The far southwestern corner of Pennsylvania looks on the surface to be a pleasant rolling, river-cut landscape carpeted with vegetation and trees. But underneath is a bloody history and a supernatural reality brimming with ghosts, aliens, and unknown creatures.
The invention of the beehive oven was a major advance in the production of coke. Beehive ovens were large masonry domes and named according to their shape. Constructed in long rows for ease of loading and unloading, workers would bring the coal from the nearby mines, dump the coal in the opening in the top, ignite the coal and seal the ovens to let the coal smolder.
Throughout the years, others passing Horseshoe Bend on dreary nights saw the ghostly figure of a man with a length of stovepipe in place of his head. As each of these people shared their otherworldly encounter, the legend of Stovepipe was born.
Greene County was once a part of the frontier of European settlement in America. Multiple well-known homestead massacres occurred in the area during these frontier times, shedding blood on the ground and leaving lasting impressions in both natural and supernatural history.
Prior to the glaciers, the ancestral Monongahela River flowed from present day north-central West Virginia across Pennsylvania and northwest Ohio.
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.
The Pennsylvania, Monongahela & Southern Railroad was organized in 1902 under the Pennsylvania Railroad to extend the rail line from West Brownsville to Rices Landing. In May 2000, the abandoned rail bed was dedicated as a rail-trail along the Monongahela River.
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…
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.
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.