On behalf of the Bridgeville Area Historical Society, I recently had the opportunity to give a talk to members of the Lakemont Farms Homeowners Association on the early history of their portion of South Fayette, located on the west shore of Chartiers Creek between Bridgeville and Mayview. It was based partially on a talk I gave a few years ago to the South Fayette Seniors.
Once the dispute with Virginia had been resolved, Western Pennsylvania was divided into Washington and Westmoreland Counties. In 1788
Allegheny County was formed from Washington and Westmoreland Counties. Within it, Moon Township was bounded by the Ohio River and Chartiers Creek. Fayette Township was carved out of Moon Township in 1790, then divided into North and South Fayette Townships in 1842. Collier Township was created in 1875 from parts of South Fayette, North Fayette, and Robinson Townships. Since then South Fayette’s boundaries have not changed.
We currently believe that the first humans in this general area visited the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter eighteen thousand years ago, give or take a few millennia. By about 1000 AD the native Americans had evolved into a culture that was quickly approaching civilization.
In this area they are known as the Monongahela People. They lived in organized villages in huts, were proficient at making tools, and practiced agriculture. Their artifacts have been found in numerous sites in the Chartiers Valley – Woodville, Boyce Station, and Gould City Hill.
There were other, similar cultures elsewhere in North America. The capital city of the Mississippi People, Cahokia in southern Illinois, boasted 20,000 inhabitants. Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon in the Four Corners area were also advanced cultures.
Mysteriously, all these cultures disappeared in the next few centuries. Perhaps it was climate change – drought or the well-documented “Little Ice Age”. Perhaps they were over-run by less civilized neighboring tribes. At any rate by the time the European settlers arrived, western Pennsylvania was a hunting ground dominated by the Iroquois, with very few permanent residents.
The one native American they encountered in this area was a Delaware chieftain named Tingooqua, whom they promptly renamed “Catfish”. His permanent home was Kuskuskis, a village close to today’s New Castle. More relevant is the fact that he retained a hunting camp on the headwaters of Chartiers Creek, now downtown Washington. Catfish Path, a trail from that location to the Ohio River, roughly following Chartiers Creek, is his legacy.
We know very little about the first settler in this immediate vicinity – the mysterious Mr. Miller. Local legend has it that a man named Miller staked a claim in 1768 at the mouth of a creek that he named for himself, then sold his claim to speculator John Campbell for a pair of shoes and moved west. Campbell died in 1803, leaving his claim (“The Mouth of Miller’s Run”) to his sister, who sold it to Presley Neville in 1804. Neville sold it to Robert Johnson in 1807.
We do know a lot about the first permanent settler, Christian Lesnett. He was born in Germany in 1728 and emigrated in 1752. In 1757 he married Christiana; they had five sons and three daughters. In 1763 he participated in the Bouquet Expedition, which raised the siege of Fort Pitt during Pontiac’s Rebellion. He liked the area so much that he decided to move here when the Treaty of Fort Stanwix opened up this area to settlers.
In the Spring of 1768 he and two of his sons, Frederick (14) and Francis (12), came to the Coal Pit Run area, staked a claim, cleared land, planted crops, and built a crude cabin. The boys stayed behind when he returned to Cumberland, Maryland, to participate in a court case, expecting him to return “before snow flies”. Things didn’t work out that way, and they were forced to spend the winter there alone. They had a happy reunion when the rest of the family returned the next Spring.
Three years later the Richard Boyce family arrived and settled in what is now known as Boyce Station. Boyce was an Irish Quaker who originally settled in the Shenandoah Valley. He and his wife, Lydia Fawcett Young, had three children before she died, in 1789. He then visited his neighbors, the Lesnetts, and persuaded twenty-two-year-old Peggy Lesnett to marry him. They had seven children, including Elizabeth in 1809, when he was seventy-five years old.
Next to arrive, in 1774, was Nicolas Hickman. Another German, he and his wife emigrated in 1752 and settled in eastern Pennsylvania. He purchased land for “one cow” from an old pioneer (probably William Brice). The Hickman property, along Hickory Grade Road, included Hickman’s Hill, the highest point in southern Allegheny County. During World War II it was the location of an aircraft spotter’s station, where old men and teen-aged boys searched the skies for enemy planes.
The specific area where Lakemont Farms is located was settled by the Herriot family, who acquired “Coal Bank” from George Gillston. Their estate was located on the west bank of Chartiers Creek, south of the mouth of Coal Pit Run. James Herriot established a stage coach inn on the Black Horse Trail (Catfish Path upgraded by the settlers). The first Post Office in the area, “Herriotsville”, was located at the inn in 1820.
James Ramsey was an absentee landlord who acquired the land in Bridgeville that included the spot where the Black Horse Trail forded Chartiers Creek. He improved the crossing by trucking in stone to even out the passage and grading the ramps down to the creek, then installed a toll booth.
The local farmers responded by proving Chartiers Creek was navigable, “worrying” a home-made raft loaded with flour from Canon’s Mill (Canonsburg) to the Ohio River. The Pennsylvania Legislature’s passage of the Navigable Waters Act in 1793 then permitted the farmers to build a crude timber bridge at the site, the bridge that gave Bridgeville its name.
On the east bank of Chartiers Creek, opposite Herriotsville, was the estate of Alexander Fowler. He came to North America as an officer in the British Army. He resigned his commission in 1774 and served with the Continental Army during the Revolution. His estate, “Wingfield Mills”, included two water wheels, a grist mill, a sawmill, and two distilleries.
Richard Noble patented a large warrant on the northern edge of South Fayette, on Robinson Run. His son Henry built a trading post there and cut a “trace” for pack trains east to Hager’s Town. It ran through Bridgeville, up Ridge Road, then down through “Shades of Death” to McLaughlin Run, then east to “Sodom” (Clifton). It was an important east-west highway.
Earlier we mentioned Robert Johnson as the ultimate owner of the “The Mouth of Miller’s Run”. He originally was a tenant of the Neville family at Woodville. When John Neville was appointed to collect Alexander Hamilton’s Whiskey Tax, he hired Johnson as an Excise Collector. Johnson turned out to be the first tax collector “tarred and feathered” by the Whiskey Rebels. Years later he built grist mill in Bridgeville, close to the present location of the Bridgeville History Center.
The Middleswarth family originally settled the property north of the mouth of Millers Run, then acquired most of Bridgeville west of the Washington Pike (successor to the Black Horse Trail). Jonathan Middleswarth inherited the family’s wealth and became the region’s most eligible bachelor. He selected Betsy McKown to be his fiancé and built a handsome mansion for her in Bridgeville. Two weeks before the wedding she eloped with Benjamin Morrison, leaving him a bitter recluse living out his years in “Jonathan’s Folly”.
We are fortunate that stories about all of these early settlers have been recorded and embellished down through the years. The transition from wilderness to farms and coal mines and finally to prosperous suburbs has progressed gradually for the past two and a half centuries. One wonders what the future holds for this region.