During his presentation on the “Great Castle Shannon Bank Robbery” last month the speaker projected a map of Castle Shannon in 1917 on the screen. When I realized it showed several railroads, my interest peaked. I am in the process of writing a chapter on local railroads for an upcoming book on the Civil Engineering Heritage of Western Pennsylvania, and I need all the help I can get. I immediately resolved to corner the speaker after his talk and request a copy of the map he was showing, then realized that this is indeed 2017. I promptly pulled out my…

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The March program meeting for the Bridgeville Area Historical Society was a very entertaining talk by retired Keystone Oaks middle school history teacher Edd Hale, entitled “The Great Castle Shannon Bank Robbery”. When I first heard the title, I thought it would be more appropriate for a British comedy starring Alec Guinness or perhaps an Abbot and Costello film, rather than for a presentation to an audience of history buffs. Turns out I wasn’t far wrong. Although the event was tragic – five men eventually died – it was peppered with absurd incidents that did indeed, as Mr. Hale commented,…

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Two months ago we wrote a column on the first of four historic maps of Pennsylvania that Dana Spriggs recently donated to the Bridgeville Area Historical Society, and promised to discuss the others in future columns. The second map is entitled “Pennsylvania, entworfen von D. F. Sotzman” with a subtitle “Hamburg bey Carl Ernst Bohn, 1797.” Daniel Friederich Sotzmann was a prominent German mapmaker in the late 1800s; Herr Bohn ran a publishing firm in Hamburg. This map was one of their best-known products. It is indeed a beauty. The legend (explanation or “erklarung” in German) is full of interesting…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society “Second Tuesday” workshop for March was a follow-up to the previous month’s project, an effort to document the businesses, institutions, and residences on Washington Avenue during the War Years. During the February session a suggestion was made that the facilitator refer to the 1940 U. S. Census for information regarding families that lived on Washington Avenue at that time. This was done, and revised copies of the map of the area between Chartiers Street and Station Street were passed on, showing this information. This was effective for the stand-alone residences, but generated a new collection…

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Feedback from readers of this column continues to be a great source of satisfaction for me, especially when someone I don’t know recognizes me and reports his or her enjoyment in reading the column. Even more satisfying are the unsolicited comments I get from readers regarding things they have read in a particular column. I recently received an email from Ronald Carlisle regarding my puzzlement with the term “a point near Cowan”s” which was one of the Landmarks in Charles DeHass’ original alignment for the Washington and Pittsburgh (later Chartiers Valley) Railroad. Mr. Carlisle is a legitimate expert on the…

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The Bridgeville Area Historical Society’s February program meeting was an extremely interesting talk by local Civil Engineer Todd Wilson, entitled “The History of Pittsburgh’s Bridges”, which coincidentally is the topic of an Arcadia “Images of America” book he recently authored. The speaker began with a drawing of Fort Pitt which clearly showed footbridges across the moat around the fort, confirming that the topic went back at least two hundred and sixty years. By 1818 the first bridge across the Monongahela River was constructed, at the Smithfield Street location which currently is occupied by the historic bridge with that name. The…

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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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