I Love This Place: Finding Budapest

My inspiration to take this road trip through the southeastern corner of Greene County came when my friend Juliann Wozniak asked me “Hey, have you ever written about Budapest?” 

Where the heck is Budapest? In Newtown, right outside of Bobtown. And when you get there, be sure to stop at Jimmie’s Place. You might find an old timer to talk to about Budapest at Jimmie’s Place.

How could I resist? This part of the county has layers of real life history, written as remembered by families or told by neighbors, that doesn’t show up in history books or on maps.

To get to Budapest I would have to cross the Warrior Trail, which has its own tales to tell.

The 5000 year old indigenous pathway goes from Greensboro on the Monongahela River, following the ridges that separate Whitley Creek from Dunkard Creek and beyond to the Ohio River. Two famous ambushes and murders happened near its vantage points above those first settlements in the late 1700s – one near Garard’s Fort, the other somewhere “between Keener’s Knob and the ridge between Whitely and Dunkard Creek …about two miles east of Garards Fort and one mile south of Willow Tree.” Descendants of the Spicer family recalled these details and wrote them down in 1889 after a family reunion in Davistown and copy is on file at Cornerstone Genealogical Society in Waynesburg.

Willow Tree is on the Greene County map but I had to check the older map from 2003 to find Davistown. Was anything or anybody still there? The spot “one mile south of Willow Tree” had no roads near it, so I decided to find Davistown on my way to Newtown and then to Budapest and Jimmie’s Place and hopefully find an old timer to talk to.

SR 2011, Garards Fort Road, is a beautiful drive through old farms still in production between the forested slopes. It climbs past Tower Road then drops down into the Whitley Creek valley and State Game Lands 223. The village of Fordyce comes into view as the game lands pause and more century farms show their stuff. Dutch House, once a general store, has been turned into an antique lover’s dream by new owner Savannah Christy. I’m just in time to see her newly restored Model T Huckster touring car get ready for its first spin and I stay to admire the ornate wooden doors she just installed on her basement workshop. 

In a few more miles I turn right on Roberts Run Road and find more history overlapping. The railroad tracks that bring coal from Kirby Mine to Alicia ride high over the White Covered Bridge spanning Whitely Creek. This is where Civil War reenactors fill the air with smoke as they shoot it out in the field during the annual Covered Bridge Festival in September. Once through the bridge, the narrow unpaved road becomes heavily graveled as it climbs past a freshly minted well pad to the high reaches of the Warrior Trail.

This part of the trail is still farmed and the view is spectacular. Zavora Shelter is somewhere beyond the fields where the trail leaves the road and crosses private land on its way to Greensboro. Zavora Shelter is one of three campsites that hikers use as they make the three-day trek across the county on the trail that once took first Americans to the flint-rich hills of Ohio.

The intersection of Roberts Run and Meadow Run roads has a bird’s eye view of Interstate 79, just south of the welcome center near the state line. Meadow Run drops off the trail in to Dunkard Creek watershed and slips in and out of game lands before merging with Bunner Hill Road. I’m getting close to Davistown, a frontier settlement named after William Davis or a close relative. There are signs this was once a bustling village, with a post office, church and general stores that took turns being the post office. A handsome brick schoolhouse turned community center and grange hall is still there and Davistown Methodist Church (1890-2001) stands stately and forlorn beside a flag bedecked two-story house that was the last location of Davistown Post Office (1849-54, 1855-1980).

Bunner Hill Road crosses another intersection on its way to SR. 2021. Each intersection brings together more feeder streams and it’s getting easier to imagine time shifting back to those first settlement days of gristmills as wide, rocky Dunkard Creek ripples into view. 

SR 2021 follows Dunkard Creek for a mile then climbs Bald Hill to Bobtown. Or should I say Bob’s Town? It depends on which century you’re remembering.

When Stephen Mapel came to the area from Middlesex County, NJ in 1788, he named the village that grew on the hill above John Minor’s mill.  Later, grandson Robert Mapel built a gristmill and opened a store three miles south and called it Bob’s Town. Bob’s Town flourished during the oil boom days of the 1860s then became a quiet village once more when the rush was over. When J&L Steel bought 1200 acres in and around Bob’s Town in 1914 it was named Bobtown. Shannopin Mine would bring in miners lured by the promise of jobs and the farmland surrounding the company houses on Sand Hill would be reshaped to fit the industrial needs of railroads, coal shafts, coke ovens and tipples.

I drive through Bobtown, follow SR 2021 down the steep hill that miners walked to get to work and make a right turn on SR 2011, now Bobtown Road. Newtown is a dot on the map at the edge of Bobtown and the road sign beside the Dollar General tells me I’ve found what I was looking for. The Budapest Road sign stands next to the old store building that noted Pittsburgh coroner Cyril Wecht’s parents operated before its doors closed during the Great Depression and the family moved to McKeesport.

I follow Budapest Road to the lazy circle of houses behind Dollar General where old single story houses mingle with newer neighbors. I roll down my window to meet the youngest person in Budapest, two-year old Kennedy Sharratt and her mom Kara. They live in one of the nicely updated houses built in the 1920s when Hungarians came here to live and work in Shannopin Mine.  They would be joined by other families from Europe and would learn to speak English together as they worked, played, prayed and built new lives in America.

“I’ve lived here four years and don’t know much about the old days but I know this is a miners house because the bathroom is in the basement where they washed up after work,” Kara tells me, catching Kennedy up in her arms and striking a happy pose in front of her porch. “I like it here. It’s a good place to live, especially now that we have a store I can walk to!”

Jimmie’s Place is just up the road on SR 2010, aka Holbert Stretch. There I meet new owner, Anna Frock, who saw the historic bar, restaurant and dance hall online while living in California. She tells me she fell in love with its nostalgic charm, bought it on Valentines Day two years ago and has continued the tradition of good food, good bar service and live music in the dance hall that James “Jimmie” Vecchio started in 1923.

Sure, she’s heard some of the stories, but I need to call Jimmie’s son Louie. You just missed him. He knows all about Budapest.

I take Holbert Stretch as it drops down to Hidden Hollow to catch up with US Route 88 and call Louie when I get home.

Cyril Wecht’s family store sold everything, Louie tells me – groceries, clothes and everything else you can imagine to the mining families of Bobtown. J&L owned all the land in town except for two lots and controlled who or what moved in. So businesses sprang up on the outskirts and Newtown was born. When Jimmie Vecchio came to Bobtown to get a job in the mine, “They wouldn’t hire him. He was known as a troublemaker.” Troublemaker?

“Yeah he wanted to make unions and nobody would hire him. So he started making and distributing whiskey.” It was the Prohibition years, the law was 20 miles away in Waynesburg, the roads to Bobtown had axel-deep mud and there was a never-ending stream of miners coming off their shifts and stopping by. “He opened Jimmies Place in 1923. I took over in 1968. I grew up in that bar. It was my back yard because everything outside was paved parking lot. We lived upstairs.”

Louie and wife Becky have just moved into their newly built home in Garards Fort and have one photo to share that isn’t still packed up – a life-size blow up of Louie standing with his dad at age six or seven. Becky takes a photo of Louie standing beside it and sends it to me.  Now it’s Anna’s turn, Louie tells me on the phone. Anne has the recipe for Louie’s Sauce for wings and she makes the fish sandwiches and posts the weekly venues on Facebook. People come for the fish sandwiches – and the music. Get the right bands and the place is packed, “You ought to stop by sometime.”

Hey! Another road trip!