By Colleen Nelson
The road to Alicia is marked by a small, off-kilter road sign on Rt. 88 along the straightaway through Cabbage Flats, near where the flashing light marking the intersection between Greensboro and Mapletown is about to come into view. I had to backtrack twice to find it the first time I went wandering into this bit of coal mining history that is still alive in the name Alicia. Three years ago I was on my way to meet Rodney Grimes who drove the coal train from the mine that CONTURA now owns in Kirby, to its Alicia Harbor on the Monongahela River.
I was there to photograph the train for the 2016 50s Fest T-shirt design celebrating the region’s coal heritage along with its love of old cars. Rodney told me when he would arrive at the harbor and what a great shot it was! Rodney blew the horn, we waved and I hurried home to start drawing. He told me if I followed Alicia Road down to the river I would find a town with the same name, sandwiched between Alicia Harbor and the remains of the old Robena Mine harbor. But I didn’t go looking for it that day.
I’m guessing W. Harry Brown had a wife or daughter in mind when he named his Fayette County Coke works Alicia. According to historian G. Wayne Smith, Brown came to Greene County in 1912 to “build a tipple in Grays Landing” and named the mine Alicia 2. The entrance would have gone straight into the exposed coal seam on the river bank like other mines of the day, a precursor of the boom to follow as investors formed companies and bought up individual operators like Brown. By the time World War I drove up the price of coal, Pittsburgh Steel owned Alicia 2.
At some point a cluster of houses sprang up in what used to be a cornfield but these were the early days and Alicia was not a big patch town like Crucible and Nemacolin. Men and boys walked to work from home back then, or pitched tents, built rude shelters, slept in idle coke ovens or boarded with local families. A look at the two streets of small bungalows in Alicia, each the same as the next, suggests that Pittsburgh Steel built some homes to rent to their workers when it purchased the mine and tipple back in the ‘teens.
So what was life like in a small mining town on the banks of the Mon, sandwiched between two harbors? I took another drive this month to find out.
Alicia Road makes a beeline across broad overgrown fields crisscrossed with chain link fences, cattle gates and abandoned roads. Kovach Road starts on Rt. 88 and connects with Alicia Road about a mile in, where long lines of neatly parked tractors and equipment in the field pay tribute to the machines that made the 20th century happen. Kovach Road ends there, but continues as a dotted line on Greene County maps. This is old Rt. 88 and it once had a covered bridge across Whitley Creek and came out between Sugar Grove Baptist Church and the intersection of Rt. 21.
As the road begins to drop down, it slips under the railroad trestle that swings into Alicia Harbor on the right and the houses of Alicia emerge from the greenery.
All the bustle of the 21st century fades away as I drive the few streets that meander in a loop of lawns, swing sets, swimming pools and houses. Some of these streets once went further, but time has turned them into driveways and dead ends. There are some remodeled homes handsomely situated by the river, along with those neat rows of bungalows and a scattering of two story houses with big chimneys from the coal burning days. It’s late afternoon and kids are riding bikes on streets where traffic is mostly ducks taking a stroll and parents coming home from work. Water Street tucks into the edge of the riverbank and the muddy Mon flows just a few hundred yards below. A boat dock beckons and you can just see the big steel pilings of Robena Harbor peeking through the trees. Then the street ends in a parade of plastic flamingos and a trio of barking dogs lets Mike Pincavitch know a stranger is here to ask him if this is his driveway or an alley to the next street up? It’s both!
Meeting Mike in his garage doing custom work on a truck, with a smartphone full of photos of the designer cars he’s worked on is my gateway to meeting his equally friendly and energetic mom Beverly. We sit on her deck at the other end of Water Street and she tells me she lived in a log cabin down by that covered bridge until she was three years old and the family left here to find work.
Her father Tom Medunick was out of work at Crucible Mine in 1948 when “we moved to Philadelphia. Dad had a brother there.” She remembers summer visits to Alicia to visit family. “Compared to Philly there was nothing to do! There were no streetlights and everybody went to bed early. I remember we caught fireflies before it got dark.”
Other things she remembers are long gone, like the Mansion House at the edge of town that was a boarding house for workers. “My great grandmother Osceola Temple Tenant was a cook there. I loved her mincemeat pies!”
Beverly, husband Frank and their four sons returned to Alicia in 1980 to care for her father. The Election Day flood of 1985 that brought water to the second floor of the houses on Water Street is still a vivid memory.
