Water Under the Bridge

Monday, March 16, 2020

"Pop" Ferree's Workbooks . January 30, 2020

January 30, 2020

“Pop” Ferree’s Workbooks

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society recently acquired a curious set of workbooks with no record of their donor nor any explanation of their origin. I was able to borrow the first one in the series and have enjoyed going through it.

The worksheets are 8” by 10 ½”, some typed, some filled with meticulous hand calculations, and some containing scaled plots of land surveys. Each book has a return address label on it, giving the name of Joseph A. Ferree and his address on Chestnut Street.

Book One is entitled “Bridgeville, 1786 – 1846. There are more than three hundred individual sheets in the book, most of which are blank on the back. I have gotten to page 400 and September,1821.

The first entry in the book is a typed page with the heading “February 8, 1786, from Warrantee Atlas”. It then describes the property “Water Inclosure”, that was patented to Thomas Redman on that date. The rest of the page records the twenty line courses of its survey, “copied from the Atlas”. The property included 208 acres of land bounded (“inclosed”) by the large loop Chartiers Creek makes north of Bridgeville.

The next sheet is a carbon copy of the first, with penciled notes reporting that the property was subdivided on September 16, 1786, with 107 acres going to James Cristy and the balance to Daniel Herbert. The next six pages (three sheets front and back) are immaculate pencil calculations of the components of each course, followed by a scaled plot of the survey.

Then comes a similar treatment of Thomas Ramsey’s “Purity”, 102 acres south and west of Redman’s property, and Benjamin Rennoe’s “Widow’s Portion”, 342 acres south and east of Redman’s (and east of Ramsey’s). These are followed by a chronological sequence of land transactions in the Bridgeville area.

It appears that someone (probably Mr. Ferree) took on the project of recording and plotting the history of property changes in this area, utilizing information from the Allegheny Recorder of Deeds Department and the Allegheny County Warrantee Atlas.

Joseph Ferree began teaching at Bridgeville High School in 1910 when it consisted of two grades and a total of nineteen students. He was still going strong in the early 1950s, a completely different environment. Our class referred to him as “Pop” Ferree and, as a sign of respect, “the Old Sage”.

We know he was a member of the “Historical Book Committee” for Bridgeville’s Golden Jubilee Celebration in 1951. The precision of the calculations and plotting in this work book certainly is representative of my memory of him; I am convinced it was his project.

In addition to his being my mathematics teacher in high school, our family had several other ties to the Ferrees. His son, Origen (better known as Gus), coached my brother’s Knee Pants League baseball team. When my mother volunteered at the Bridgeville Public Library, she became close friends with Gus’ wife, Ada.

I was particularly interested in the surveys recorded in the original warrants. In the early days surveys were a record of the landmarks which defined the boundaries of the property; the azimuths and distances were merely recorded to provide the approximate location of the next landmark (corner).

For example, the survey for Rennoe”s “Widow’s Portion” begins at a white oak tree that is a corner of Henry Evault’s adjacent property and proceeds North 68 degrees west, 98 perches to a “linn” on the bank of McLaughlin Run. “Linn” is a Scotch word for steep ravine or gully; our landmark was the point where a prominent gully intersected McLaughlin Run.

We were instructed to begin at the white oak and aim our compass 68 degrees west of north. A “perch”, also known as a pole or a rod, was sixteen and a half feet long. If we marched 98 perches (1,617 feet plus or minus eight feet three inches) in the proper direction we should find the desired “linn”.

The approximations of both angle and distance were acceptable as long as we could use them to locate the corners (landmarks). As a general check and to evaluate the error of these approximations, the surveyor would then calculate the true components of each course and add them to determine his “error of closure”.

For this survey Mr. Ferree calculated an error of closure of nearly eighteen perches (nearly three hundred feet). This seems like a lot until you realize that the survey consisted of twenty-five courses totaling nearly four miles.

By the time I was learning surveying, instrument precision had improved by an order of magnitude. We would read angles to the nearest fifteen seconds and distances to fractions of an inch. An acceptable error of closure in those days for a survey of this length would have been well under five feet.

We are fortunate that Pop Ferree took on this project and has provided us with so much relevant information. As I continue to investigate it, I will report on the earliest days of our community.

