River Ridge Farm, Venango County

The Samuel Justus Trail is a rail trail that runs along an abandoned stretch of railroad between Franklin and Oil City.  It follows the Allegheny River in its northern reaches.  When I was a kid, this was still an old railroad bed, but now it's the playground of provincial yuppies.

The Allegheny River is beautiful up here, not as big as it is in Pittsburgh, but wilder and cleaner.

About two miles from the Franklin trailhead, going toward Oil City, you reach the former estate of Joseph Sibley, an erstwhile politician, congressman, judge, and mayor of Franklin.  This stone pylon in the woods marks the edge of his old estate.

The estate--known as "River Ridge Farm"--has long since been divided up and sold into smaller parcels.  But it was vast in its day.  If you click on this photo and look closely, you can almost see the Italianate mansion near the top of the hill, in the forest.  (For a better picture, click here.)  It now belongs to some fundamentalist Christian sect.  After passing out of Sibley's hands, it was owned for a time by the "White Fathers," an order of missionary priests who worked in Africa and retreated here.

But there are three grand houses on the estate.  One of the lesser houses can be seen in this photo.  I believe this stone structure was the guest house.  There is also a large redbrick house for the farm manager.  In the 1960s, my father almost bought the farmhouse, but thought that it was a little too remote.  Instead, he bought a big townhouse in Oil City.  Notice the oil derrick in the foreground.  The grounds of the estate, which were once fields and gardens, are now planted in derricks.

Joseph Sibley was placed under house arrest at one point, and he was not allowed to leave his mansion on the hill.  In its heyday, this was the entrance to the estate from the railroad tracks.  Sibley had his own private railroad station here, and he whisked away frequently to New York, Harrisburg, and Washington, DC.  The roof that is seen through the archway is to a small tower of carillon bells that played several times each day.  They've been silent for many years.

President Woodrow Wilson visited Sibley here at River Ridge, and legend claims that it was here he drafted his "Fourteen Points" at the close of World War One.  This grand estate with its imprisoned master used to loom large in my childish imagination...always across the river and in the woods, but visible from where I was.