STEEL INDUSTRY HERITAGE CORPORATION ETHNOGRAPHIC SURVEY of the following communities in Lower Armstrong County: Apollo Dayton Freeport Kiskimere Leechburg Schenley Yatesboro with brief forays into: Hyde Park Lower Burrell North Apollo North Vandergrift NuMine Smicksburg Washington Township Jean E. Snyder, Ph.D. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania SUMMARY REPORT October 31, 1997 2 CONTENTS I. Introduction: Concept and Evolution of Fieldwork 3 II. Overview: Physical, Historical and Cultural Geography 5 III. Community Portraits 14 A. Apollo - After the steel has gone: The historical, cultural and craftsmanship heritage B. Leechburg - A Manufacturing and Cultural Hub of Lower Armstrong County C. Freeport - From breweries to brickyards D. Schenley - Labor-management relations and gender roles E. Kiskimere and Yatesboro - Two coal company towns F. Dayton - Local history, agriculture and the Amish community IV. Recurrent Themes 42 A. Cultural Values B. Paths to the Future V. Recommendations 47 A. Follow-up studies B. Educational and interpretive programming VI. Contacts List --- VII. Bibliographic Sources 50 3 I. Introduction: Concept and Evolution of Fieldwork This study of the industrial and cultural history of Lower Armstrong County is based on a brief survey of sources such as county histories, town anniversary booklets, newspaper articles, and information provided by local historians, which provides the background for the oral history gathered in taped interviews. Many of the interviewees are retired laborers in the coal, steel, and supporting industries which made Armstrong County a major source of raw materials and industrial products in the last half of the nineteenth and the first three-fourths of the twentieth century. Their memories of work experience and their sharing of Old-World cultural traditions and family history form the substance of this report. The survey of Lower Armstrong County was started by Dr. Ron Carlisle and Dr. Carmen DiCiccio, then passed on to me for completion in the last two months of the contract period. After a morning at the Steel Industry Heritage Corporation office in Homestead going through the files on Armstrong County, I began my fieldwork with a visit to the Armstrong County Tourism Bureau in Kittanning. I talked with Susan Torrance, who gave me additional contact references, and I gathered materials, made several phone calls, then visited the 26th Annual Fort Armstrong Folk Festival being held along the Allegheny riverfront. While at the Bureau, I met Ralph Knepshield, who grew up in Leechburg. He offered to spend a day introducing me to people and places in Leechburg that might be relevant to the project. Ralph's thorough and enthusiastic introduction to the Leechburg community set the general direction for my fieldwork. Leechburg became the central focus, given the numerous persons of a variety of backgrounds in occupation, ethnic and religious traditions, and life experience whom I met or to whom I was referred. While this may to some extent have skewed my perspective toward seeing Leechburg as a pivotal community in Lower Armstrong County, it also gave me the opportunity to study a particular community in some depth, providing a means of comparison to other communities. 4 One of my aims has been to be sure that the African-American perspective is represented in this study, as sometimes, either by oversight or because of lack of "gatekeeper" contacts, their contribution and experience tend to be missing or less visible than those of other ethnic groups. My contacts with African Americans were facilitated by my involvement in another SIHC project, directed by Mrs. Bessie Sewell, which is documenting African-American sacred music traditions in the Kiski Valley. While the focus of that project is in Avonmore and Slickville, across the river in Westmoreland County, the close relationship among the churches in the Allegheny Union Baptist Association in the Kiski Valley brought me into contact with persons in Apollo, North Vandergrift, Spring Church, and Leechburg. I interviewed African- American persons in Spring Church, North Apollo, North Vandergrift and Kiskimere, but in Leechburg I was not able to schedule the interviews which would have given a first-hand account of the experience of African Americans in the steel mills in that area. I met Mrs. Mary Carter at the Leechburg Festival, who would have been most helpful, but she was out of town a great deal thereafter and not available. Other contacts whose names I was given did not respond to telephone requests for interviews. This is an area which needs followup to provide a more balanced perspective. I conducted 26 interviews in addition to the seven conducted by Carmen DiCiccio and one by Ron Carlisle. I interviewed persons residing in Leechburg, Schenley, Freeport, Gilpin Township, Kiskimere, North Vandergrift, North Apollo, Apollo, Spring