Wild Allegheny

10/05/2026

When the people of Franklin reached the Bully Hill road that August morning in 1870, the iron tire of a buggy wheel was hanging in one tree and a man's boot was hanging in another.

The boot belonged to William A. Thompson, and to understand how it got there you have to know what a torpedo was in the oil country. By the late 1860s drillers had learned that a well that had quit could often be brought back by lowering a metal shell full of nitroglycerine down the hole and setting it off, cracking the rock at the bottom so the oil could run again. Colonel E. A. L. Roberts built a company on the idea, and the men who hauled and fired the shells drove the stuff over rutted hill roads in buggies and wagons. By the summer of 1870 nitroglycerine had already taken seven lives in the region, and one of them was Dr. Fowler of Franklin, whose magazine on the hill above the Allegheny Valley depot had gone up the year before with him inside it.

Thompson had come to Franklin from Clearfield County in 1853 and married two years later, and the oil historian John McLaurin remembered him for his social qualities and high character. That morning he drove a torpedo out to a well on the Foster farm with a man named John Quinn. At the farm he was handed two old torpedoes that had sat there five or six weeks because they had failed to go off, and he agreed to carry them back to the factory. Quinn went home up the river by train, and Thompson took the buggy.

On the way he stopped at Samuel Graham's place on Bully Hill, got an apple, lit a cigar, and on his way out said, "Good-bye, Sam, perhaps you'll never see me again!"

Five minutes later Graham heard the explosion, about a mile from where Dr. Fowler had died. He and his neighbors ran down the road and found Thompson fifty feet from it. The wounded horse had dragged the front wheels a hundred yards before it fell, and the rest of the buggy was splinters. He was thirty nine, and he left a wife and a daughter in Franklin.

He was not the last. Within weeks a torpedo man named William Pine went the same way coming down a steep hill near Rouseville, and when McLaurin set the whole list down in his book a quarter century later, it had grown long enough that he called it appalling.

Portrait published 1896, brought to life. Image: McLaurin, Sketches in Crude Oil, public domain.

10/03/2026

In 1982 the state put a marker at the corner of 13th Street and Franklin Avenue. It says John Chapman, an actual person as well as a folk hero, lived nearby along French Creek between 1797 and 1804, with a nursery here and one near Warren, before he moved on to Ohio.

The next year the Franklin Area Chamber of Commerce was looking for something to pull the town together. The economy had gone soft and people wanted a reason to be downtown. On the long range planning committee was a newcomer named Lee Chapman, no relation, who had come to Franklin from South Africa. She looked at the orchards on the hills and the marker on the corner and suggested the town celebrate the apple. The first Applefest was 1983. The original event was an apple pie baking contest.

It's grown into one of the biggest festivals in northwest Pennsylvania, hundreds of vendors and somewhere around a hundred thousand people over the weekend, and almost nobody walking Liberty Street knows the man it's named for was real.

I told his story in July. The link is in the comments. This weekend, if you're downtown, walk two blocks up to 13th and Franklin and read the marker. Then go get a pie.

10/02/2026

Franklin hosts Applefest this weekend where hundreds of vendors line the parks and streets selling all the crafts. I'll have this map of the river towns from Warren to Pittsburgh with me.

Allegheny River Towns from Warren to Pittsburgh.

09/30/2026

The Austin Dam was finished in December 1909. It stood for less than two months before it moved.

On January 22, 1910, with the reservoir full behind it, the base of the dam slid about eighteen inches downstream and the middle bowed out thirty one inches. A gravity dam is supposed to hold by its own weight, sitting on bedrock. This one sat on a layer of sandstone and shale that let water get underneath, and water pushing up from below lifts a dam the same way it pushes against the face. The crew's fix was to dynamite a notch in the crest to lower the water and take the pressure off. Then the mill filled it back up.

By the fall of 1911 the reservoir was holding about 260 million gallons, up from the 200 million it was built for, and the spillway margin had been trimmed from four feet to two and a half to get there. Bayless Pulp and Paper needed the water. The mill ran on it.

The morning of September 30 was clear. Around two in the afternoon a section near the east end let go, and the rest followed it in pieces. The telephone operator in Austin, Cora Brooks, got a call from the dam and stayed on the switchboard ringing the town while the water came down the valley. She is one of the reasons the number was 78 and not several hundred. Austin had close to 2,900 people that day.

The families settled with the company for about $600,000 total. Two years later Pennsylvania passed its first law requiring a permit to build a dam, and inspection of the ones already standing. That law is the direct result of this valley.

About 480 people live in Austin now. The dam's broken sections still stand where they landed, at Austin Dam Memorial Park on Route 872, and you can walk right up to them.

