My grand-daughter, Rachael, has participated in a music program at the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp for the past three years. This summer she was selected to be part of the camp’s International Youth Symphony Orchestra, which recently returned from an exciting three-week tour of Luxembourg, Germany, and France, where they gave seven concerts. The camp is located close to Lake Michigan, near the community of Whitehall. We drove there recently for the orchestra’s Farewell Concert, a very impressive performance. They played an all Rimsky-Korsakov program – “Procession of the Nobles”, “Capricio Espagnol”, and “Scheherezade” – beautifully. The concert was…

Continue reading

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society “Second Tuesday” workshop for July continued our study of the history of Bridgeville High School, this time focusing on the classes of 1952 and 1953. Thanks to the presence of five alumni of those two classes, we had a lively session with lots of input from them. The 1953 class was particularly difficult for me. I knew three of its members – Ron Rothermund, Dale DeBlander, and Russ Kovach – well when they were small children and have been privileged to be close friends with them as adults. When I went away to college in…

Continue reading

The final program in the Bridgeville Area Historical Society 2017-2018 season was an interesting presentation on the Fort Pitt Museum, by its Director of Education, Kathleen Lugarich. Her talk was entitled “Point of Empire: A Brief Overview of Fort Pitt”, an obvious pun on Pittsburgh’s Point and the clash of French and English empires that collided there. Ms. Lugarich began by explaining the significance of the Ohio River to three different cultures. A small number of Native Americans – Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo – made their home in the Ohio Country after being displaced by English settlers on the eastern…

Continue reading

I have been a jazz fan since my college years, and even longer, if you acknowledge the fact that “Swing” was a very important component of popular music in the late 1930s and 1940s. Consequently I was very excited when I learned that my sixteen-year old grandson, Ian McCance, was signed up for Jazz Camp at Duquesne University and would be staying with me for a week. Ian lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. He started playing trumpet in Middle School and quickly became interested in their Jazz Band, much to my pleasure. I have been out to see and hear…

Continue reading

I have just returned from an interesting experience, a trip to “a different world”. My son John and his family are spending a few weeks in northern California while he conducts business at his company’s office in San Mateo. I hadn’t seen them since Christmas and was glad to have the opportunity to fly out there to visit them. Their home base is in Beijing, China, and I lack the stamina for making that long trip to see them; the five-hour flight across the country is enough of a challenge for me. I managed to watch two forgettable movies on…

Continue reading

For history buffs in this area, July is Whiskey Rebellion month. Two hundred and twenty-four years ago this month farmers in western Pennsylvania decided that the new excise tax on the production of whiskey was unfair and onerous and decided to protest. Eventually their confrontation with federal officials led to several fatalities and the complete destruction of General John Neville’s Bower Hill plantation. In response President Washington dispatched an army of thirteen thousand soldiers here to quell the rebellion. This year there were major celebrations of these events in Washington, Pa., at the Oliver Miller Homestead in South Park, and…

Continue reading

The Bridgeville Area Historical Society’s June “Second Tuesday” workshop focused on George Washington’s adventures in western Pennsylvania in 1754. It was the second of a series of seven workshops dedicated to Washington’s seven visits to this area, in support of the Society’s proposed permanent exhibit on that subject. As we get deeper into this project its potential as a resource opportunity becomes even more obvious. The history of this area in the latter half of the eighteenth century is as exciting as the Harry Potter or Stars Wars epics and in addition is based on things that actually occurred. One…

Continue reading

A recent message from Don Colton reminiscing about the “old days” resurrected the subject of nicknames and the perception we all have that this practice was especially prevalent in Bridgeville seventy years ago. To quote Don, “Of all the different places I have lived, Bridgeville stands out for seemingly having a huge penchant for nicknames. Why do you think this is?” The first question of course is whether or not this was unique to Bridgeville or to that specific time period. Like many other octogenarians I scan the obituary notices (also known as “the Irish sports pages” by my Hibernian…

Continue reading

The May program meeting of the Bridgeville Area Historical Society focused on the early history of Upper St. Clair Township with a presentation by Marjorie Stein entitled “Memory Lane”. She prefaced her talk with the statement that her information was based on family lore and was not necessarily historically correct. She began by recounting the history of what is now Upper St. Clair Township. The original St. Clair Township, one of six in Allegheny County, was bounded by Chartiers Creek, the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers, Streets Run, and the Washington County border. The first division was into Lower and Upper…

Continue reading

The Bridgeville area recently lost one its most distinguished citizens with the passing of centenarian Amy Perkins. Aimee Purnell was born on May 20, 1915, the daughter of Leroy and Viola Purnell. Before she was old enough to know her father, World War I took him to France, where he died. We believe he was the first African-American from the Bridgeville area to lose his life in the service of his country. Years later the government arranged for mothers and widows of servicemen buried in France to visit the cemeteries in which their loved ones were buried. Over six thousand…

Continue reading