Church, NuMine, and Dayton/Smicksburg, and wandered across the river to Washington Township and Hyde Park to interview persons who were recommended as strong contacts. As I reflect on the results of my interviews, I realize that I found less evidence of living traditional artistic and cultural heritage than I expected. My contacts list indicates that I didn't reach some key people and didn't hear about others until it was too late to include them in this study. When I learned that many of the contacts to whom Marilyn Rae at the Armstrong County League of Arts in Slate Lick referred me were actually in Lydia Strohl's part of the county, I pulled back from pursuing them. In doing so I may have missed the opportunity to 5 include some artists and crafts persons who should be represented in the Lower Armstrong County survey. The record of traditional arts and crafts in Lower Armstrong County begs further exploration. I am greatly indebted to Don Stevenson, local Apollo historian, for sharing a number of his manuscripts on the history of the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal and the development of the steel industry in Apollo and the Kiskiminetas Valley. I have drawn on them extensively in sketching the industrial history of the area, in addition to other sources. Likewise, Joe Yerace in Freeport, Rev. T. R. R. and Eleanor Stull in Dayton, and Ralph Knepshield and numerous other interviewees in Leechburg provided invaluable historical background. II. Overview: Physical, Historical and Cultural Geography The rolling hills of Lower Armstrong County support lush green wooded areas and undulating farmland, dotted with occasional single homes, clusters of suburban housing, small businesses (gardening centers, fruit and vegetable stands, automotive repair shops, catering services, sportsman's supply shops) and sudden, sometimes precipitous descents to the river valley where small industrial towns nestle along the Kiskiminetas and Allegheny rivers. Most of this research has focused in these river towns, approached from the east by Route 66, which crosses the Kiski River at Apollo and angles northwest along the river through North Apollo, North Vandergrift, below Kiskimere, and into Leechburg, where it turns more sharply north into Gilpin Township toward Kelly Station. Freeport and Schenley, tucked in the extreme southwest corner of the county, on opposite sides of the Allegheny River near where the Kiskiminetas River joins it, are easily reached from Route 28 which shoots north from Pittsburgh, or from the east, Freeport at a slight angle west of Leechburg along Route 356 and Schenley north and west of Leechburg off Route 66. The study area also included the towns east of Kittanning along old Route 85, Yatesboro, Rural Valley, and NuMine, and northeast of them, Wayne township and the Dayton community. 6 The first known residents of what became Armstrong County were Native Americans, primarily the Lenni-Lenape nation, who were forced westward by European settlers, and were defeated by Col. John Armstrong at Kittanning during the French and Indian War in 1756. Except in the name of a golf course, a realty company, a school of practical nursing and a vocational-technical school, few traces and little remembrance of their presence remains. There are, however, areas such as Schenley, site of the Indian village Atteques, where farmers and gardeners find numerous arrowheads, and where roundforts and an Indian burial ground including skeletons, tomahawks and stone vessels have been discovered. (Howard) Dale Morgan, president of the Apollo Historical Society, who collects Indian artifacts, can provide information about Native American life in the southeastern part of Armstrong County. Like the settlers who followed them, Native Americans often established their villages along the banks of the Kiskiminetas River, and the mounds and numerous artifacts they left behind suggest a rich history to which this survey cannot do justice. Apollo, Leechburg and Freeport, which became the predominant towns on the Armstrong County side of the Kiskiminetas River, were scarcely-recognized villages until the building of the short-lived Pennsylvania Mainline Canal. Built to provide a water route from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and to ensure that the recently built and provocatively successful Erie Canal did not rob Philadelphia of its role as a major eastern port and Pittsburgh of its role as Gateway to the West, the Pennsylvania Canal ultimately proved a financial failure. But the growth it stimulated first in Freeport, Leechburg and Apollo culminated in the convergence of coal and steel as the economic linchpin of the entire Kiski Valley. By the early nineteenth century, Pennsylvania had excelled in the building of turnpikes, but its rivers did not provide a natural highway from east to west which could facilitate the exchange