By Colleen Nelson
I’m certainly not the first person to love Aleppo, either as a township or a laidback country village tucked along the South Fork of Wheeling Creek. For thousands of years this land of breathtaking ridge-top vistas offered abundant game to those who walked the Warrior Trail from Greensboro to the flint hills of Ohio to find chert to make arrows, knives and spear points. Later, land speculators bought up this steep land along the West Virginia line, sight unseen, and tried to sell it to early settlers. But there was better farmland to be had by tomahawk claim or barter, so for decades it remained a hunting ground for frontiersmen and the tribes that still lingered or came to raid at the edge of the Ohio Territory. Bates History tells us that the notorious “Indian killer” Lewis Wetzel hunted here when he wasn’t taking lives, scalps and cash rewards. Judge Foster, who met Wetzel in 1789 when he was in irons for “having shot an Indian during terms of peace” described him as “26 years old, five feet ten, broad chested, dark skinned…” whose face was pitted deep with small pox and with hair “of which he was very careful, when combed, reaching to the calves of his legs.”
Aleppo became a township in 1821, with a sparse scattering of farming families including “Fletchers, Hinermans, Mitchells and Gullensteines.” These hardy folk were willing to take on the broken terrain that would one day produce a record amount of oil when wells were drilled in the early 1900s. Some struck it rich and others got jobs bringing in pipe and supplies and building wells that followed the creeks where the rock formations foretold where to drill.
But until those boom time arrived, the years before and after the Civil War were hard work, muddy roads and rural isolation. A newspaper article from 1859 reports “the district is poor, land being but recently disposed of in parcels, consequently not much improved.” Raising sheep was a safe bet – Caldwell’s Atlas of 1876 lists John Evan as having a wool factory, saw and gristmill on Wheeling Creek. Neighbors survived by farming, trapping, bartering and the occasional cash-paying job. Lives were greatly improved when gas and oil speculation ushered in the “progressive era.” By 1887 the township had ten schools, 448 students and the Aleppo Brethren Church brought its old church, along with its bell and organ, down from Fairview ridge and rebuilt it on Aleppo Road within sight of town. The 1890 census counted 28,938 people in Greene County -1,537 were in Aleppo Township. Census enumerator Mrs. Mary Parry was paid two cents for every live person, three cents for every death, fifty cents for every factory and a nickel for every war veteran or widow in the township.
G. Wayne Smith’s microfilm sleuthing tells us that in 1895 there were “many wells in Richhill, Center, Aleppo and Springhill townships.” The next year Dr. J. H. Miller was open for business in Aleppo. Standard Oil leased 12,938 acres in the township between 1897 and 1900 and the oil output between 1901 – 05 was “most successful in Aleppo, Richhill, Springhill, Jackson and Gilmore.” Standard Oil wasn’t the only player – Dunns Station Company had nine producing wells in the township and 2000 acres of coal rights were already sold. The future was coming on strong – Aleppo High School opened in 1912 and West Penn Lighting Company applied for a charter of incorporation the next year. By 1915 farmers were learning better farming practices through the state Farmers Institute and lobbying for better services through the Grange, a national organization whose mission is to improve life in rural America. Economic stability was shaken when the Great Depression struck in 1929. Still, in 1931, Governor Pinchot managed to build State Route 3001, 20 glorious miles of paved road that connected Ned to Majorsville by way of Deep Valley, Windy Gap, Aleppo, Ryerson Station, Durban and Crabapple.
Aleppo High School’s football program had been suspended in 1933 after “officials concluded not enough boys were enrolled to warrant a team.” The community mourned its loss. Principal Duane Wood saved the day in 1939 when he helped organize Aleppo as the first six-man football team in Greene County. Aptly named the Pioneers, these hayfield hardened kids played “border league” teams on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line to wild community support until the school finally closed in 1947. The late Rex Galentine saved every clipping from these glory days and donated Scrapbook #3: “Football, baseball 1935-1950” to Cornerstone Genealogical Society in Waynesburg. 
It’s a golden October afternoon and I’m in downtown Aleppo to take a photo of how things look today. Neighbors I’ve known for years turn out – Victor and Nancy Antill live beside the post office, daughter Kristin Wells and husband Bob and Jim and Becky Pettit live across the road. We look at old photos of Aleppo that once hung in Jordan’s store before it closed, tell stories about what used to be here and what we were doing back in the day when Kristin and my daughter Elise were in the Community 4-H club that met in the community hall over there.
Kristin points to her house. “Alan Shipman told us there used to be a bar in the basement,” she says and everybody nods. “We used to find broken beer bottles when we mowed the bank,” Nancy says. Well it figures – in 1935, after Prohibition was struck down, townships voted on whether to be wet or dry. In the western end all voted dry except Aleppo and Springhill who said yes to beer and whiskey sales. That might explain the pool table that used to be in the old store and why people came in after the Jordan family bought it, looking for beer. General stores, after all, are supposed to have everything you don’t want to drive to town to get!
As I step into the middle of the road to take the group photo, a worker from one of the Marcellus pads that are going in on the ridges around Aleppo slows his four-wheeler as he swings around us and I flag him in for the shot. With a grin he becomes part of our history.
Heading home through the game lands of Jackson Township, to Higgins Cemetery Road, I drink in the beauty that is October. Chipmunks, squirrels and leaves scatter, deer are beginning to cluster, hawks and vultures soar. It’s hard for me to imagine a better place to be.