09/29/2026

The man who had just shot Henry Clay Frick twice was pinned to the office floor, chewing on something, when Frick, bleeding from the neck, told the deputy sheriff not to shoot him. Leave him to the law, he said, but raise his head and let me see his face. They pried the man's jaw open and found a capsule of fulminate of mercury, enough to blow up everyone in the room.

Frick had started out on a Westmoreland County farm, a grandson of Abraham Overholt of the Old Overholt wh***ey family, and as a young clerk he told people he would make a million dollars. He borrowed to build coke ovens, the brick ovens that bake coal into fuel for steel mills, bought out his scared partners in the Panic of 1873, and on his thirtieth birthday checked the books, bought a five cent cigar on credit and went to bed a millionaire.

By 1892 he ran Carnegie Steel, and that summer he broke the union at Homestead. He locked the men out, fenced the works, and sent three hundred Pinkerton guards up the Monongahela on barges, and on July 6 seven steelworkers and three Pinkertons were killed on the riverbank. Seventeen days later a young anarchist named Alexander Berkman, who wanted to answer Homestead with a killing, walked into Frick's office in downtown Pittsburgh with a revolver and a sharpened file.

The first bullet went through Frick's ear into his neck and the second hit the other side of it. The third went into the ceiling, because his partner John Leishman knocked the gun up. Frick still dragged Berkman down and held him there through three stabs of the file until the clerks piled on.

Then he wired his mother that he was shot twice but not dangerously, refused the anesthetic so he could guide the surgeons to the bullets, and sat at his desk to finish a loan and sign his letters. His newborn son died eleven days later. Two days after the funeral Frick rode the streetcar back to work.

When he died in 1919 he left Pittsburgh 151 acres for a park, free to the people. Frick Park has grown to 644 acres since, the largest of the city's regional parks.

Portrait published 1903, animated.
Image: Bridge, The Inside History of the Carnegie Steel Company, public domain.

09/29/2026

The Warren County Historical Society has a pair of boots that were on Henry Rouse's feet the night of April 17, 1861, and they are the only part of what he was wearing that came out of the fire in one piece.

He had come to Warren County twenty years before that with one dollar. He was a Westfield, New York boy who had read law in a lawyer's office and left the academy owing tuition, and in the winter of 1840 he took the school at Tidioute, where the district paid him in wooden shingles. By 1844 he had a store at Enterprise with a partner named Brigham, then sawmills, then a thousand acres of pine, and in 1858 and 1859 the county sent him to the legislature in Harrisburg.

Then Drake struck oil at Titusville in August 1859 and everything on Oil Creek changed at once. Before the year was out Rouse had gone in with William Barnsdall and Boone Meade on a well on the Parker farm, the third oil well drilled in Pennsylvania, and by February 1860 it was making sixty barrels a day. It cost them about 3,000 dollars and cleared 13,000 in four months, which is roughly what a man teaching school for shingles would not see in a lifetime. That July he and two partners leased the Buchanan farms, 425 acres on Oil Creek, and the town that grew up on them was named for him the following February, because a local company president printed Rouseville on his letterhead and nobody argued.

On the evening of April 17, 1861, Fort Sumter had fallen three days before and the country was at war. Rouse and his clerk and six other men had finished supper at Anthony's Hotel and were talking about it when a laborer ran in from the Little and Merrick well to say it had struck oil at three hundred feet, and hard, gas and water and oil lifting the tools out of the hole. Nobody had built a tank. Men ran with shovels to dig a trench and throw up a bank to hold the oil while it ran across the ground, and the damp evening air filled with gas. Something lit it. One account says coals under a boiler, another says a cigar. Two wells, the tanks and an acre of oil soaked ground went up in one flash with ninety or a hundred people standing in it.

Rouse was beside the derrick. The first flash blinded him, he stumbled and fell in the wet ground, threw his wallet and papers clear of the fire, got up, went a dozen steps and went down again. Two men, Uriah Smith and E. N. Wheeler, ran into the flames and dragged him out. His clothes were gone. They carried him to a drilling shanty and he lived five hours.

He used them. Sipping water from a spoon at every breath, he dictated a will in twenty three sections and had six witnesses put their names to it. Half his estate was to go to the roads of Warren County and half to its poor. He remembered his clerk, his hired boy, the two men who had carried him out, and people who owed him money. When a preacher in the shanty asked to pray with him he said his account was made up, and that if he was a debtor it would be cowardly to ask for credit now.

