Woodland Archaeology

How can you tell that this little patch of woods in the western end of Raccoon Creek State Park used to be somebody's home site?  Daffodils.  They're a telltale sign that a farmhouse used to stand here.

These are definitely "heirloom" daffodils.  Look how dense and lacy they are compared to the ones that bloom in most modern yards.  The state forced landowners off their property in order to establish this park in the 50s and 60s, and so you find the remains of old homesteads all through the forest.  But this one is particularly odd.

This stretch of forest sits alongside an old road that is no longer open to vehicles, but it joins up with a public road nearby, at the edge of the park.  Several years ago, while exploring this area, I noticed a hammock here in these trees.  There was someone relaxing in the hammock, though I didn't approach to ask any questions.  I couldn't tell the person's sex or age.  And just today, on a fluke, I walked past here again, only to find this curious woodland shelter.  It looks a little like Eeyore's house.

And just behind the shelter, in the same general area as the daffodils, there is an old water well.  Note the backside of the shelter and the old road to the left in this photo, the well to the right.

Up the hill a very short distance, there are artifacts strewn outside an old foundation.  Here you have a broken shard of pottery, a nicely fashioned bit of cast iron, and part of an old metal pail.

Here are the shallow remains of a long-ago cellar.  But the interesting thing to me is the fact that someone keeps coming back here to spend time.  Someone has built a little shelter in the old former front yard of the farmhouse.  My guess is that it's the same person who sets up his or her hammock here in the summer.

There's nothing particularly beautiful or interesting about this little stretch of woods, so why would someone keep coming back here to spend hours at a time?  My guess is that this was once his or her home...or maybe their grandparents' house.  They come back here to feel close to the people who used to live on this land and work it.  They come back here because it makes them feel connected to long-dead loved ones, and to the past, and to their own younger selves.  This photo shows where the old lane leaves the park.

 In fact, I found all kinds of ruins in the park today.  Old CCC cabins that were intact several years ago are now demolished.  Only the chimneys remain.

This is a different chimney, and you can see the foundation of the cabin laid out in stone in the foreground.

Even the interesting old stone cottage at the old mineral spring has been torn down.  Just four years ago, I found it looking like this.

I did like the look of this old one-room cabin in Group Cabin Camp # 3.  I'm even thinking about how to bring a group out here to occupy it...

Quebec Run Wild Area, Forbes State Forest

I visited the Quebec Run Wild Area several years ago, and I hated how popular it was with mountain-bikers and their unleashed dogs.  But on the Tuesday before Easter, I had the place more or less to myself.  I did meet a few bikers on the trails, but only three or four, and no damned dogs.  These photos cannot be enlarged, which is too bad because the hemlock beside this stream is truly beautiful.

A "wild area" is a protected zone inside a state forest.  Back country camping is permitted, and I'm so sorely tempted!  Once you get away from the major mountain bike trails, this place is extremely quiet and wild.  It's beautiful country of hemlocks, and rhododendrons, and more clear little rushing streams than you can count.  It would be easy to find a solitary spot and set up camp.

Many of the best trails follow the beautiful mountain brooks, like this one.  They're clear, and cold, and rapid.  Not big enough for kayaking, but definitely big enough to make the music of the forest.

Vistas are rare in this quadrant, even though it's in the higher altitudes.

 A few interesting camps are built along the edges of the state forest land.  I liked this place because it was an old 1970s-style trailer with a permanent room built onto it, sitting right beside the creek.

 And this one is meant to be camouflaged, I think...

 There were even a few patches of snow left on the ground at 4pm in certain areas of Quebec Run.

The area runs along the Mason-Dixon Line, which I crossed to take a little drive down country lanes.

The Allegheny Trail?  Who's ever heard of that?  It apparently begins at the Mason-Dixon Line and runs 300-some miles into West Virginia.

On the Pennsylvania side, there are enormous windmills, like this one.  I love renewable energy, and I'm glad to see the windmills--even though they do create disturbances in the forest.  But damn, these things look sinister up close.

Brownsville, Revisited

 The steep old Monongahela Valley town of Brownsville has been so well documented in its decline that it seems almost unfair to mention it.  This city has fallen on some very hard times.

With block after block of empty storefronts, Brownsville appears in numerous movies where an abandoned is called for.  Some of them are pretty bad movies, too.  And yet, there's a dark loveliness to the place, too.  It's got steep brick streets, broad views of the river, and nice overlooks.