of agricultural produce and raw materials from the western areas for manufactured goods from the east. The success of the Erie Canal, which provided an easy trade route from the port at New York City to the Great Lakes, created a virtual panic among Philadelphia businessmen and economists who felt compelled to establish a competing waterway to facilitate 7 trade between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. However, Pennsylvania's mountainous terrain posed serious obstacles. The railway system which was beginning to develop in England seemed to some a more practicable answer than a canal which would require an extensive system of locks and perhaps tunnels to transverse the Alleghenies. But in its earliest stages the railway did not seem to offer a more feasible way to negotiate the precipitous inclines the route must cross. The Pennsylvania Mainline Canal was built with far less careful planning and cost evaluation than was invested by the builders of the Erie Canal in New York state. Opposition to the Mainline canal was answered partly by the building of branch canals along the way, which distracted funds and precious time from the process of building the Mainline. As it was finally completed, the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal was a combination of the Philadelphia-Columbia railroad, canals and portage railroad which proved cumbersome and expensive. Along its 395-mile length, it climbed to 2,322 feet above sea level, with 174 locks for a total lockage of 1,141.5 feet in addition to the rise and fall on the Allegheny Portage Railroad of 2,570 feet. The cost of building it rose to $12,106,788. The Erie canal, which provided a through waterway, required only 84 locks for a lockage of 689 feet, and cost $7,143,790. The total length of the Mainline was completed in 1834 (though sections operated locally much earlier) and was sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1857 for $7.5 million. By 1839 shippers found that delays and high tolls on the mainline (largely caused by the need to shift from railroad to canal to railway portage and back to canal) made it cheaper to send goods down the Mississippi to New Orleans then ship them to Philadelphia than to use the "shorter" mainline transportation service. In addition, frequent breakdowns on the western division of the canal caused by floods, deterioration of dams and other maintenance problems caused costly disruption in service. Parts of the eastern division continued to operate for local traffic until 1900. The western canal division was officially abandoned in 1964; Don Stevenson reports records of soldiers who left for service in the Civil War as passengers on the canal, but returned from the War by railroad. Despite the overall financial failure of the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal as a 8 major east-west trade route, the Canal had a dramatic positive effect on the industrial development of the Kiskiminetas Valley. Twenty-five miles of the canal stretched through Lower Armstrong County, mostly along the banks of the Kiskiminetas River. This included the seven miles of slackwater between Leechburg past Apollo which was created by the dam built by engineer and entrepreneur David Leech. A wooden acqueduct carried the canal from the mouth of the Kiski River across the Allegheny River and through Freeport. Another acqueduct carried the canal across Buffalo creek, where it joined the Allegheny River for its progress to Pittsburgh. As early as 1828 parts of the western division of the canal were functional, making Freeport an important hub for the trade of merchandise and freight. Large quantities of salt, coal, sand, clay and raw iron began to find eastern markets. A great deal of the region's iron was shipped to Pittsburgh for manufacture and then transported east. Essentially, the canal helped gather produce and raw materials from the western part of the state, including Armstrong County, transport them eastward, and bring manufactured goods and immigrants into the area. The passenger service also facilitated local merchants such as Don Stevenson's great aunt, who purchased supplies in Pittsburgh for her milliner's shop in Leechburg. In addition to the material benefit brought to the region by the canal, the Irish immigrants who were recruited to build the canal settled down to become laborers and land owners in the area. The steel mills of Leechburg, Bagdad and Apollo (and of Vandergrift across the Kiski River) were fired by the abundant bituminous coal deposits which underlie much of the surface of this area. While the steel mills and some supporting industries were built along the river and the railway line which parallels it, coal deposits were mined throughout the county. Small company towns dotted the countryside, and many homeowners found coal deposits near the surface of their own land which supplied their needs for