Bridgeville High School Class of 1946 . January 23, 2020

January 23, 2020

Bridgeville High School Class of 1946

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society recently received a valuable collection of memorabilia related to the Bridgeville High School class of 1946, from alumnus Paul Schmidt’s widow via fellow classmate Ed Chabala.

A very young Paul Schmidt is portrayed in a photograph on page 90 of the Society’s Images of America book, “Bridgeville”, helping his mother make apple butter in an outdoor kitchen. Paul was a member of Boy Scout Troop 245 in 1943 when I joined it, and preceded me through high school by three years.

After Paul grew up and left Bridgeville he maintained contact through his boyhood friend Ed Chabala, punctuated by frequent class reunions. Eventually Ed began mailing him copies of my “Water Under the Bridge” columns. At some point I added Paul to the mailing list for the original unedited versions of the columns. A few years ago I was saddened to learn that he had died.

Recently his widow forwarded to Ed two file folders filled with documents from Paul’s high school days. Leafing through them generates waves of nostalgia from an era seventy-five years ago.

The prize of the collection is a copy of the 1945 BHS Yearbook, a yearbook I did not know existed. We believe there were yearbooks in 1925 and 1926 and that the tradition was then suspended, with the exception of a home-made mimeographed version in 1939. Apparently the Class of 1945 elected to resurrect the tradition, and produced a handsome paperback Yearbook, called “The Bridge”.

The Yearbook was dedicated to the BHS graduates serving our country in World War II. It begins with an Honor Roll of BHS servicemen and women. Included are ten young men from the Class of 1945 who went into the service just before graduation. There are 292 men and women on the Honor Roll, including twelve who had lost their lives. The war years were difficult times for Bridgeville.

A closet door is opened,

An eloquent statement by Dr. Colton acknowledging the debt current students owe to their predecessors is followed by three pages of photographs of the thirty members of the faculty, headed by Joseph “Pop” Ferree. There are eighty-eight Seniors pictured, including among others, Sammy David, Tom “Dreamer” Lytle, and Gerre Harmuth.

“Senior Class History”, “Class Prophecy”, and “Senior Class Will” follow; appropriate for their time, they seem trite today. There are excellent sections on the underclassmen and on the various clubs and activities. I was especially pleased with the portion covering the basketball team – my all-time favorite. Their 34 to 32 loss to Avalon in WPIAL semi-finals was a major disappointment.

The page devoted to the Junior Play that year, “Mr. and Mrs. North”, brought back many memories. Bob Rothermund had a minor part in the play, as a corpse. Early in the play a closet door is opened, exposing a corpse which then falls straight forward face down on the stage. When we asked Bob how he could pull that off, he told us to “Watch the hands!” He then demonstrated how he could cushion his fall with his hands.

The night of the play we were eager to see him pull it off. “Watch the hands!” When the door opened we were shocked to see that he had both his hands in his pockets. Not to worry, the show must go on. Bob took one for the team, smashing into the floor without a cushion. By coincidence, among the artifacts in Paul Schmidt’s collection is a photograph of Bob on the floor being examined by the doctor, played by Bill Sweeney, and the policeman, played by Benton “Red” Williams.

As is always the case, the collection of advertisements by sponsors is an excellent record of the businesses active in Bridgeville at the time. Of particular interest to me is one for the Hop Shoppe, a soft drinks night club for teenagers with dances Wednesday and Saturday evenings.

This yearbook is a valuable addition to the Society’s collection, as are three copies of the “Bridger”; November 1945, January 1946, and March 1946. A puzzling comment in one of the “Water Under the Bridge” gossip columns is “Kitch misses Don Toney an awful lot”. I must ask Don which one of his conquests was known as “Kitch”.

The March “Bridger” reported that the Class of 1946 had determined that publishing a Yearbook like the one the previous year was too expensive and that they would, instead publish an expanded “Bridger” with most of the same content. They would print two hundred copies and sell them for ninety cents a copy.

Sure enough, Paul package included a copy of the 1946 “Bridge” and it does indeed contain a large amount of relevant information. There were eighty-seven graduates in the class; for me it will always be “Rum” (Bob Rothermund) and “Slugger” (Bob Bailey)’s class, but it was filled with people important to me.

