World War I had been over for more than a decade and the Roaring Twenties were raging on throughout most of the country. However, Greene County was suffering her own economic depression. In 1928, a year before the stock market crash of 1929, several banks in the area had failed, property values in the county were on a rapid decline, and it was a very uncertain time. County officials were encouraging homeowners to remodel their homes to create jobs and pleading with farmers to take on laborers to help curb the massive unemployment. The state created an unemployment committee for Greene County to canvas the region in hopes of finding and creating jobs, but there was no end to the hardships in sight. Matters would only get worse when the great depression struck the nation in 1929.
The people of Greene County would prove themselves to be industrious. Several local groups formed for the purposes of helping and aiding those who found themselves going through tough times. The American Legion Relief Committee, chaired by J. E. Isherwood proved to be the most important local private relief agency for providing assistance to the needy. In coordination with the Greene County Poor Board (the agency responsible for overseeing the poor farm or County Home where the Greene County Historical Society now resides) and the Monongahela Township School Board, the Legion’s Relief Committee staged a benefit show with the proceeds used to buy shoes, clothing, utensils, and other necessities for those who were suffering the greatest effects of the Depression. Later, in 1931, they held Christmas Dinner for the poor at the Poland Mines theater, and special free lunches were arranged for children at the Poland Mines school house.
Greene County largely dealt with the consequences of the 1928 local depression and the Great Depression on her own. The local population did everything they could to help get everyone back on their feet, with great amounts of success. Times would still remain tough with the impact on the coal industry, which even then was a large part of the Counties economic structure. On May 6, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order #7034 creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA), an agency whose purpose was to assist in funding public works projects to create jobs. By that time, Greene County had largely stabilized herself and was dealing with the Depression well.
Greene County would still see a presence from the WPA, but not like other areas of the country where the WPA would build bridges and work on local infrastructure such as power and water utilities. In Greene County, the WPA would turn its eye towards the preservation of history with a special emphasis on the history of our local veterans.
Dr. Paul Rich “Prexy” Stewart of Waynesburg University and U.S. Army veteran Frank B. Jones, both mentored by Professor Andrew Jackson Waychoff of Waynesburg University, would perhaps be Greene County’s most involved citizens with the WPA. Both men would work on two major projects through the WPA that would have lasting impacts on Greene County, her history, the memorializing of her veterans, and on the field of archaeology. Jones and Stewart lead projects that would locate, identify, record and survey the burial locations of all veterans buried in Greene County while at the same time studying the archaeology of Greene County and making discoveries that would be studied for decades to come.
Jones and Stewart were both founding members of the Greene County Historical Society established the previous decade in November 1925. Jones specifically would work with over a dozen other individuals searching the archives held by the historical society and by canvassing the local population to locate nearly 700 cemeteries in the county, create detailed surveys and record the locations of the burial of every veteran discovered in Greene County. Jones would also create a veterans burial index on note cards that is now archived at the Greene County Historical Society and available for research at Cornerstone Genealogical Society.
This work in recording veterans burials remains significant to this day. In many cases, the surveys generated give detailed descriptions of the size, limits, location and orientation of the cemetery, as well as specifically where in the cemetery veterans can be found. These surveys are often the only record of a specific cemetery.
Frank Jones and the crew working through the WPA were able to speak with locals who had memories of long forgotten spots where great grandfathers and more distant ancestors were buried in unmarked graves and were able to locate them for the men working with the WPA to be recorded. Many graves that remain unmarked, even to this day can be identified based on the surveys created in the mid-1930s.
This WPA work would also be heavily used throughout the mid-1960s and 1970s by Dorothy and James Hennen when they made their prolific 12-volume set of Cemetery Records of Greene County. The Hennen’s used the WPA Surveys to locate long forgotten family burial grounds and recorded every known cemetery in the county, with transcriptions from each individual stone in each cemetery.
The WPA work, culminating with the Hennen Cemetery Records, has made locating the burials of distant ancestors in Greene County very simple for the genealogist and historian and few other locations have cemeteries as well recorded as we do here in Greene County.
Stewart and Jones would both engage in another project through the WPA, a passion both men shared along with their mentor, Andrew J. Waychoff. The prehistory of Greene County and the study of artifacts that had been found by farmers in their fields for over 150 years was a topic both men had been studying throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, and with the WPA, Stewart and Jones had the chance to fund an extensive archaeological survey of Greene County.
Several important sites were located throughout Greene County (for the purposes of protecting and preservation of archaeological sites we will only mention locations of specific sites vaguely). Most notably one on a high hilltop in Jefferson Township and two in Franklin Township just south of Waynesburg. These sites provided a wealth of information on the Monongahela Culture, a group of Native Americans that lived in the area surrounding the Monongahela River from about 1000AD through 1635AD, and was just beginning to become known to archaeologists.
All the sites discovered by the WPA were village sites from different time periods during the years the Monongahela Culture existed in the region. They provided a wealth of information to be used to create a full picture of what life was like for these prehistoric people. Without the work done by Frank Jones and Prexy Stewart, little would be known about the Monongahela People and the prehistory of Greene County.
The artifacts discovered by the WPA would be photographed and referenced in over 40 years’ worth of publications taught in colleges and universities. They also helped to further the understanding of the Native Cultures that existed in the eastern United States.
Both projects, the cemetery surveys, and the archaeological surveys are still researched by many today. Cornerstone Genealogical Society archives the actual completed surveys showing veterans burials, and they can be used by the public to help locate the grave sites of ancestors. The archaeological work can be found spread throughout issues of Pennsylvania Archaeologist, a publication by the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology. Some artifacts recovered are on display at both the Greene County Historical Society Museum and the museum at Waynesburg University. Both of the latter institutions can credit, at least in part, their establishment to Dr. Paul Rich “Prexy” Stewart.