For its October program meeting the Bridgeville Area Historical Society entertained a substitute presenter (Yours Truly), when the scheduled speaker had to cancel because of health issues. The replacement talk was a brief run-through of Bridgeville’s history, related as a series of anecdotes based on people who typified life in this area down through the years.
The first three subjects were Native Americans, beginning with an anonymous primitive hunter whose recent ancestors had reached North America from Siberia when the last Ice Age lowered sea level enough to create a land bridge between Asia and America. A nomadic hunter who lived on large mammals killed by spears, he left artifacts at the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter perhaps 18,000 years ago. By 1000 AD his descendants had evolved into a peaceful, semi-civilized society with a settlement along Chartiers Creek, now an important archaeological site called the Drew Site. Typifying them was a matriarch, leader of a family group that lived in a semi-permanent village, farmed, and made their own tools. Mysteriously, this society was displaced by the war-like Indians the settlers encountered centuries later. By 1750 the Iroquois had transformed this region into a hunting ground; history records one famous hunter, Delaware chieftain Tingooqua (called Catfish by the settlers), whose legacy was the Catfish Path — the trail from his camp in Washington, Pa., to the Forks of the Ohio.
The first (European) settler here was Christian Lesnett. When the Fort Stanwix Treaty of 1768 opened up this area for settlement, he arrived with two teen-aged sons and staked his claim. Forced to return to Cumberland, Maryland, for a court case, he left the boys behind, then was unable to return until the next Spring. Like true Lesnetts, the boys survived the winter in the wilderness and happily greeted their family when they arrived in the Spring. In contrast to the Lesnetts, the John Neville family members were wealthy when they came here from Virginia. They established a large plantation and built two mansions – Bower Hill and Woodville. Woodville has survived; Bower Hill was burned to the ground at the inception of the Whiskey Rebellion. Another wealthy Virginia planter, Thomas Ramsey, is remembered as a villain. Possessor of the claim for the land where the Catfish Path (by then known as the Black Horse Trail) crossed Chartiers Creek at the south end of Bridgeville, he attempted to charge a toll for farmers using that crossing. This was thwarted when the farmers floated a keelboat loaded with flour down Chartiers Creek from Canonsburg to the Ohio River, proving the (navigable) Creek was public property. When Ramsey gave up and sold his claim to Moses Middleswarth, they then built a wooden bridge (possibly the first bridge in Allegheny County) that eventually gave Bridgeville its name.
The mid-nineteenth century provided four more candidates. Jonathan Middleswarth is remembered for the mansion known as Jonathan’s Folly, built as a wedding gift for his fiancée, who jilted him a week before their wedding. Allegheny County’s only United States Supreme Court Justice, Henry Baldwin, built a palatial summer home, “Recreation” in Greenwood Place, in 1828. Two years later surveyor Charles DeHaas laid out the right-of-way for the Chartiers Valley Railroad, an impactful artery that abruptly transformed this area from a quiet hamlet into a prosperous village. Richard Lesnett, a Civil War fatality from the Cold Harbor battle, represented “the Bridgeville Company”, Company K of the 1st Pennsylvania Cavalry, heroes of that war.
C. P. Mayer came here in 1879 to work in A J Schulte’s Bridgeville coal mine; his later accomplishments included a building supplies store, a brick yard, an airport, and the Bridgeville Land Improvement Company, which attracted four major manufacturing facilities to this area. John B. Higbee represented the J. B. Higbee Glass Company; Joseph Flannery, the Flannery Bolt Company and the Vanadium Corporation of American; and Walter Baker, the Universal Rolling Mill Company. Law and order in this area was typified by Allegheny County Detective Robert Lee McMillen. The only time he failed “to get his man” was the 1914 murder of Pennsylvania Railroad Station Master James Franks.
In 1918 the Colussy family acquired the franchise for Chevrolet vehicles; today it is the oldest continuous Chevrolet agency in the world. Albert Colussy was selected to represent them. The twenty-two area servicemen dying in World War were represented by Roy Purnell and the poignant tale of his widow’s trip to France to visit his grave, funded by her employer, Dr. Fife, irate when he learned she had been refused participation in a federal program for war widows because of her race. Two athletes were recognized – Burkey Jones, member of the 1924 US Olympic soccer team; and Aldo “Buff” Donelli, another international soccer star and a renowned college football coach.
World War II produced another sixty-six fatalities. When my brother wrote his book, “Almost Forgotten”, honoring local men who lost their lives in service to our country, he chose a photograph of Alex Asti, the first local serviceman to die in World War II, for its cover. A true hero of another war is Dr. William Shadish. He was serving in an Army Field Hospital in North Korea when the Chinese entered the Korean War and drove our troops back to the 38th Parallel. Ordered to evacuate, he refused to leave his patients, dooming him to over 1,000 days in a Chinese POW camp where he saved numerous lives despite the lack of adequate medicines and facilities. One of those he saved is another Bridgeville boy, Larry Donovan.
We are grateful for being able to get through this presentation without serious mishap; our thanks to the audience for their courtesy and attention. The next Society program meeting will be at 7:30 pm, Tuesday, November 26, 2024, in the Chartiers Room of the Bridgeville Volunteer Fire Department when Frances Halley will discuss “Pennsylvania Folk Art”.