Last week I reflected on the similarity between Bridgeville in 1942 and River City, Iowa (site of the Broadway musical “The Music Man”) in 1912. At the same time my current interest in reading William Faulkner turned up numerous parallels between Yoknapatawpha County (the mythical locale for many of his novels and short stories) and our local area (which I will call Tingooqua Township). Both regions were settled in the early days of our country and evolved and transformed dramatically into the middle of the twentieth century. I found myself wondering what body of literature he would have produced had he based it on the actual stories of this area. We do know that many of the episodes in his epic are based on actual events that happened in northern Mississippi during that era. Faulkner lamented the destruction of the natural environment, the disruption and removal of the native Americans living there, and the use of enslaved people to build an aristocratic society. We can match the first two in our history, and perhaps the exploitation of “foreigners” to staff our coal mines and steel mills parallels the third. Faulkner chose a Chickasaw name for a river in northern Mississippi, translated as “water flows slow through flat land” for his mythical county; I propose “Tingooqua” for ours. It is the Delaware name for a native American the settlers called “Catfish”; Catfish became the eponym for a path from his camp in what is now Washington, Pa., to the Ohio River.
Imagine how Faulkner would have described the transformation of Catfish Path from a minor Indian trail in 1770 to a modern paved highway in 1920, via the Black Horse Trail (a crude wagon road in 1790), the Pittsburgh/Washington Turnpike (a corduroy road in 1820), and the Chartiers Valley Railroad (CVRR) in 1871. Faulkner chronicled a similar evolution in his description (scattered throughout a dozen stories) of the Natchez Trace into a high-speed highway where Bayard Sartoris raced his automobile in 1920. His description of the construction of the railroad from Jefferson to Memphis immediately following the Civil War is no more interesting than our tale of the construction of the CVRR at about the same time – and he lacks a character like our Charles DeHaas who, transit on his shoulder, laid out our line in 1828.
Or consider the earliest settlers – ours preceded his by forty years, but had remarkably similar experiences. I doubt that Faulkner has any source material to match the story of the Lesnett family, how in 1769 Christian Lesnett and his two teenage sons Francis and Frederick came here to stake a claim, how they marked out a site in what is now the Coal Pit Run area with tomahawk blazes on boundary trees, how they cleared a few acres and planted crops and built a crude cabin to “prove” their claim, how Christian left the boys behind to return to Cumberland planning to return “before the snow flies” and take them back with him, how some legal complication prevented his return, how these boys survived a harsh winter in the wilderness, and how Christian and the rest of the family found them hale and hearty when they finally came back the next Spring. I can imagine Trula Holman shuddering when she read the previous run-on sentence; but I suspect Bill Faulkner would be grinning. For the benefit of those of you who don’t know who Mrs. Holman was – she is my wonderful high school English teacher who spent two years trying to encourage my desire to become a writer and concluded by advising me to seek a different occupation since, despite writing eloquently, I “didn’t have anything to say”. Sadly, she was right and I gravitated to a career as a civil engineer, one that fortunately suited me perfectly.
Or the tale of Lesnett’s neighbor Richard Boyce who was returning home with sacks of meal he had had ground at a grist mill when he encountered a pack of wolves. He made haste to a nearby haystack, climbed to its top with his meal, and sent the horse off. Sure enough the horse showed up rider-less at Lesnetts’, initiating a rescue party that arrived soon enough to save Boyce. Or the story of another early settler, Johan Nickolaus Hickman, who acquired his grant of land from a man who decided to move West and was willing to sell it for one of Hickman’s two milk cows. The Hickmans spent the first summer in their new home living on “sarvis (service) berries and cow’s milk”. And there is Hugh Morgan’s general store/post office, a dead-ringer for Will Varner’s store in Frenchman’s Bend in “The Hamlet”.
