My visits to the Bridgeville Area Historical Society are always pleasant, and frequently quite rewarding. The volunteers there include many of my favorite people. When I stopped there last Friday, Leesa Shady greeted me with “I think we found something you were looking for” and promptly produced a large scrapbook, which I immediately recognized, one that had been misplaced for a number of years. For me it is a treasure house of Bridgeville history.
Three decades ago when I began writing this column, Bridgeville history was a frequent topic. Invariably, a few days after an historical column was published I would receive a polite letter from Virginia from Jimmy Patton, full of corrections to my narrative. Even though he had moved from this area fifty years earlier, he still was the reigning expert on our past. When I reported that the “Murray House” at 745 Washington Avenue was one of the oldest buildings still in existence in the borough, he courteously advised me that its proper designation was “the old Donaldson House” and proceeded to instruct me on the history of the Donaldson family.
Jimmy left Bridgeville at the beginning of World War II and spent the rest of his life in Washington DC and nearby Virginia. Nonetheless his ties here were never broken. He occasionally came back and gave talks on our early history. We were aware that he maintained a valuable scrapbook on the subject, including fascinating discussions with his uncle, John Poellot. Large excerpts from those discussions were included in the Historical Society book, Bridgeville, when we published it in 2010. When he died, the scrapbook was inherited by his sister Jane (who also had contributed an excellent piece to the book), and eventually by the final remaining sibling, Patty Patton Lawrence. Upon her passing, the scrapbook finally was donated to the Historical Society.
I immediately commandeered it and wrote a number of columns based on information in it. I carefully inventoried its contents and returned it to the History Center, accompanied by passionate instructions regarding its historical value. Despite my pleas, a year or so later when I asked to borrow it, the volunteers who were there at that point had no idea what I was requesting. Ever since then I have regularly reminded the folks at the Center of the value of this artifact. Since they have been active at the Center, Linda Tome and Leesa have made a serious effort to humor me and look for it. Sure enough, a week or so ago as Leesa was going through boxes of un-recorded artifacts, she found the scrapbook and instantly recognized what it was.
The biggest challenge for any museum is the determination of the historical significance of a specific artifact. Once the curator has decided it is an appropriate addition to the museum’s collection, all its relevant information (including its location in the museum) must be carefully recorded in a user-friendly format. For the past several years Leesa has been meticulously doing this for new acquisitions; now she is investigating un-documented items. I couldn’t be more pleased that this effort turned up the scrapbook.
In the early 1930s a teen-aged Jimmy Patton kept pestering his octogenarian Uncle John for information on Bridgeville in the nineteenth century. The Poellots, including a precocious young son John, came to Bridgeville in 1859 from Sodom (now Clifton), moving into a house on the Washington Pike. John Poellot’s memory was so good that, seven decades later, he was able to draw a map of Bridgeville in 1859 showing the two dozen buildings that it included and to name the 110 persons who occupied them. Separately he named the 94 students who attended school at least part-time – mainly of them from nearby farms. The scrapbook includes the original documents that he produced, plus type-written (by Jimmy?) transcript copies of them.
A major facility in this tiny village in 1859 was the Shaffer fulling mill. It was a major source of income for local farmers as an outlet for wool from sheared sheep. In the mill the wool was carded, spun into yarn, and woven into fabric, primarily for blankets. John Poellot had worked in the mill as a young man; when Jimmy asked for information about it, he responded by drawing a neat sketch of it which someone (Jimmy?) colored with crayons. He also drew floor plans for the mill, showing the location of major equipment – looms, the boiler, etc. The originals of all these documents are in the scrapbook; it is indeed one of the most valuable artifacts in any of the impressive collections housed in the History Center.
In addition to the original Poellot/Patton documents, the scrapbook is full of other valuable Bridgeville historical artifacts, primarily brittle, brown-edged newspaper clippings. I am particularly interested in a summary of the first dozen years of Bridgeville Borough council minutes, beginning in 1901. Borough Secretary James Franks carefully recorded transactions. One of the final ones reported the negotiation for construction of the Borough Building on Washington Avenue; Colussy Brothers Builders were the successful bidders, for $6,800. I also liked a series of programs for “Circuit Chautauquas” presented in Bridgeville for three consecutive years in the early 1920s. These programs (unrelated to the Chautauqua Institution) delivered culture to small towns with a travelling group of lecturers, musicians, and actors. Their performances in Bridgeville must have been the ultimate in excitement.
Now that this trove of treasures has been relocated, I am full of questions regarding its preservation. I think the Poellot/Patton originals should be stored in acid-resistant envelopes, supplemented by photo-copies and digital files. Perhaps the original map and sketches should be framed and displayed. At any rate, I am grateful to the History Center volunteers for taking such good care of them; some future amateur local historian will be as thrilled as I am to have access to them.