Jefferson, which she finished in four, not six years. Her life of teaching, evangelizing and caring for her family when needed reflects the value the Brethren Church puts on women as the spiritual and mental equal of men. Her life offers those who came after her a reflection of the value of education and the spiritual rewards of “duty and from wherever the call is heard, be it from the pulpit, farm or home, it is always heeded.”