house coal. Armstrong County is also rich in supplies of natural gas, a resource first tapped for the iron industry by William Rogers in the 19th century. When the coal reserves dwindled, natural gas became the primary fuel for the steel industry, as it still is today. No interviews of gas 9 company workers have been conducted for this study . Carmen DiCiccio made inquiries regarding a contact in the Dayton area, and I also pursued this possibility, but was not able to connect with a worker from this industry. Other referrals to gas company workers in the Apollo area came so late in the study that it was not possible to follow up on them. These names appear on the appended contacts list and may be interviewed later. Although river transportation has often opened frontiers to settlement and economic development, most of the river towns in Lower Armstrong County line the Kiskiminetas River, which is navigable only at limited times of the year. Its shallow water level and the notorious pollution which killed most river fauna for many years made it a poor candidate for river transportation. In Freeport and Schenley, access to the Allegheny River after it was made navigable by dams provided significant transportation and employment. This study has gathered almost no information about the life of river workers, though one interviewee, Joseph Uptegraph, worked briefly on the river. But Joe Yerace recalls lively swimming, boating and fishing activities in Freeport during his boyhood which prefigure the greatly increased river recreation potential being developed along the Allegheny--and even to some extent along the rehabilitated Kiski River. Though coal mining preceded the steel industry and was far more widely dispersed through the region, the peak of its development is inextricably linked to the rise of the steel industry. Coal was discovered in the mid-19th century, and after the Civil War became a lucrative enterprise--for the owners. The European settlers who laid claim to the agricultural and mineral wealth of Armstrong County were primarily English, Scots-Irish and German. During the industrial development, these lineages also dominate the rosters of mine, mill, and railroad owners, managers and foremen. As mentioned above, Irish workers were recruited to build the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal, and many stayed to become part of the industrial labor pool. In some areas, such as Apollo, the majority of the labor force was drawn from the local West European settler communities. In Freeport, in addition to Irish workers who came to build the canal and Italians 10 drawn to work on the railroad, the work force included local German, English, and Scottish settlers. Likewise in Dayton the local workers of British and German descent were supplemented by Italian workers while the coal mines were operating. But in Leechburg, Schenley, Kiskimere, and Yatesboro, in addition to Irish laborers, large numbers of Eastern and Southern European laborers were drawn or were recruited: Northern and Southern Italians, Hungarians, Ukranians, Slovenians, Poles, Lithuanians, Greeks, and Syrians. African Americans also migrated from the American South in significant numbers, drawn by the prospect of jobs and comparative freedom from racial harassment. In at least one instance, at the Sagamore mine, African Americans were brought in as strike breakers. But for the most part, the difficulty black workers had in securing jobs, particularly in the mills, and the consistent pattern of assigning only the most menial jobs to African Americans limited the size of their migration to Armstrong County. However a number of families persisted, contributing several generations of active community members. In most of these areas, descendents of these laborers from many national and ethnic backgrounds still anchor the social, economic and cultural lives of the community. In Dayton, however, the Italian laborers who joined the British and Western European agricultural workers to mine the local coal departed when the coal supply was depleted, and little trace of their contribution remains, except in the memory of elderly residents. In the small mining and mill towns, where language barriers and close family ties may at first have limited interaction among these diverse groups, the shared experience of hard work and limited resources forged tight-knit community across ethnic and religious boundaries. "We worked together, we played together, and we were poor, but everyone was the same," is a comment made by interviewees from various ethnic heritages. While some have maintained a few distinctive cultural practices (the most persistent seem to be food traditions, and in some cases, music), there was in these small towns no large enough concentration of any one group to permit the exclusiveness of certain ethnic communities in the larger industrial towns and cities.