Fifteen men died in the fire that night by the count in the 1865 oil region atlas, and thirteen more were scarred for life. Later counts, and the state marker in Rouseville, say nineteen dead, with Rouse among them. He was 37.

Then the law got involved. Pennsylvania had passed a statute in 1855 that voided any gift to charity made in a will inside a month of the death, and Rouse had died the same night he wrote his. The will was worthless, and his father in New York was the heir. It took a settlement with the family and an act of the legislature in April 1862 creating the Commissioners of the Rouse Estate before the money moved, and in November 1863 just over 186,000 dollars reached Warren County. In 1865 the county spent 13,500 of it on four hundred acres outside Youngsville and built the Rouse Home. It has been taking care of people ever since, and it still does, as the Rouse Estate.

They buried him beside his mother in Westfield, the way he asked, with no sermon.

The fire you see was painted the year it happened, by James Hamilton, and hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Portrait published 1896 and an 1861 painting, animated.
Images: McLaurin, Sketches in Crude Oil; James Hamilton, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Both public domain.

09/25/2026

The bridge inspector on the Kinzua Viaduct, a man named Charles P. Stauffer, fell 65 feet off it in the winter of 1883 into deep snow, got up, and went back to work. He inspected that bridge for another sixteen years. In 1899 he fell again, 60 feet this time, and it killed him. The next summer, when the crew finished the new steel bridge, it was his son Andy they handed the gold rivet to.

The bridge crossed the Kinzua valley in McKean County, about two hours north of Franklin, and it is a different Kinzua from the dam that shares its name. It got built because of coal. In 1882 General Thomas Kane's railroad needed to move McKean County coal to Buffalo and the valley sat across the line, so instead of laying six extra miles of track around it the company had Octave Chanute design a bridge straight over, the same Chanute who would later coach the Wright brothers on gliders. The ironwork went up with two steam hoists and a crew of forty, thirty six of them making two to three dollars a day and the four foremen five to six. When it was done it was 2,053 feet long, a railroad running through the air at the height of a thirty story building.

It was never a gentle place. In 1889 a coupling broke on a southbound train and three cars went off the side and fell the full 301 feet.

The 1900 rebuild had its own summer. The crew took the tallest of the old iron towers down in seven and a half days, worked off two 180 foot timber travelers rolling out from each end, and lost a week to a strike, a day to a presidential candidate's speech, and time to a forest fire before they opened on September 25. The new steel weighed 6,715,000 pounds, twice the iron it replaced. The three photographs of the thin iron towers in the video came out of the Phoenix Bridge Company's own 1885 sales album; the men at the pier were photographed around 1900; the aerials are a 1971 government survey.

The steel bridge carried coal and freight until 1959, Sunday excursion trains at a dollar a head in its early years, and sightseeing trains from 1987 to 2002. On July 21, 2003, a tornado hit it broadside and eleven of the twenty towers came down in under thirty seconds. The bridge had been closed for repairs for a year and nobody was on it. The state left the steel where it fell, and the six standing towers carry a walkway now. Off Route 6 at Mount Jewett.

Photographs: Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record, 1882 to 1971

09/25/2026

The day Denman Thompson was born, his father went out and planted a tree on the west side of the house, and a hundred years later a government surveyor sent to measure the place before it fell down wrote on his form that the tree was still standing.

The house was in Girard township, less than a mile from the Devil's Backbone, the ridge above Elk Creek that Girard people still know by name, and Rufus Thompson had come into that country in the spring of 1831 and built it out of the trees he cut clearing the ground. The surveyor who came in the 1930s listed what he found: hand hewn posts and rafters, lath split by hand, plaster mixed on the premises. Under Present Condition he wrote one word. Dilapidated.

The boy born in that house on October 15, 1833 went back to New Hampshire with his family at fourteen, and at nineteen he went on the stage at Lowell, Massachusetts, which in 1852 meant variety, the halls where a performer did whatever the bill needed that night, a song, a dance, a comic turn. He did that for better than twenty years. Then in January 1875, at 41, playing a Pittsburgh hall called Harry Martin's Varieties, he tried a sketch he had written himself, twenty minutes long, two scenes, about a quiet old Yankee farmer named Joshua Whitcomb who comes to the city and mostly just talks. It was the opposite of everything else on a variety bill. It ran two weeks. He toured it for ten years, and by the time he and his manager J. M. Hill parted they had divided more than 400,000 dollars between them on that one character, in years when a dollar bought the best seat in the house.

The play that grew out of it was The Old Homestead, written on the road with George Ryer, who caught up with him at Lock Haven in December 1885. It opened at the Boston Theatre in April 1886 and took in 11,279 dollars and 25 cents the first week. When it got to the Academy of Music in New York, they drove a yoke of oxen and a wagonload of hay across the stage so the city could look at the country, at 25 cents to a dollar a seat, and over 290,000 people came through the doors in the first three months. He played it the rest of his life.