“Up to there!” she tells me, pointing to one wall from our seat on the deck. “We had to redo everything.”
When I stopped by again on Mothers Day, we sat at Beverly’s kitchen table and swapped stories with cousin Jerry Michael, the family historian who traces their maternal side to George Kiger, who came to Greene County in 1801 and cleared two farms near Kirby. Jerry was born in 1952 and remembers his neighbors and the way life was lived back then. “Swimming the river was a rite of passage for boys,” he tells me. “People would ask ‘have you swam the river yet?’ and you might say ‘Not yet. Maybe next year!” And then there were times when the water looked like orange juice from the sulfur and acid from the mines. “It dried poison ivy right up!”
Before the mines came, Alicia was fertile farmland, planted in corn and the owner had the first steam-activated harvester in the county. Jerry doesn’t remember who the owner was but Jerry’s grandfather John and great uncle Bennett Kiger worked the fields. Later, Bennett was the farrier for the Alicia Mine mules that were stabled next door to the Mansion House.
Of course everyone burned coal and house coal was sold door to door by those who dug it from hand mines that popped up wherever coal could be found in seams too small for the big companies to bother with.
Jerry remembers the water treatment plant at the edge of town that pumped river water into three huge redwood tanks to be filtered and then into three smaller ones to be chlorinated before being pumped to a holding tank further up the hill and gravity fed to Alicia.
When Alicia Mine closed “Frick sold the plant to the town for a dollar to make it legal and Uncle Bennett kept it running. He trained the next guy to do it when he got too old and when a waterline broke everyone got out and fixed it. The DEP inspectors told us we had the best water on the river.”
And the best neighbors, too.
“Alicia was a melting pot – German, Polish, African-American, Serbian, French, Italian – it didn’t matter where you came from, or where you went to church. We grew up around all kinds of people and everybody came together to help each other.”
Jerry remembers half a dozen African-American families including Abe and Mary Glaspie and next-door neighbor Ida Hale and her two-acre garden. The families shared holiday cheer and he became good friends with her grandson Ralph Hale. Jerry left Alicia when he was 18 and he and Ralph worked at Humphrey 7 Mine near Morgantown where Abe Glaspie was a mine foreman. Now retired, Jerry and his buddy Ralph stay in touch and Beverly is friends with Ralph on Facebook. When Ralph and I finally connected via Facebook, he texted me back: “I do have friends in Greene County because that’s where my heart is.” He remembers long Sunday strolls along the river as a kid – “it was cute watching those old ladies walking with their big sticks to ward off black snakes!” As for Grandmother Ida with her two-acre garden “she was my rock. A very hard working lady. Lived to be a hundred and six years old.”
One last question – were there any stores in Alicia? Beverly and Jerry think about it, shake their heads, then start grinning. Well, Miss Lulu and Mrs. Amos sold penny candy to neighborhood kids from their homes. And if you were an adult they would sell you beer. But no stores – just good neighbors!
GreeneScene of the Past
A jumble of brick walls, steel girders, broken windows and remnants of the old tipple that still jut above the river’s edge near Grays Landing reminds us that the Alicia 2 mine harbor was once a busy workplace. SWPA Rural Exploration member Evan Williams II of Carmichaels took this photo in 2013 while documenting the old site for the group’s historic website and Facebook page. 
The black and white photograph from the Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette, Eberly campus, shows what Alicia 2 looked like in 1930 when coal fueled America’s economy even as the Great Depression loomed. At some point during the lean years that followed, Alicia 2 stopped producing, but other mines weathered the storm and got production back when World War II demanded steel for tanks and bullets and shifts were filled for the war effort.
Alicia 2 production records are preserved in G. Wayne Smith’s history of Greene County. Those tonnages are a snapshot of the boom and bust economy cycles that affected the lives of the workers and the communities that grew up around the mines.
When William Henry Brown of Fayette County opened Alicia 2 mine in 1912, its entrance went straight into the Pittsburgh Coal seam that lay exposed on the riverbank near Grays Landing. Dams helped control the river to allow barge traffic from Morgantown to Pittsburgh and the 20th century was full of promise. Alicia 2 went from being a single owner business to a “captive” mine, bought by Pittsburgh Steel to produce coal and coke exclusively for its steel mills in Pittsburgh. World War I was brewing and the need for steel would drive mill owners to secure the mines they needed.
