My recent research into coal mines in the Bridgeville area has been focused on underground (shaft) mining and, indeed, that was the primary method used prior to the 1930s. It neglected the portions of the Pittsburgh Seam close to the level of Chartiers Creek, too deep for surface mining and too shallow for shaft mining. A new technique (strip mining) had to be adopted. The first step for this technique was to use a large power shovel to remove a long (several hundred feet) strip of overburden (usually about ten feet thick) and perhaps forty feet wide, piling the overburden in a ridge on one side of the excavation. After the exposed coal was removed by conventional methods (jack-hammer and shovels), a new strip of overburden is removed adjacent to the first one, with the overburden being piled in a ridge in the first strip.
Typically this was done four or five times. Ground water seeped into the areas where coal was removed, resulting in a series of dune-like ridges with steep sides, separated by long, narrow ponds. This is the environment I remember for the Blue Ponds, just beyond “Godwin’s Meadow” and adjacent to the hill to the east. For me it was a wonderland of cat-tails and red-winged blackbirds. I suspect the ponds were created in the late 1930s and mostly filled in by 1965.
Between that location and Chartiers Creek today is “Lynch’s Pond”. I have an old newspaper article that tells its story. At some point in the 1940s a Bridgeville speculator named Jimmy Lynch bought sixty-five acres of bottom land along Chartiers Creek for $3,000, hoping to recoup his investment by selling off topsoil. The Pittsburgh Coal Company had different ideas; they purchased mineral rights from him for $8,000 in 1948. They then built a bridge across the creek, constructed a tipple over the railroad (see above photograph), and removed nearly a million tons of coal. Piers for the bridge can still be seen adjacent to the Bursca self-storage facility.
What remains of this effort is a pond about 750 feet long by 80 feet wide. Both John Shipe and Ted Evangalista remember Mr. Lynch chasing them from Lynch’s Pond when they were kids. In 1967 seventy-one-year old John Straka drowned while testing the ice to see if it was strong enough to permit ice-skating. The newspaper reported it was on “Blue Pond”; I suspect it was really on Lynch’s Pond.
Farther downstream, where the I-79 interchange is today, was another series of ponds, “Scott’s Ponds”. A 1938 aerial photograph shows four or five on each side of Hickory Grade Road, south of Miller’s Run Road. In later years we recall two large ponds parallel to Miller’s Run Road, replacing the earlier clusters. A newspaper article in 1935 reports on the popularity of the ponds after 3,000 fish were removed from the Highland Park Reservoir and relocated to Scott’s Ponds. Another article reports on five hundred fisherman there for the opening of bass season.
Scott’s Ponds were the site of at least five fatalities – Frank Martinek in 1934, Francis Simon in 1937, Joseph Demko in 1954, Ethel Supan in 1954, and John Gatti in 1958. Prior to their being filled in, the water quality in both ponds deteriorated because of abandoned mine drainage.
Years ago my neighbor, Mickey McDermott, told me about a spring time ritual for a gang of his friends in Mt. Lebanon in the 1930s. The first warm Saturday in April they would hike to Kirwan Heights to swim in “Presto Lake”. I quickly realized he was talking about “C. P.’s” or “Mayer’s Pond”, an equally popular destination for my friends who lived in Bridgeville’s “Lower End”. The Bridgeville Area Historical Society has a photograph of a power shovel inundated by a flood while stripping overburden for C. P. Mayer’s mine, probably in the 1920s.
Directly behind the string of Great Southern Shopping Center buildings housing Big Lots, Fresh Thyme, and LA Fitness is a steep cliff with a wetlands at its bottom, the remains of “Mayer’s Pond”. It made the news a dozen times, under different names. Fourteen year old Charles Alston drowned there in 1937. Two years later fifteen-year-old Bernard Holl dove from a rock 25 feet above the pond, hit his head on the bottom and was paralyzed. Although a friend rescued him, he died in the Woodville hospital a day later. I suspect the rock was the one called “Full Moon”; one halfway up the cliff was called “Half Moon”.
In May, 1940, John Andreas (29), of the North Side, visited the pond to fish, went for a swim, and promptly drowned. A month later, a South Hills High School Senior, Charles Mundt, drowned five days before his graduation, with his Prom date watching. In October that year there was much excitement when an automobile was fished out of the pond, a harbinger of things to come. The body of a twenty-four year old Carrick steelworker was recovered from the pond in 1942, victim of a swimming accident at 4:30 am. The final fatality reported was twenty-five year old Lawrence Gleisle, of Westwood, a 2:00 am swimmer in 1945.
In 1943 part of the mystery of the automobiles in the pond was solved when two members of a burglary ring preying on Squirrel Hill and Mt. Lebanon homes confessed that their modus operandi was to steal a car, use it while they were breaking into homes, and then drive it off the cliff into Mayer Pond, “to hide their fingerprints”. Five automobiles were recovered. This, of course, was where Mayer Air Field was located, before the Great Southern Shopping Center replaced it. One wonders what access road these people had to get to the pond.
Twelve drownings, a burglary ring, and a successful get-rich-quick scheme – the strip mine ponds around Bridgeville certainly added a lot to our small-town lore.