And then there is the wonderful tale of the first bridge, which carried the Black Horse Trail over Chartiers Creek. It begins with an absentee landlord, Thomas Ramsey, who owned the land where the Trail crossed the Creek by fording it in a shallow place. Ramsey trucked in rocks to improve the ford, graded and “paved” the ramps on both sides to make it easier for wagons to cross, and installed a toll gate and a toll collector. This did not sit well with the local farmers (some of the same folks who were active in the Whiskey Rebellion!). They destroyed the toll gate and sent the toll collector “packing”, back to Virginia. Ramsey returned and took the miscreants to court. Coincidentally the state legislature had enacted the Navigable Waters Act of 1793, which decreed that any stream capable of supporting commercial shipping was common property. The settlers built a barge at Canon’s Mill, filled it with sacks of flour, waited for a summer downpour, and managed to “worry” the barge all the way to the Ohio River. Ramsey gave up at this point. The settlers then built a crude timber bridge across the creek, the first of six to be located there and the source of Bridgeville’s name. Faulkner would have crafted at least a novella out of this experience.
Let’s not forget Jonathan Middleswarth. I am currently reading Faulkner’s masterpiece, “Absalom, Absalom”, in which Thomas Sutpen arrives in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833 with a sack of gold coins, buys a huge property from the Chickasaw Indians, builds the finest mansion in the county, and then cons Mr. Coldfield (would you believe that, in a 257-page novel, Faulkner never divulges the first name of a major character?) into surrendering his daughter to him to be his bride. In our story Jonathan Middleswarth is the favorite son of Moses Middleswarth, who has managed to amass a small fortune since coming to Tingooqua Township. When Moses dies, he leaves Jonathan his fortune plus ownership of all the land on the west side of the Pittsburgh/Washington Pike in what is now Bridgeville. In 1828 Jonathan builds “the finest mansion in the county” and arranges with Mr. McKown to be permitted to marry his daughter, Betsy, easily the most desirable young lady in the area. A week before the wedding Betsy sends Jonathan a “dear John letter”, advising him that she had eloped with Benjamin Morrison. Jonathan then vowed to remain a bachelor, and lived the rest of his life as a hermit in “Jonathan’s Folly”. Faulkner could easily have stretched Jonathan’s experience into a full-length novel.
I suspect I have already proven my point, and I am not yet even up to the Civil War! In “The Unvanquished”, John Sartoris organized a regiment to go off to defend Southern culture; in Tingooqua Township, William Boyce organized Company K, First Pennsylvania Cavalry. Early in the War Sartoris was voted out as colonel of his regiment and returned home where he formed another unit. Similarly, Boyce was deemed inappropriate for command, replaced, and sent home. Our Company K stories are numerous – the Bethany Church ladies sewing a battle flag for them; their participation at Gettysburg; the loss of Richard Lesnett at Haws Shop, Virginia; and the post-war activities of veterans (David Shaffer and John Herriott). The transformation of Bridgeville from hamlet to full-fledged village after the War parallels the story of Frenchman’s Bend in Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy. I would love to read Faulkner’s description of our own Norwood Hotel.
Equating our exploitation of “foreigners” to slavery is really too much of a stretch. Nonetheless Faulkner would surely have gotten a lot of mileage out of the way we treated the early coal miners, and built a major prosperity based on their efforts. Bridgeville’s secession from Upper St. Clair Township and incorporation as a formal independent borough, C. P. Mayer’s development of the Kirwan Heights industrial complex, Mayer’s subsequent establishment of the first commercial airfield in western Pennsylvania, and Bridgeville’s ascension to being the business/cultural capital of the middle Chartiers Valley would easily source several novels. Imagine Faulkner describing a summit meeting of Mayer, the Flannery brothers, Ollie Higbee, and Walter Baker, at the Norwood!
We are grateful that the Bridgeville Area Historical Society continues to collect and archive each of these seemingly trivial stories; in total they represent a body of real world cultural anecdotes easily equivalent to all the fictional content of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. We only lack a wordsmith of Faulkner’s caliber to convert them into a memorable epic. Our understanding of our heritage is important. To quote my favorite writer (“Requiem for a Nun”), “The past is never dead. In fact it isn’t even past.”