I Love This Place: Along State Route 18: From Grimes Hill to Nettle Hill

The stretch of State Rt. 18 aka Golden Oaks Road between Grimes Hill and Nettle Hill rides the Warrior Trail. This 5000-year-old trade route of America’s first people runs from Greensboro on the Monongahela River to the Ohio River and then on to the flint ridges of Ohio. When European settlers followed rivers and creeks into the Western Frontier in the mid-1770s, they crisscrossed this old path as they settled the land. 

When Waynesburg became the county seat in 1796, its eastern portion had farms and villages busy doing business getting goods and services to and from the rest of post-Colonial America by way of the Monongahela River.

It would take another generation to push into the hilly reaches to the Ellicott Line, where Greene County meets the West Virginia panhandle and establish villages like White Cottage, Nettle Hill, New Freeport and Garrison. For the farmers who shopped the villages that grew around crossroads, it was a long wagon ride to Waynesburg. Their connection to the world was the muddy path that would become a state road in another century when it was finally paved from Rogersville to White Cottage in 1932.  

When it comes to keeping track of those generations, it’s hard to beat retired County Judge Terry Grimes.

“See that stone over there—the one with the two flags? That’s George Graham.” I was standing outside with Terry after Sunday services at Valley Chapel, looking across Route 18 at the little cemetery where great-great grandfather Peter Martin Grimes and many of his descendants are buried. Family lore has it that the Grahams had such a heavy Scottish brogue that it wasn’t more than a generation until some sons had whittled their surname down to Grimes on their paperwork.

George Graham (1730-1840) was a private in Captain Shaver’s Company, New Jersey Regiment during the Revolutionary War. It would be land grants instead of paychecks that brought veterans westward and another few hundred years for George Graham to find his long lost family, genealogically speaking. Long interred in Waynesburg’s first cemetery near Fort Jackson on Liberty Avenue, George seems to have been left behind when the land was reclaimed for a housing development in the 1970s. The graves that were found were removed to Greene Mount Cemetery and given a monument with their names listed. Terry’s genealogical sleuthing, which is recorded in Greene Connections for all to share, found no mention of George on that marker so in 1982 he ordered a stone in his memory and placed it here.

Like their forefather, the Grahams and the Grimes would push westward looking for land. When Peter Martin Grimes (1823-1896) bought the property at the foot of the hill that winds up to the Warrior Trail in 1850, the log cabin that would be known as White Cottage was already there. Present owners Ken and Carol Peters, who settled here from Michigan in 2012, found it listed as a residence in the 1790 census while doing a title search of their land.

The massive logs have been wonderfully preserved because the exterior was covered by white clapboard when Peter Grimes lived here and managed a post office and store in the front yard. Board and batten was added sometime in the 1980s when owner Dan White turned the old cabin into a hunting lodge and left the logs exposed under the front porch to be admired. White also dismantled one of the original barns to build a kitchen addition where Carol now cooks and bakes using an Amish wood-burning stove. 

Ken showed me where the store once stood by the road. All that remain are some hefty hand cut foundation stones lining the edge of the front yard. 

The beautifully colored sketch from the Caldwell Atlas of 1876 shows White Cottage in all its glory as a place to live and do business. The caption notes that P M Grimes was a dealer in “dry goods, groceries, boots and shoes, hardware, queensware and all kinds of goods to supply country trade.” 

He was also the postmaster and an elected Justice of the Peace with a keen eye for an overloaded wagon. Stories are told that he kept a gate across the road and teamsters who wished to climb Grime’s hill had to be carrying a load that their teams could safely manage. The options were to split the load and take it up in two hauls or unhitch and pay to have Grimes oxen do the walking.

From the top of Grimes Hill it’s a few country miles to the “Village of Nettle Hill” road sign. What remains of the village is a scattering of houses and the surprisingly narrow edge of the road where Lemmons then Phillips general store once stood. Here’s where neighbors found everything from dry goods, wagon parts and livestock feed to penny candy and later, gasoline. This is where the Warrior Trail hangs a right and follows Aleppo Road to Centennial Church on its way to the Ohio River. 

G.M. Grimes would live to see his son Abraham Lincoln Grimes be a conductor on the Waynesburg and Washington Railroad. But he would miss the coming century when vehicles did the heavy hauling and gas pumps were added to roadside businesses, including Rainbow Heights, the dance hall eatery at Nettle Hill.

The one surviving photograph of Rainbow Heights shows the transition times when horses and automobiles shared the road. No one remembers who owned the building, but Terry Grimes knows that at some point in the 1930s his mother Faye Stockdale’s parents operated the store and restaurant on the first floor and there was a dance hall on the second. “Grandpa Stockdale had a square dance band and my mother played the piano. She said she chorded along. Sometimes they had guest musicians and people came to dance,” 

Terry Grimes remembers the glow in the sky when Rainbow Heights burned to the ground sometime in the 1950s but 98-year-old Jess Rinehart of Waynesburg remembers being inside when he was a kid. “The dance hall had a stage for the band and local people used to play there.  Geho had a barbershop downstairs in the basement.”

I drove to the site where Rainbow Heights once stood, just to get my bearings and pulled over where the PennDOT tower fills the sky across the road. The view here is spectacular and the drop off from this high ridge seems to go straight down into the watershed that runs its headwaters into Dunkard and Fish creeks then into the Monongahela River, then north to Pittsburgh. Go on Aleppo Road for a few hundred yards and the watershed switches direction and the headwaters of every stream coming off those ridges flow to the Ohio River. I can just imagine the rainbows this confluence of hills must have witnessed from this grand view and grin. I love this place when it makes me think this way.