Farmers Market Vendor

Farmers Market

Greene County’s love of farmers markets gives visitors another excursion during the road trip. Add picking up local produce and baked goods from among your stops at Thistlethwaite Vineyards for wine, Shields Nursery for plants, and Waynesburg Milling Company to pick up a gift made by a local artisan. Once you taste fresh picked tomatoes, you’ll be glad you did.

Rain Day Festival

The Beginnings of a Tradition

Waynesburg is perhaps best known for a summer-time event, their annual Rain Day celebration on July 29. The local holiday is known around the globe and receives national attention each year as locals enjoy the festivities on High Street in Greene County’s “County Town” hoping that rain will fall from the sky, keeping a tradition alive that dates back a little over a century. But how did such a small rural community get their own holiday?

Enterprise Steam Boat 1815

River Boats

One of the best known steamboat tugs and the only one still on a river is the W.P. Snyder, Jr., originally built in 1918 and owned by the Carnegie Steel Company. It was originally named the W.H. Clingerman and was one of the first steel hulled steamboats. In September of 1945, it was sold to the Crucible Steel Company and renamed W.P. Snyder, Jr.

Overview of Rices Landing from the Greene County Historical Society archives.

Rices Landing

Along the Greene River Trail Rices Landing Settlement of Rices Landing One of the earliest overnight visitors was George Washington, when he and his troops camped here on their way to Pittsburgh during the French & Indian War. In 1786, John Rice purchased land on the east side of Enoch’s Run, a tributary of the…

Foundry and Machine Shop - Outside

W.A. Young & Sons Foundry and Machine Shop

William A. Young, a descendant of two established families of Washington and Greene counties, purchased a plot of land in Rices Landing in 1900. The following year his mother, Rachel A. Young, bought the adjoining lot and sold it to her son in 1902. William Young built his foundry and machine shop on these two parcels of land and operated the facility until his death in 1940. Young’s sons, Walter and Carl, carried on the operation until 1965.

Pittsburgh, Allegheny & Birmingham / drawn from nature, lithographed & published by Otto Krebs, Pittsburgh, Pa.

Pittsburgh Coal Seam

Named by H.D. Rodgers of the First Geological Survey of Pennsylvania, the first reference to the Pittsburgh coal bed was on a 1761 map. In the mid 1700s at Fort Pitt, coal was being mined on Coal Hill, or as it is known now, Mount Washington. The coal was extracted from drift mines in an outcrop about 200 feet above the Monongahela River.