Almo Pruner was Class President; Louis “Skp” Colussy, Vice President. Helen David was Secretary; Ralph “Butch” Schneider, Treasurer. Patty Patton was Social Chairman; I recently learned from Mary Weise, another proud member of the class, that Patty died recently. In addition to Paul Schmidt and Ed Chabala, the class included Charles and Sheila Banks, Frank “Cutter” Cortazzo, Jimmy Delphus, George Deep, Norman “Nimmy” Kreiger, George “Hipper” McCoy, Carleton “Curly” McKee, Teresa Pennetti, and Alice Pesavento.

Among the photographs in Paul’s package of artifacts is a glamour shot of a beautiful young girl, seated on a stool. On the bottom of the photo someone has written Evelyn “Babe” McElhaney. I have a distinct memory of being infatuated by Evelyn McElhaney and Dorothy “Dot” DeGrosky after watching them do a dance routine “By the Sea”, dressed in Gay Nineties bathing suits, at Class Night in 1946. To a naive ninth grader, they were easily as glamorous as movie stars.

We are fortunate that the 1946 Class chose to record its history with this document. It deserves a place with the professionally produced Yearbooks that followed it.

Most classes start out with ambitious plans for reunions; this class followed through much more extensively than most. Paul’s collection included seven formal pictures of class reunions beginning with number fifteen in 1961 and ending with number fifty-five in 2001. There is also a picture of a gathering of seventeen classmates in 2011. I think Ed told me he still gets together with six of them occasionally. This collection warrants a folder of its own at the History Center. Perhaps we can persuade Ed and Mary Weise to identify the folks in some of the pictures.

We are indebted to Mrs. Schmidt and Ed Chabala for their thoughtfulness in making certain this collection of artifacts has found a home.

Bridgeville in 1920 . January 17, 2020

January 17, 2020

Bridgeville in 1920

As we enter a new decade it is appropriate for us to roll the calendar back a century and examine Bridgeville one hundred years ago. According to the 1920 Census its population that year was 3,092, still significantly smaller than its neighbors, Carnegie and Canonsburg, but enough bigger than the mine patch towns in the nearby townships to be an important commercial center, filled with small businesses.

Evidence of the proliferation of these businesses is an advertisement in the January 21, 1920, Canonsburg “Daily Notes” for Franco-American Coffee, “Begin Tomorrow with a Smile”, that lists area dealers where it can be purchased. Included in the list are nine different Bridgeville stores – Ruben Abramovitz, R. Peterson, Harmuth Bros., O. Pinazzi, A Wagoner & Sons, Durgain Thomas, Mary Lavendosky, Albert Sam, and Jos. Saperstein. Apparently this is before the arrival of the supermarkets.

Another interesting advertisement, in the January 4, 1920, Pittsburgh Press is for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Ship-by-Truck Bureau. Located on Baum Boulevard in East Liberty, it advertised shipping anywhere in the metropolitan area. Bridgeville was included on Route 7, along with Ingram, Crafton, Carnegie, Walker’s Mills, Oakdale, Noblestown, Sturgeon, and McDonald.

Business was booming in the Kirwan Heights industrial complex. C. P. Mayer had shifted his interest from the brick yard to the new airfield he had just constructed – the first commercial airfield west of the Alleghenies. General Electric had taken over the J. B. Higbee facility and converted it into “the Glass House”.

The January 17, 1920, Pittsburgh Daily Post ran an advertisement for Universal Steel offering liberal wages for a “man to run Davis Bournondeille radiograph for cutting tops of steel ingots”. A series of similar ads later in the year attest to the continuing expansion of the Universal facility.

The Colussy family’s venture into selling automobiles was in its second year; one wonders if they had any idea that it would be Chevrolet’s oldest continuous franchise a century later.

On January 27, 1920, McMullen Bros., Russell’s Garage, Bridgeville put an advertisement in the Pittsburgh Press offering to sell three different pieces of tire-retreading machinery, “total value $293” for $150, and sweetened the deal by offering “to teach you the business”.

An advertisement in the Pittsburgh Press on January 30, 1920, reported the availability of a new bungalow, five rooms and a bath, to be “sold at a bargain”. Contact F. E. Hanna. The only other area real estate offering in local newspapers was a new four room house on a one acre lot near Boyce Station for $2,200. M. Magie placed that advertisement in the Pittsburgh Press on January 18, 1920.

