IUP Geography/Regional Planning Dept. and the Blairsville Improvement Group Present

The Blairsville Hill-to-Hill Walking Field Trip

Led by Dr. Kevin Patrick

September 2006

    In September 2006, IUP's Social Geography class, interested in the town's on-going attempt to redefine itself, teamed up with the Blairsville Improvement Group, town residents and professional to participate in Dr. Kevin Patrick's Hill-to-Hill Historic Walking Field Trip, which cut a transect through downtown Blairsville from the Hilltop Park on the east side of town to Bairdstown Rocks across the Conemaugh River to the west.

Blairsville, Pennsylvania, 1871 (click for larger view)

Breakfast at Dean's Diner, a 1952 Fodero and local institution brought to US 22 soon after the Blairsville Bypass opened.

Packsaddle Gap cut by the Conemaugh River through Chestnut Ridge east of Blairsville.

Auto Era Blairsville

The field trip moves west down Market Street (above) through the old automobile row on the east side of town, and its collection of gas stations and auto show rooms (below). Blairsville was an important service center on the William Penn Highway, an early auto trunk road that carried traffic across the Appalachian Mountains between New York/Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

**************************

Railroad Era Blairsville

Between 1851and 1852, Blairsville was the western terminus of the Philadelphia-anchored Pennsylvania Railroad, and the location where it interfaced with the Western Division Canal to Pittsburgh. This role evaporated by the end of 1852 when the Main Line railroad was completed to Pittsburgh, but Blairsville continued to experience rail related growth with the opening of the Indiana Branch to the county seat in 1856, and the PRR's West Penn Railroad to Pittsburgh by 1866. The Pennsylvania Railroad built the Subway (above) through downtown Blairsville in 1906 for its heavy freight trains traveling the low grade West Penn line through the Conemaugh Valley. The upper track served the Blairsville yard and rail shops, and connected with the Indiana Branch. Norfolk Southern still uses both levels.

Blairsville's first depot, now a private residence, was built in 1851 at Main & Liberty streets near the Pennsylvania Railroad's original Blairsville terminus (below left). The PRR built its second depot, recently renovated by S & T Bank, in 1856 where the Indiana Branch crossed Market Street (below right).

**************************

Blairsville's Block Buildings

Large, Multi-storey, multi-function commercial buildings began to rise in downtown Blairsville during the late19th and early 20th centuries. Block buildings were the skyscrapers of small town America, signifying a well-developed economy with a vibrant banking and business community. They were proud markers of progress, and proof that Blairsville had become a regional market center.

The Brown Block (above left), was built as the Brown Opera House in 1888 with an auditorium on the second floor. Industrial age Blairsville came to center at Market and Stewart streets (above right) where the First National Bank Building was constructed in 1903, followed by the Einstein Block across Stewart Street a year later. Originally known as the Einstein Opera House, the new building's 1,100-seat auditorium eclipsed the Brown as the town's premier show place. Constructed in 1923, the Moose Temple (below left) was Blairsville's last block building, but the first to include a movie theater. Michael Eversmeyer (below right) discusses the restoration of the First National Bank Building, which had been converted in a G. C. Murphy department store after the bank moved out in 1925, and more recently closed with the collapse of the Murphy chain.

The Murphy Building soon after its opening as the First National Bank Building

**************************

Downtown Detail

Downtown Blairsville's rich array of architectural detail is an untapped resource awaiting restoration. This includes fading wall signs (above left) from the early 20th century, 1930s and 1940s-era pigmented structural glass facades (above right), entrance aprons to long lost stores (below left), decorative terra cotta tiles (below right), and nearly 200 years of architectural detailing (bottom).

**************************

Blairsville's Prestigious "A" Street: South Walnut Street

While block buildings were going up on Market Street, Blairsville's upper income professional and business class were constructing comfortable and commodious homes on S. Walnut Street in the latest Victorian and early 20th century Revival styles.

**************************

Blairsville's Diamond

Blairsville's Diamond, or market square, at Market & Main streets was the original center of town, as laid out during the Turnpike Era in 1818. The arrival of the Main Line Canal shifted the town's business fulcrum westward toward the Conemaugh River, and then the railroad encouraged its relocation far to the east near the Pennsylvania's Market Street grade crossing. By the early 20th century, downtown Blairsville centered at Market & Stewart, while the old town to the west withered. Although some Federal era buildings remain (below right), most of the town's oldest commercial structures were razed as part of the Army Corps of Engineers Conemaugh Dam floodway project in 1951-52, or in a 1967-68 urban renewal project. Hill-to-Hill Field Trip participants rest (briefly) at the gazebo that was recently reconstructed in the Diamond, and is now the center of Blairsville's annual Diamond Days Celebration (below left).

The Everett House once stood on the Diamond's northwest corner.