When retired Post Gazette editor and unabashed train buff Pete Zapadka and I rode the coal train as guests of Rodney Grimes in 2017, we had an hour to kill before Rodney was ready to roll, so harbor worker Frank Craig took us on a tour. As his four-wheel drive truck made its way up a steep stretch of gravel road leading to the tipple he stopped so I could photograph a bit of history. There on the hillside cement pillars rose and were capped with slabs of natural rock. In between was a wall of concrete blocks. It was the entrance of an old mine, sealed for safety but still overlooking the river.
I called Frank for this story and ask him if that old entrance is Alicia 2.
That’s what they say, Frank tells me. I’ll take that as a yes!
You can find a link to the You Tube video Pete made of our train ride with Rodney at Greenescene Magazine on Facebook .
Shining the Light
Sugar Grove Baptist Church on State Rd. 88 can trace its roots back to 1868 and beyond, to the frontier days when Sunday services were held in a shady grove – weather permitting – or in the cabins of neighbors when it did not. But whatever the weather, when a convert was taken into the spirit and was accepted into the fold, the immersion happened in a nearby creek or pond even if a hole had to be chopped in the ice!
Baptists, many of them hardy Welsh and Scots Irish immigrants, began moving to the frontier from Delaware, Virginia and Eastern Pennsylvania in the mid-1700s. They were heading west to escape religious persecution from the Church of England and surprisingly enough, from the Puritans of the New England colonies who were intolerant of their spiritual practices. When the Rev. John Corbly was driven from Virginia by the authorities of the Crown for the fiery power of his redemptive preaching, he began building congregations on the frontier that would in time become West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania. When Corbly finally established a Baptist church near Garards Fort on Whitely Creek and one on Muddy Creek near Jefferson in 1771, he called them Goshen. Corbly’s family settled by Garards Fort and church history tells us that in the days before and after the American Revolution, Greensboro Baptists travelled two hours by horseback to the fort to hear Corbly preach. In the early 1800s, Robert Jones, grandson of David Jones, the firebrand Welsh Baptist minister who was a gun toting, medically trained chaplain in Washington’s Continental army, started bible studies in Greensboro in local homes. By the 1830s a lot was purchased on Water Street and local farmer Reverend Francis Downey helped form this new church with nine founding members. Amazingly enough, two years later the church was doing missionary work in Burma, a testimony to its desire to spread the Good Word.
Scattered Baptist families who gathered to worship and be baptized in the creek beside a grove of sugar maple trees a few miles north were considered, an outpost of the Greensboro congregation. They “appealed to be granted the rights to their own church in 1868” and the wooden sanctuary they built had two doors, one for men and one for women. If you drive by their church on State Route 88 today you’ll see that a porch has been added, along with a big glass front door for all to enter.
I stopped by for services on Mothers Day and was greeted by Bill and Wilda Humbert, old friends of mine from Carmichaels Grange. There’s no overhead media screen above the pulpit at Sugar Grove – just clear acoustics, beautiful windows and plenty of hymn singing with Irene Bowers on keyboard. Reverend Frank Vucic of Rices Landing takes New Testament scriptures and brings their message of love to the travails of modern life with the grace of a good teacher – he taught music at Southeastern Greene from 1964-74 and it resonates in the quality of the singing that fills the rafters every Sunday.
Reverend Vucic tells me before services that the church is on land that was once part of the John Hannah farm before the family donated it. He lends me a book from the church library by Frank T. Hoadley about the history of American Baptists in Pennsylvania and Delaware. It is a good read, filled with first hand tidbits of history pulled from early documents, notes and letters written by ministers who lived through the changes that the centuries bring.
I turned to the last chapter “Where do we go from here?” to find some inspiration for us in the 21st century that Frank Hoadley could only dream of when he wrote this in 1986:
“The word for love is from the Greek word agape, a love without limits and without thoughts of gaining anything in return..…This is the essence of the Creator who placed us here. Can we return to that simple yet profound love….Can we cast aside outmoded customs, petty quarrels and moral hairsplitting? Are we willing to be led by God’s own hand?”
Sunday services start at 10 a.m. and the congregation celebrates the holidays with church dinners. It’s been a few years since Sugar Grove held Sunday School or did activities involving kids but Reverend Vucic wants the neighborhood to know the door is always open.