Joshua Whitcomb was not made up. Thompson built him out of two real men from Swanzey, New Hampshire, a Captain Otis Whitcomb and a Joshua Holbrook, one for the comedy and one for the serious part, the kind of neighbor he grew up among after leaving Girard.

He died at his home in West Swanzey in April 1911, at 77. If anybody knows whether the house on Blair Road is still standing, say so in the comments. The government photographed it falling in back in the thirties and I have not found out what happened to it.

Portrait about 1900, animated.
Photo: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, no known restrictions.

09/24/2026

If the birth year Henry Shoemaker wrote under his picture is right, Jesse Logan was 27 years old when Cornplanter died, which means the old man drawing a bow in this 1915 photograph grew up on the Cornplanter tract while Cornplanter himself was still living on it.

The tract was the strip of Allegheny River bottom above Warren that Pennsylvania granted to Cornplanter in 1791 for keeping the Seneca out of the wars on the frontier, and the Seneca families who lived there were still living there when the twentieth century came in. Logan was one of them. What he did for a living, as far as anybody wrote down, was hunt. Shoemaker's list of Pennsylvania panthers killed since 1860 has him in Warren County that first year, and the caption on his photograph says he killed many wildcats, which in that country meant bobcats, trapped and shot for the bounty and the pelt the same as any white hunter on the river did.

What made Shoemaker drive out to see him was that he was old enough to remember things nobody else alive did. Logan told him how the old people had hunted panthers before there were ri**es enough to go around: in deep snow, on snowshoes, following the track until the cat floundered and gave out, carrying long oak shafts like the ones used in the snow snake game, sharpened at the tip to the fineness of a knife blade, and spearing the panther where it lay. Shoemaker wrote that the Pennsylvania Indians hunted that way into the early 1800s, which is to say into Logan's own childhood.

He told him other things, small and exact, the way an old hunter answers. That panther cubs were delicate and many died while they were teething. That the Canada lynx had never been plentiful anywhere in northern Pennsylvania in his lifetime, no matter what people said. That the black moose was not seen in the northwest counties in his day, and that the old name of Clearfield, Chinklacamoose, meant the meeting place of the moose, a better translation than the one in the books. Shoemaker also wrote that he was a grand nephew of Logan the Mingo orator, and called him a Pennsylvania Indian chief under one of the pictures. Nobody else ever wrote either thing down, so I will leave both as Shoemaker's.

In 1915 P. C. Hockenberry, the Warren photographer, came out to the tract with a camera. Logan sat down against a tree with a hatchet through his belt, a self bow in one hand and an arrow across his knees, and looked straight into the lens. Then he stood up and drew the bow to his cheek, with a small dog watching from the foot of the tree. He died on February 17, 1916, and Shoemaker, who was finishing a book on wildcats, added the date as a footnote.

Photograph taken 1915, animated.

09/22/2026

River Tale, with a generated image. The book it comes from is real, and the original drawing is in the first comment.

Walk the big woods after a windstorm and you will find a hemlock with its whole top gone, snapped off twenty or thirty feet up, splinters on the ground, and nothing else around it touched. In 1910 a forester named William T. Cox wrote down what the old logging camps said did that. He called it the splinter cat.

Cox was 32, a trained forester who had grown up around lumber camps, and that year he put out a 47 page book called Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods. It reads like a real field guide. Every animal the lumberjacks swore was out there gets a range, a diet, and a Latin name, and the whole thing is written dead straight. The splinter cat got Felynx arbordiffisus, roughly tree splitting cat. Cox said it lived wherever wild bees and racc**ns were thick, because those were what it ate, and it hunted them by climbing one tree and launching itself headfirst at the next, hitting the trunk square with what he called its hard face, one tree after another on every dark and stormy night until it broke open a hollow one with a c**n den or a bee tree inside.

What I like about the story is that it is built on something true. A hemlock or a beech top really does go in ice and wind, and it almost always goes at a weak spot, a rot pocket or an old cavity where the wood has gone punky. The cavity is very often there because a racc**n has been denning in it for years. So the lumberjacks had the chain right, c**n den, weak trunk, broken top on a stormy night. They just gave it fur and a face.

Cox became Minnesota's first state forester the next year, and his little joke book is out of copyright now. Next time you find a fresh snapped top in the National Forest, look for the hollow. There is usually one.

Generated image of an animal from a 1910 book. Not a photograph.