The Newtown Pentacle

Wednesday

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Belief exists – within one such as myself – that passing mention of a municipality in the South Hills section of Pittsburgh neighboring the section which Newtown Pentacle HQ is found within – a place and a state of mind called ‘Bridgeville,’ sometime in the past.

At any rate, welcome to Bridgeville, for today’s post.

Here’s a link to Bridgeville’s Wikipedia entry, and one to their official governmental site. There’s a historical society there too, and I’m on my second watch of this great presentation to that historical society, by a fellow named Warren Merritt. Good stuff, that.

Modern day Bridgeville is largely residential, but there’s a significant amount of commercial/strip mall style development there. Texas Roadhouse, a Home Depot, the drivers license center for the State’s PENNDOT agency, basically all the sorts of ‘mall’ style retail businesses you’d expect in a suburb can be found along its ‘Washington Pike.’

That’s what’s here in Bridgeville these days, but there’s a significant historical incarnation of this area, one which made Bridgeville quite a different place in the past.

Coal, the past here was all about coal.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

Our Lady of the Pentacle had signed up for a class which was held here in Bridgeville, allowing me a couple of free hours to explore some of the town’s less well traveled sections on a recent weekend morning. I had the car with me, and a long list of saved locations embedded in a Google Map.

Most of the traffic and local populace were involving themselves with the long line of shopping malls defining the modern streetscape mentioned above. I was in an industrial district.

Saying all that, there are many leave behinds from the industrial past to be observed here, with many of these ‘old’ mill buildings – long since modified from their original purpose for the exigencies of modernity – displaying a characteristic masonry design which one has learned to associate with the long shuttered mining operations of the Frick and Mellon Family’s Pittsburgh Coal Company. This corporation became one of the two dominar suppliers for processing coal feedstock into coke, setting prices for both acquisition and end sale. A monopoly, if you would.

That corporation survives into modernity, now calling itself ‘Consol Energy.’ So too do the Mellons and Fricks persist.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

At the end of the 19th, and especially so during the first three decades of the 20th century, Bridgeville was a coal mining superpower. The ‘Pittsburgh Seam’ is quite close to the surface here, and in some parts of Bridgeville, there were even outcroppings of coal which could be directly harvested at surface level. The coal in this area is Bituminous, as opposed to the Anthracite stuff that is more commonly harvested from eastern PA.

The industrial area I was driving and shooting within is right about here in Google Maps, should you want to have a click around and do some remote exploring. There’s a good amount of activity in these old mills.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

The rail tracks hereabouts likely belong to the Wheeling & Lake Erie RR outfit, but I didn’t see any rail action on this particular morning.

There was definitely a waste transfer operation somewhere nearby, as I saw had seen truck drive into a site through a scale, and I could smell trash. Can’t tell you much about what goes on back here.

Yet.

One had a list of locations to take a scouting look at; a couple of cemeteries, a few points of elevation, and old mill or two, an urban waterway, to see if anything interesting might be visible. I was kind of hopeful about one spot being productive, one that was from up on a high ridge. It wasn’t.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

A still active metal mill and factory is present, dubbed as being the Universal Stainless and Alloy Products, Inc. Here’s their corporate site, as well, just for the curious, or even for the stainless steel hungry amongst you – lords and ladies.

This coal business continues to blow my mind, as a note.

A significant amount of the land here in Pittsburgh is undermined, with historical mining using ‘pillar and room’ setups, which are only about thirty to sixty feet down below the ground, here in Bridgeville at least. There are also random and forgotten voids, cut into the trackless depths of the ground.

Before the word went out from the steel mills that they’d only buy coal from one of two suppliers in Pittsburgh – both of which happened to be owned by Henry Clay Frick and or the Mellons, who coincidentally owned the steel mills and coke ovens buying the coal – most of the mining was entrepreneurial in aspect. The order for consolidation by the ‘big dogs’ forced a lot of ‘small potato’ miners to sell their claims off to the nascent monopoly and then go to work for it.

In modern times, the corporate types refer to this sort of monopolistic practice as ‘vertical integration.’ Think about Apple computer, there.

Records were left behind by Pittsburgh Coal Company, about where and how deep they had dug, but the smaller operations which predated the consolidation – not so much. Periodically, surprise appearances of undocumented mine ‘portals’ appear during construction projects, here in the Pittsburgh region.

– photo by Mitch Waxman

It appears that the early miners ‘followed the seam,’ in from the hillsides.

As the coal embedded in the Appalachian layer cake here was being dug out, mines also began commercially extracting shale and limestone as well, which are commercial byproducts of digging into that layer cake.

Mole hills. It’s like mole hills down there.

Who can guess, all there is, that might be buried down there?

Back tomorrow with more.

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