Ragged Ridge-and-Valley Towns

 In a previous post, I called the little hamlets in the valleys of Central Pennsylvania "quaint," and so they are.  This is the countryside and the rural life that echoes through the music of that old alternative rock group "The Ocean Blue," which is still one of my favorites, and the excellent solo pianist and composer, Greg Maroney.  There's a stout loveliness to the towns.  They're old, and well-maintained, and solidly built, with a few architectural frills just to please the eye.

 And yet, when you've got so many small towns grouped in such proximity to each other, you're bound to see some decay, too.  German settlers in the 1700s often built their homes all together in small villages and farmed the outlying areas.  This is in contrast to the more British habit of letting each farmhouse sit in the middle of its own land.  The German way meant that you might have more towns, but the towns would be much smaller.  They would often be mere hamlets, composed of seven or eight farmhouses, surrounded entirely by the woods, pasture, and fields that belonged to each family.  Of course, there are also isolated farms along the roadways.  And most of the big, boxy houses in these towns are no longer attached to farms.

 These are all sloppy drive-by shots in the villages of Rainsburg and Charlesville, in Bedford County.  Rainsburg was a charming little place at first glance.  It had a few of these stately stone houses and, for a town of fewer than 400 souls, there were three churches, one of which appeared to be abandoned.  The menacing signage did betray a goodly number of Mennonites in the area.  You can always tell because they're the ones who put warning signs by their mailboxes, things like "Prepare to Meet Thy God" and "Jesus May Come Today." But most Pennsylvania German settlers here and elsewhere were not Mennonite or Amish; they belonged to the state churches of Germany, which were Lutheran or Reformed (aka, Calvinist, aka United Church of Christ).  And so, the churches that remain in these villages still belong to those denominations, and they're often surrounded by very old and interesting graveyards.

 Charlesville was even smaller than Rainsburg and had an eerie number of abandoned buildings, which I only got to photograph quickly from a moving car.  It looks as if this house is still filled with furniture and waiting for someone's long-delayed return.  The owner probably died, and his or her adult children keep telling themselves they'll get down here some day to go through the place and put it up for auction.  They're living in North Carolina and Harrisburg.  They don't want the old family home.

 Here's another shot of the same little village house and an abandoned business just adjacent to it.  What happened here?

 This may have been a house, but you don't see many of these New Orleans style "boxcar houses" in this area.  My guess is that this was some sort of seed or grain store.

 And this big old place with the nice front porch appears to have been both a house and a business.  It almost looks like a general store or a restaurant, doesn't it?  It, too, still has curtains in all the windows.

 The double doors make me think it was a public establishment of some kind.  But when the population of an area declines and everyone has a car to go shopping at Wal-Mart, little village stores are doomed.  If this were rural Vermont, it would be a cheese shop or a maple syrup-themed boutique.

 But alas!  Tourist dollars will not redeem the countryside of the Keystone State, where few tourists venture past Bucks and Lancaster counties.  And this!  I've seen this beautiful old farmhouse from the Turnpike several times, near the Bedford exit, and I accidentally happened past it on this last trip.  It took all my forces of restraint to keep from going up and knocking on the door, pretending to be a lone Jehovah's Witness so that I could peek in the windows.  It looks very much like my house in Allegheny County--just on the edge of suburbia.  But here it sits, dilapidated and forlorn, gazing out at the passing world, waiting to be loved again.  

The family farm is largely a thing of the past.  If you don't sell out to a giant farming corporation, then you've got an endless uphill battle to keep your independent farm in the black.  You could go organic and do a "farm-to-table" thing, but as popular as those are, I wonder if there's any money in them?  And of course, if you do sell your farm to the soulless agricultural conglomerates, this is what happens to the old farmhouse.  Our "constructed history" is being swallowed up by the monoculture of corporate greed.  I see that someone still mows the lawn.  God, I'd love to get inside this place....