The Long, Strange Life of a Military Hospital Hut

This is the weird errand that took me back to the area around Saltsburg, in the previous post.

In 1950, suburban sprawl was rapidly overtaking the farmland south of Pittsburgh.  This photo was taken on Bower Hill Road at Parkview in about 1951.  All the forests and farms in the background are now the neighborhoods of Mt. Lebanon and Scott Township.  The parish I serve was created, and they purchased a military hospital hut from Camp Shelby, Mississippi, to serve as their first church building.  They quickly outgrew it, and five years later they began construction on the sprawling monstrosity of a facility in which they now rattle around like a handful of nickels in an oil drum... (They should have kept this little place to return to, but back in those days, no one knew that people would ever stop going to church.)  The old military hospital ward was disassembled, trucked off, and reassembled in a little coal-mining village named Forbes Road, in the hills about 50 miles east of here.  The congregation that bought the building has no online presence, and I'm not really sure if they're even still in operation.  So, I got the urge to drive out there to see if the building was still standing and still in use.

And lookie here!  I found it!  The sign out front calls it "Forbes Road Christian Fellowship Church."  (Stacking the words "Fellowship" and "Church" seems redundant to me, but what's it matter?)  I can't tell if it's still being used, but it's very definitely the same building.  It went from military hospital to thriving suburban church to...whatever it is now.  The steel cross on top of the steeple in the first picture used to sit in a storage room in our current building, but I haven't seen it in years...

Locust Knob near Saltsburg

This is the view from the upper reaches of a hill called Locust Knob, just above the borough of Saltsburg, Pennsylvania.  I used to visit Saltsburg with my bike to explore the many rail trails in the area.  This is old-time coal country, trying hard to recover from the industrial excesses of the past.  But now it's threatened by fracking and the potential installment of data centers.  It's said that a single AI online search uses as much as 30 gallons of freshwater.  That's why Pennsylvania is in the crosshairs for the construction of so many new data centers: We have lots of water, and our government has a long tradition of allowing just anyone to do just anything...as long as it brings a handful of short-lived blue collar jobs along with it.

But instead of coal, Saltsburg was better known for its salt mines.  I traveled about half a mile on the Westmoreland Heritage Rail Trail in order to make this ascent.  Starting at the little park near the waterworks in Saltsburg, you take the Westmoreland Heritage Trail west out of town for about half a mile to an electric line swath--which is the cleared expanse of land where the electric lines cross the trail.  At that spot, you turn rightward and uphill onto the very steep swath and make a slippery, thorny ascent following deer paths toward the summit.

See how steep this non-trail is?  I owe my conquests of many peaks to "easements" or "swaths," which often cut a brambly path straight to the summits, and which also provide views that would otherwise be nonexistent.  Locust Knob stands at a modest 1,247 feet, but it's got pleasant-enough scenery, great herds of whitetail deer, and an abundance of "flannel leaf" or "mullein."

There were a few pleasant groves of white birches on the mountainsides.  They don't usually thrive this far south, but the higher elevations help.  Fittingly enough, there are also a lot of black locust trees on Locust Knob.  It was misting down in Saltsburg and hailing a bit up here on the heights.

I was in Westmoreland County on a quest.  The church I've served as pastor for almost 16 years has a grand building that was constructed in the mid-20th century--far bigger than what we need today.  But for the first five years of our existence, from 1950 to 1955, we used an old army hospital barracks as our temporary building.  The barracks were transported up from Camp Shelby in Mississippi.  When the parish outgrew the original church (the army hospital), we sold that smaller building to a little congregation in the mountains east of Pittsburgh.  Fast-forward to today: The rural church that bought the old building, if it still existed, had no online presence that I could find.  And so, I came here to see if the building was still standing.  (It is.  Let's talk about that in the next post.)

While I was up here in the hills, I wanted to bag at least one unclaimed peak.  I hadn't been peak-bagging since early November of last year when I climbed the Maryland high point.

You make pleasant crossings of both the Conemaugh River and Loyalhanna Creek on this trek.  The Westmoreland Heritage Trail might be worth a longer visit.  I'm no fan of rail trails because they go where railroads go: through the dirty sections of old towns and along river valleys.  I prefer wilder trails that take me up into the highlands.  But I give to the Rail Trail Conservancy because I love the idea of having a network of footpaths across the whole country, like they have in the UK.  Now let me say, I'm not sure if this electric line easement is on public land or private, but it's not posted, so I took a chance.  Climb at your own risk.  The editorial board at Snow & Jaggers does not encourage or condone trespassing.