The town was established in 1785, and it has a proud history.  Just as in McKeesport, the Baptist faith does not seem to have fared very well here.

Parts of the so-called "Nemacolin Castle" were built in the 1700s.  It sits in a neighborhood of fine old houses with beautiful gardens, overlooking the mostly derelict city.  I think this used to be a museum and conference center--or at least a B&B--but its website is defunct.

Hill's Tavern, Scenery Hill

This great old tavern along the Old National Pike was built in 1794.  It burned down last summer and now sits derelict with all its lawn furniture still out on the patio.  The little village of Scenery Hill is kind of an interesting place with antique shops, and old buildings, and distant views out over the surrounding countryside.  There's been an appeal to help rebuild this house, but it will never happen.  Sadly, the conservation of historic architecture has never been a priority around here.  I don't know what's wrong, but I'm only able to upload small photos onto my blog right now, so there's no use in clicking on these pictures to enlarge them.

Jonathan Knight's Abandoned House, Washington County

This alluring old house appears on several websites with photos of great abandoned buildings.  What none of these sites tell you is that this house belonged to a once-famous politician and railroad engineer named Jonathan Knight.  It's about five miles west of Brownsville, PA, on US Highway 40.  Of course, 40 runs more or less along the route that General Braddock hacked into the wilderness in the mid-1700s in a falied attempt to capture Pittsburgh (then Fort Duquesne) from the French. Knight was instrumental in building US 40, aka, "The Old National Pike," through this region.  

I didn't even know the place was here, as I barreled down 40 toward Brownsville.  But when I caught a glimpse of it through the trees alongside the road, I immediately turned around and got out to snap a shot.  It's a fantastic place, clearly abandoned, but with trinkets still in the windows and curtains tied back to let in the sunlight.  The house looks like it's been empty for at least two decades, but it doesn't appear to be vandalized at all.  A big lady at the hair-styling salon just across the road came out and yelled at me for taking pictures.  A lot of folks in the Brownsville area seem a little hostile to strangers.

Maxo Vanka Murals at St. Nicholas Church, Millvale, PA

St. Nicholas Church doesn't look like much from the outside.  I've passed by it many times on PA-28, and I've never thought anything of it.  It's located in a dense, hard-to-reach neighborhood of Millvale, with a busy state highway screaming past.

But the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently ran an article about the historic icons that grace the interior.  Wow!  This place is worth seeing!

It's a Croatian Catholic church, and the murals were mainly painted in two phases: the late 30s, when the Nazi threat was menacing the Croatian homeland, and in the early 40s, when Croatia was under the crushing heel of the Nazis.

And so, the murals have two themes running throughout: the sometimes hellish life back in the old country and the sometimes hellish life in the mills, and mines, and factories of the new country.

My cellphone camera was nearly worthless in the church's dim light.  This mural depicts Croatian women in the old country, mourning for a fallen son.

But a strong social justice theme also haunts the walls of St. Nicholas.  Here is a Pittsburgh robber baron, a tycoon, feasting sumptuously, being served by an African-American, with a beggar on the floor--echoing Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

Opposite the feasting tycoon, there is an impoverished family of Croatian immigrants eating cabbage soup and bread.  A ghostly Jesus is standing among them.  My picture of that mural did not come out.  But here is Mary of the Seven Sorrows.

And this eerie specter is Mother Croatia being crucified by the Nazis.

The angel is holding a cautioning finger to his lips.  The tour guide seemed to believe that he was telling Croatian immigrants not to talk too much because their distinctive accents would get them labeled and mistreated.

There were some traditional religious themes, like these two of the four evangelists.

The ceiling was the crowning achievement of the whole church.  It shows the ascending Christ, soaring above all the brokenness and evil depicted elsewhere in the walls.  Vanka painted himself into this scene.  He's one of the minor characters in the lower right hand corner of it all, looking on dubiously but hopefully.  The passion flower, native to Croatia, is blooming in even the darkest of murals, hinting at the hope of renewal and new life.

This is a terrible shot of the spookiest mural in the house.  A gas-masked figure in a black robe and white hood holds a sword in a bloodied hand.  In the other hand he holds the scales of injustice, in which gold outweighs bread.  Vanka believed (correctly) that most war is the result of greed.

