I usually don’t pay much attention to occasions like Black History Month and Presidents Day, but this year I enjoyed special events from both of them on back to back days. On Sunday, February 19, we went to Dormont to the Hollywood Theater to see a classic silent movie, “The Flying Ace”. The theater is operated by the Friends of the Hollywood Theater, a non-profit organization whose mission is to celebrate cinema and preserve the single-screen theater experience. It began life as a silent movie theater in the 1920s and currently is one of a very few surviving single-screen theaters…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society “Second Tuesday” workshop for February focused on “downtown” Bridgeville in the 1940s, an effort to document the businesses, institutions, and residences on Washington Avenue during the War Years. The facilitator established the mood for the program by reading an eloquent document written by Jane Patton for the Bethany Church Servicemen’s Newsletter in August, 1944. The Newsletter was sent monthly to Bridgeville area servicemen all over the world in an effort to let them know the folks on the Home Front were thinking of them. In this issue Jane recorded a hypothetical walk up Washington Avenue…

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In an earlier column I mentioned that Judy Oelschlager Dames had loaned us a family heirloom, the ticket book her mother, Pauline Engel, used when she accompanied Mr. and Mrs. C. P. Mayer on an excursion to Los Angeles in 1924. Miss Engel was serving as Mrs. Mayer’s “companion”; this was an exciting experience for a young lady who had only been in this country four years at the time. The occasion was the sixth annual convention of the Common Brick Manufacturers’ Association of America, an organization in which Mr. Mayer was a prominent member. It appears that this organization…

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One of my long term projects is to write a chapter about railroads for a book entitled “The Civil Engineering Heritage of Western Pennsylvania”, to be published by the History and Heritage Committee of the Pittsburgh Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. I immediately realized that the beginning of the chapter should be the story of the beginning of the Chartiers Valley Railroad, the first example of railroad engineering in this region. I knew that a group of developers decided to organize a corporation to build a railroad linking Washington, Pa. and Pittsburgh, in 1830. The construction of…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society welcomed back Dr. Jack Aupperle for its January program meeting. As is its custom, the Society holds its January and February program meetings on Sunday afternoons, to minimize potential winter weather complications for its members. Dr. Aupperle has a remarkable talent for reviewing current historical books and using their content as a basis for presenting a comprehensive picture of a relevant event or individual. This time it was “Admiral Bill Halsey: A Naval Life” by renowned historian Thomas Alexander Hughes. The speaker drew on Hughes’ biography of the well-known World War II hero to portray…

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The most recent addition to the Bridgeville Area Historical Society archives is a collection of four large historical maps of Pennsylvania, donated by Dana Spriggs, a donation greatly appreciated especially by me. Being a Civil Engineer and surveyor and possessing an MOS (military occupational specialty) of cartographic draftsman, I am thrilled by every map I see and particularly old maps of this region. The first map has a title in French, “La Pensilvanie, en trois Feuilles”. I think “trois Feuilles” refers to its size – three sheets. The print Dana sent is about twenty four inches high by forty eight…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society’s January “Second Tuesday” program was a comprehensive review of the C. P. Mayer Brick Company, brickmaking in general, and the unusual hobby of brick collecting. Based on the variety of comments and questions it is obvious this was a popular topic. The facilitator began with a brief overview of the brick-making process. Raw materials include sand (silica), clay (alumina), lime, magnesia, iron oxide, and water combined in fairly specific proportions. The mixture is then ground very fine; mixed well; and fired at temperatures well over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. The Mayer Brick Company mined shale on…

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I spent most of the first full weekend of this month “putting away Christmas”, carefully wrapping up our precious collection of artifacts that constitute our family’s Yuletide heritage. This was a difficult Christmas for us, the first since my wife’s passing. Nonetheless it was a joyful occasion with our house filled with grandchildren and their parents, eleven in total. Holidays and family were always important to my wife; consequently Christmas was her favorite time of year. She particularly enjoyed hand-crafting things for the holidays, apparently a tradition in her family. One year she hand-painted overboards, to be placed on top…

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We think the first newspaper in Bridgeville was published by C. P. Mayer sometime around the turn of the twentieth century; we have no record of its name nor the duration of its existence. We also know that, at least in 1918, John W. Knepper published a four page weekly newspaper called “The Bridgeville Signal”; again we have no record of its duration. We also know that publication of “the Bridgeville News” was begun in 1926 as “a means of helping Francis P. Cavanaugh through college and University”, according to a document entitled “Ethnographic Survey of Bridgeville” written by Alex…

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Veteran readers of this column are aware of my fascination with Catfish Path, the ancient Indian trail from what is today Washington, Pa., to the Ohio River, roughly following the Chartiers Creek valley. The southern terminus of the trail was Catfish Camp, allegedly named for a Native American whose name, in the language of the Delawares was Tingooqua. I have assumed there was someone with that name, but never knew for sure that he actually existed. Last Fall when I attended the re-enactment of the termination of the Mason-Dixon Line survey, I was surprised to see a re-enactor portraying a…

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