A few other newspaper articles mentioned Bridgeville people. According to the Monongahela Daily Republican, January 28, 1920, Rev. Murray C. Reiter gave the keynote address at a conference of Washington County Sunday School Association workers. The January 7, 1920, Canonsburg Daily Notes reported that nurse Ruth Fremlin has returned to her home in Bridgeville after caring for a young boy with pneumonia, in Canonsburg.

On January 20, 1920, the Daily Notes reported that Mr. and Mrs. W. M. Russell had spent the weekend visiting friends in Canonsburg and now returned to their Bridgeville home. The January 6, 1920, Brookville American reported a similar visit by Bridgevillers Mrs. Lucy Shaw and her two children to Brookville. Trivial as these articles seem today, it is pleasant to imagine a day when newspapers found such information newsworthy.

The Post-Gazette reported, on January 13, 1920, that Susan Hatz, of Bridgeville, had filed for a marriage license with Michael Roche of Pittsburgh. I am sure that was as significant to them as was the Daily Notes January 10, 1920, article recording the marriage of Sara Elinor Donaldson, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses Donaldson, in Palm Beach, Florida, to Orvis Alexander McDonald.

Buried in a list of movie advertisements in the January 22, 1920, Pittsburgh Daily Post is one for the Star theater in Bridgeville. The Star was showing “The Call of the Soul”, starring Gladys Brockwell. Ms. Brockwell was a prolific silent films star – this film was one of seven she made in 1919. She successfully made the transition to talkies before dying in an automobile accident in 1929.

The movie, fifty minutes long, was a classic soap opera love triangle involving a nurse, a doctor, and a polar explorer. I wonder where the Star Theater was located. Perhaps it was the one the Delphus family ran on Railroad Street (page 67 in the Bridgeville Area Historical Society book “Bridgeville”).

In 1920 Washington School housed all twelve grades. There were thirteen students in the graduating class that year -- Gladys Allen, Lester Allen, Mary Campbell, Cecelia Dargis, Mike Kissel, Emma Hoffman, Charles McIlvaine, Logan Meise, Walter Patton, Denie Rovesti, Wilmer Schneider, Elizabeth Warensford, and Elnora Weise.

Bridgeville made the society page of the Pittsburgh Press on January 10, 1920, with a report of a meeting of the Bridgeville Women’s Club the previously Monday at the home of Mrs. Albert B. Murray. The Murray family and their handsome Washington Avenue residence are featured on pages 42 and 43 of “Bridgeville”.

Mrs. S. A. McFarland read a paper on “Albert, King of Belgium”; Mrs. F. A. Cummins, one on “Cities of Belgium”; Mrs. M. L. Maxwell, one on “The Shakespeare of Belgium”; and Mrs. G. P. Murray, one on “The Invasion of Belgium”. Mrs. T. D. Lesnett broke the spell with a reading of “The Shepherd Dog of the Pyrenees”.

Miss Alberta (?) then sang, accompanied by Miss (?) Patton. One wonders if these were children. The February meeting was scheduled for the home of Mrs. D. M. Bennett, with Mrs. Maxwell as leader. In addition, “the dramatic members of the club will give a play in the near future, entitled “A Day and a Night”. Great to realize there was so much culture in Bridgeville that long ago.

There was great interest in sports in Bridgeville in 1920, especially in soccer. Bridgeville had a team in the Central Division of the Press Soccer League. Early in the month they played a scoreless tie with Cecil, primarily because of the work of goalkeeper Darkus. Unfortunately they lost the next game to Sturgeon Aerie, 4 to 2, despite early goals by Mochus and Dubroskey.

The rest of the team included Texter, Ziegler, Cimarolli, Ferry, Easterday, Zaney, Federoff, and Dalzuffo. In one newspaper article the team is referred to as “the Panhandlers”. Perhaps they were sponsored by the Panhandle Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Another active team was a basketball team called the “Bridgeville Odds”. One suspects that they were sponsored by the Odd Fellows, before that fraternal club changed its name to the Owls Club. It is described as a junior team; its starters were Silhol (Captain), Jones, Kasputis, Hattner, and Cooper. We assume “Jones” was Burkey Jones – he was captain of the Bridgeville High School basketball team a year later.

I’m not sure how valid a picture of life in Bridgeville a century ago we can imagine from a pile of newspaper clippings, but at least they are a good beginning. It certainly appears to have been a time less stressful than most of the decades that followed.