There's so much at St. Nicholas that I was unable to capture.  Mother Mary is rampaging among soldiers, breaking the barrels of guns in her strong, peasant-woman hands.  Other soldiers, in attempting to stab one another with their bayonets, are seen thrusting the blades into the side of the agonizing Christ.  This place cannot be described or done justice on a blog; it has to be visited in person.  Google it.  It's open for free tours on Saturdays from 11am until 2pm.  The tours are free, but please drop something in the basket to help preserve this Pittsburgh treasure for future generations.

Early Spring on the Chartiers

 Same stream, different kayak.  This is the earliest I've ever put into the Chartiers to do the oxbow between Heidelberg and Carnegie.

 The water levels were nice and high, but not so high as to be fast moving.  Never before have I paddled the Chartiers and failed to see a blue heron, but there were none to see this time.  Plenty of Canada geese and wood ducks.

From Heidelberg to Carnegie, the creek meanders happily amid dark, derelict-looking mills, passes under wooded bluffs, splashing a little wildly in places, then after more than forty-five minutes, it deposits you back in Carnegie, where you parked your car.  Actually, I made a day of it in Carnegie, which is a way cool little town.  There's more racial diversity here than in most Western Pennsylvania boroughs.  It's a miniature city with grand churches, a mosque, onion domes, a stately old library with a performance hall, walkable shady neighborhoods, and a number of old mansions.  Lots of restaurants and shops crowd the main drag, and the streets come together at sharp, odd angles.  Of course, the Chartiers runs through the heart of town, with attendant railroad tracks.  Had lunch with a friend at the Cafe Delhi, in the Indian Community Center, which is housed in an ugly former Catholic church.  Upon arrival back in Carnegie, stopped by the ever-cool Carnegie Coffee Company, located in an old post office with tall windows and high ceilings.  

As you draw into the outer edges of Carnegie, houses begin to line the creek.  This third view always reminds me of the line from Tennyson's great poem:

And 'ere she reached upon the tide

the first house by the waterside,

singing in her song, she died,

the Lady of Shallott.

Chief Cornplanter

Two depictions of the legendary old Seneca chief, Cornplanter, who inhabited the forest up near the New York state line.  Both of these images turned up this past Thursday on my trip to Oakland, one in the Carnegie Museum and the other in the windows of Heinz Chapel.

Although Cornplanter's land grant was promised to him and his descendants for all time, it was taken away entirely by eminent domain when the Kinzua Dam was built.  Most of his village is now under water.  Apparently Johnny Cash sang about the injustice of it, but that was before my time.

A Day in Oakland

It was a drizzly day, not impossible to hike, but a little unpleasant.  Since we have a membership at the Carnegie museums, I decided to spend the day in the city instead, in the Oakland neighborhood, where a lot of the city's educational institutions are located.

I don't know which got the name first, the city of Oakland, California, or the neighborhood of Oakland in Pittsburgh.  However, Pennsylvania has a storied history of putting its public universities in places with confusing names.  We've got an Indiana University of Pennsylvania, in the town of Indiana, and a California University of Pennsylvania, in the town of California.  Ah, but the gallery of the grand staircase at the Carnegie Museum is lovely and seemingly eternal.

The Hall of Architecture, unlike many of the other displays, has not changed a bit since I was a kid.  It's got the same statues, and doorways, and pulpits that it's always had.  The heavy facades of the same French and Italian churches stand in exactly the same spots.  The dinosaur display especially has changed a lot down through the years, probably as we've learned more about dinosaurs.  But the Hall of Architecture is immutable.  I think that's one of the reasons I find myself drawn back there time and again.  

Of course, every museum has its lame furniture displays.  If you ever get lost in the Met, in New York, you'll end up in early American furniture.  The furniture gallery at the Carnegie has annoyingly squeaky floors and a relatively uninteresting display, but the one redeeming factor is that it has big windows to let in the natural light--which was luminous and gray on this Thursday.  The beautiful Heinz Chapel can be seen through the glass.

Up close, Heinz Chapel looks like a rock on the Scottish coast.  Dark, jagged, imposing.

 On the inside, you could swear you'd walked through one of the fake facades in the Hall of Architecture.  It's got all the magnificent pretense of a European church.  And like a medieval church, the altar is at the east end.  The windows depict Christian saints but also historic figures who represent various virtues, like Galileo, Da Vinci, and Bronte.

This view faces west, toward the entrance, where a very eager hostess will push brochures and questions at anyone who enters.