**************************

The Floodway

The Conemaugh River loops around the south and west sides of Blairsville bound within a jungle-like corridor of trees and invasive Japanese knotweed generally known as the Floodway. The Floodway resulted from the Army Corps of Engineers 1952 construction of the Conemaugh Dam, located eight miles downstream. The dam was built to provide a retention pond for floodwaters, working in concert with other Allegheny watershed dams to protect downstream places like Pittsburgh from the type of devastation suffered in the 1936 St. Patrick's Day Flood. The dam's crest at 975 feet above sea level was designated as the boundary contour for the upstream flood impoundment area. Upstream land below that elevation was condemned and bought by the Army Corps of Engineers, who then razed all structures to their foundations, and allowed the floodway to revert to woods. Hundreds of families were relocated, industrial plants like the Blairsville Rolling Mill (closed 1899), and Columbia Glass Works (idle since 1938) were leveled, and the Conemaugh River hamlets of Liverpool, Fillmore, Newport, Bairdstown, Cokeville, and much of Blairsville's Tintown neighborhood were wiped off the map. Remnant bits of foundation-level built environment survive among the underbrush and knotweed.

Conemaugh River, and its impenetrable band of knotweed.

The front steps of a lost Blairsville house are now shaded by fifty years of tree growth (above left). The Cokeville Bridge piers have been long neglected by all but Blairsville youth in search of a swimming hole (above right). Tintown's Liberty Street disappears into the tangled underbrush of the Floodway (below left). Now linking nowhere to nowhere else, the Water Street Bridge still stands over Sulphur Run (below right).

**************************

Bairdstown

Located on the west bank of the Conemaugh River, Bairdstown is one of the Floodway ghost towns leveled by the Army Corps of Engineers in the building of the Conemaugh Dam more than a half century ago. Bairdstown, like other Floodway sites, nonetheless retains a considerable amount of historic and cultural artifacts that can be highlighted as part of an interpretive trail. The first impetus for the village came with Western Division of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, the towpath of which followed the Bairdstown bank along a slackwater section of the canalized Conemaugh River. A back channel was dug parallel to the river bank to serve the Bairdstown wharf and boat yards. Opened to Pittsburgh in 1829, and then to Philadelphia via the Allegheny Portage Railroad in 1834, the canal brought growth to Bairdstown until it was succeeded by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1852. Bairdstown continued to be the home of coal miners working seams that outcropped on hill above town, and laborers employed in Blairsville factories up until the town was abandoned in 1952.

The Conemaugh Dam typically backs up flood waters several times a year, occasionally submerging the deck of the Bairdstown Bridge (above left). The current Bairdstown Bridge is the fourth to occupy the site. The abutments and mid-span pier used by previous bridges are still visible (above right). These stone walls originally supported a 300-foot long covered bridge completed for turnpike traffic in 1822. After this bridge collapsed in 1874, a through truss bridge was built that was destroyed in the Johnstown Flood of 1889. The replacement through truss was itself replaced by the current skewed through truss in 1935, which carried U.S. Route 22 traffic until the Floodway required the completion of a new and higher US 22 Bridge farther downstream in 1953. 

IUP students discover an old spring house to a former Bairdstown residence.

**************************

Bairdstown Hill

The steep slope of Bairdstown Hill rises above Blairsville along the west bank of the southward looping Conemaugh River. In dissecting this slope, the river cut across a number of coal veins, the most important of which was the famed Pittsburgh seam, the main source of high quality, bituminous coking coal for the steel mills of southwestern Pennsylvania. Burrell Mine #1 opened into this seam from an outcropping beneath Hilltop Park on the east side of Blairsville in 1898. Burrell Mine #2 opened just north of Blairsville in 1900, and Burrell Mine #3 opened on Bairdstown Hill in 1901. Burrell #3 was a drift mine that drove into the Pittsburgh seam from a hillside outcrop above the Conemaugh River. Loaded coal cars exiting the mine were carried across the river on a high trestle to a tipple straddling the Pennsylvania Railroad's Blairsville Branch, an industrial spur that also served the factories in Tintown. All three of these mines had closed by the 1930s, but the collapsed portal to Burrell Mine #3 can still be found on the slopes of Bairdstown Hill (below left).

Burrell Mine # 3 portal (above left). 1902 USGS quadrangle showing the locations of Burrell mines numbers 1, 2, and 3 (above right).

**************************

Bairdstown Rocks

At the crest of Bairdstown Hill, a massive layer of sandstone outcrops as a jumbled collection of cliffs, crevices, and caves called Bairdstown Rocks. Although isolated, overgrown and virtually unknown, this natural wonder with its panoramic views of Blairsville and the distant Packsaddle Gap, has recreational potential as a scenic attraction in conjunction with interpretive trails leading up from the Floodway.

After hacking their way through Japanese knotweed, and scrambling up the slippery slopes of Bairdstown Hill, field trippers worker their way into The Slot (above left), passing honeycombed cliff faces (above right), and through Tectonic Cave (below left) to Table Rock (below right).

The Hill-to-Hill Walking Field Trip concluded with a spectacular view of Blairsville and Packsaddle Gap from The Overlook (below left). Kevin Patrick balanced on Balanced Rock (below right).

Blairsville and Packsaddle Gap from Bairdstown Rocks