Babylon Hill, Near Tidioute

This is the view of Tidioute and the Allegheny River from the top of Babylon Hill, which was an unclaimed peak in my peak-bagging club until yesterday.  It’s only 1,624 feet above sea level, and 510 feet above the river, but it’s MINE!  Babylon Hill is all mine…

Views are rare up at the summit, and they’ll be even rarer by mid-April, though old electric line easements provide an occasional break in the trees.  But let’s talk about Babylon Hill’s wonderful name.  My father and his family are from this area, and he used to talk about a notorious figure called “French Kate,” a professional criminal ad former dancer who ran gambling dens, and brothels, and bars and very disorderly houses in the old ghost town of Pithole—which, back in the days of the world’s first oil boom, here in these hills—was as wild a place as any California gold town.

French Kate was best known as a madame.  She provided female companionship for the oil workers who flocked to Northwest Pennsylvania from all over the nation, and the world, to make their fortunes in the new oil fields.  She was a garish woman who painted her face, wore expensive jewelry, and always had the latest styles from the coast.  It’s said that she was educated and a polyglot.  She carried a pistol in her bra and wasn’t afraid to use it.  My father used to say that she and the pimp across the street in the boomtown of Pithole used to shoot at each other from their windows.  “The pimp across the street” was the infamous Ben Hogan, another erstwhile legend in these parts who ended up becoming Kate’s lover and then converting to Christianity and returning here to preach salvation from sin.

But I digress.  After Kate and Ben fell in love, and before Ben got religion and became an evangelist, they began to run afoul of the law in back Pithole.  They decided to join efforts and open a new brothel and dance hall together on top of the mountain just outside Tidioute, a wealthy city on the banks of the Allegheny.  Babylon Hill is steep, but only 510 feet above town, so French Kate knew that the uphill trek would be a deterrent for the police, but not for her more highly motivated clientele—lonely oilfield workers from Ireland and Brooklyn.  Those guys lived in the oilfield barracks and rarely saw women, so they’d have climbed Everest for what Kate had to offer.

So she and Ben Hogan put their new brothel at the top of Babylon Hill—so named because the respectable townspeople knew it as a place of vilest debauchery, and Kate herself was “The Whore of Babylon,” with her fancy clothes, and her urbane ways, and her band of dancing girls for rent.  The name stuck, even though there is nothing to be found up on the ridge today but pleasant forests of white pine and hemlock.  See the mountain’s name near the middle of this map?  And see how sharply the land descends toward the river?  It’s technically within the bounds of the Allegheny National Forest, so it’s possible to camp out up there…with all the ghosts of the prostitutes and immigrant oilfield workers who came to untimely ends up on that peak.

To think that this was once a place where impoverished young women were viciously exploited and abused, where there were 20 men to each lady, which often led to fistfights and knife fights, a place of licentiousness where Kate herself shot and killed two of her own clients.  I don’t say this to be judgmental; it stands in such contrast to the quiet, peaceful place it is today.  I need to do more research.  I believe that the shooting ended up getting the business closed down after just 9 months in operation.  Ben and Kate then turned to running gambling barges up and down the Allegheny River until Ben “got saved” and Kate left him.  I don’t know what ever happened to her.

This is the summit of Babylon Hill.  You can hear the bustle of the little town below and the distant hum of US-62, the small highway across the river.  You would never guess its history, but such is the way of these dark Northern forests.  This land was once denuded of all trees, covered in oil derricks, and crawling with luck-seekers from all the world over, some of whom were overnight millionaires, but many of whom just went from misery to misery.

And here’s an old postcard of the view from up high.  Before doing this trek, I read a very long and entertaining article from 1932 about Pithole, Babylon Hill, French Kate and Ben Hogan, which made it all the more fun.

And here’s the old forest lane, looking downhill, that travels up to the ridge line from the rail trail at the river below.  It’s quite steep in places.  Park at the Tidioute Rec & Trek Trail, follow the river for 1.5 miles, to the place where Grove Run comes tumbling down the mountainside from the right.  There’s a small waterfall, and this steep lane cuts sharply uphill to the right of it, as seen in the fourth photo from the top.  The whole out-and-back is only about 4.5 miles, though I explored the mountain and ended up doing a road-walk back to my car.  Also on this trip I bagged a peak called Preacher Hill, of similar height, but it was a dull and gloomy place, which could be how it got its name…