As I drive to the Monon Center in Greensboro on a sunny summer morning, I find myself remembering another sunny morning sitting in the grass beside its high walls, sketching, laughing, sharing stories with fellow sketchers…was it five years ago? I’m not sure. Summer art classes were happening for a few years at the Monon Center when it was still active, that much I remember. The handsome cut stone building has been sold to Nick Perreco, great grandson of the man who built it in 1904 and remaining board members Candace Rydal and Linda Chaney are busy getting every remaining item and artifact catalogued and redistributed.
My hazy memories will be remedied once I step through the doors to browse the Monon Center files with Candace. Boxes of manila sleeves stuffed with papers are on every table, rows of old school desks march along one wall, stacks of chairs along another. We’re in the big high ceilinged downstairs room to the right of the doorway that still has its original slate blackboards. I’ve come to find the story of the Monon Center and the school it commandeered to be both a museum and education and enrichment center for the community. I’ve already reached out on Greensboro’s official Facebook page and got some clear childhood memories of school life back in the day. “I got my knuckles busted with a dowel rod first day in first grade in 1952” wasn’t sure when the school closed, but there on the blackboard I find the answer written in chalk – “Last year of School here is 1962 – 1963.”
Candace set her laptop on a back table, turned on a floor fan and gestured to the files. “I have everything in those files on spread sheets and we’re contacting every non profit that has history as its mission. Where do you want to start?”
For the next few hours we piece together a timeline saved in meeting minutes and newspaper clippings that describe a remarkable story of historic preservation that is still alive and well in Greensboro.
When the Monon Center formed as a 501c3 in 1974, the Women’s Club of Southeastern Greene County and townspeople with kids had already organized around having fun things to do close to home. Mon View Park was up and running with a swimming pool, skating rink, playgrounds, picnic areas and sports facilities. Area coal mines were still operating, and the American Bicentennial was just around the corner. The original charter for membership listed hundreds of individuals who were involved in the beginning and the artifacts that are still here are impressive. A Dravo Corporation poster describes the Center as a small, personal museum “where our past can play a meaningful role in our present” and notes “[w]ithin its gray stone walls are collections of local Greensboro and New Geneva pottery, a Monongahela House Hotel guest register signed by Ulysses S. Grant and a 20-foot working model of a navigation lock built by a river buff.”
Personal items of Reverend John Corbly, “leader of the Whisky Rebellion,” were also on display for the Bicentennial and Candace showed me a newspaper clipping reporting the $15,000 Bicentennial grant that helped make it all happen.
Monon Center was a hub of community activity for the next ten years, the centerpiece of the Greensboro Bicentennial of 1981, and the place to go for history lectures, art lessons and pottery workshops using molds to create decorative green ware that could be painted and fired by anyone with an interest. At some point a grant was written for a potter to start a line of hand thrown jugs and crocks and “world renown Prof. Zeljko Kujundzic” threw prototypes with the chosen logo embossed on the side. But the grant was not awarded and the prototypes became part of the stoneware collection that still sits on shelves in the next room, waiting for a new home.
By the mid-1980s the original founders of the Monon Center were growing older and it was harder to do the volunteer work it took to maintain the building with its big coal fired furnace. Times were changing and the next generation seemed more interested in the present than the past. Candace pulled another file and showed me the minutes of every meeting through those years. “I’ve read them all. It’s all here, every receipt, everything. They were very organized and you can see what things cost back then. Dues were five dollars a year and they never went up.” Despite that, membership continued to decline. “Then there was the flood.”
The Election Day flood of November 5, 1985 put three feet of water in the basement and high school kids helped clean up. In the months that followed the Corbly family reportedly took their artifacts and donated them to the Greene County Historical Society Museum. Still, the pottery classes continued even as the museum shortened its hours of operation to by appointment only.
Greensboro itself was facing an uncertain future. When the Army Corp of Engineers made plans to condemn the houses of the historic riverfront in 1992, homeowners and the community organized Nathanael Greene Historical Foundation and went to court to prevent it. The foundation would become Nathanael Greene Community Development Corporation, and continues to promote Greensboro’s rich history the Monon Center helped preserve in the 1970s.
“In 1991 there was one meeting,” Candace tells me, and in 1993 the board voted to shut off the water to save $15 a month. The last entry in the museum register was August 9, 1999. Candace says she read every entry and found the center had visitors from 38 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia and six foreign countries.
By 2006 the borough was ready to sell the building and its contents but some residents took it to court to stop the sale. A new board was appointed by the court in 2009 and in 2011 the Monon center funded local sculptor Steve Murdock to start a summer arts camp for kids. Artists were now being drawn to Greensboro through Art Blast on the Mon. This newest reincarnation of the community spirit that started the Monon Center was a Labor Day festival sponsored by Nathanael Greene Foundation to keep the focus on art, education and the history of this little corner of the Western Frontier along the banks of the Monongahela River.
Candace admits she was recruited to come on board in 2014 by a fellow artist she met in class at Wash Arts in Washington. A retired teacher with years of experience with Intermediate Unit 1 in Coal Center, Candace was ready to throw herself into all the details of grant writing, recruitment and documentation that it takes to do successful arts and education programs. She recruited her friend Linda Cheney, a retired docent and practicing paralegal to the board and received an 18-month Community Foundation grant in 2015 to put art and artists in every school district in Greene County and the Parks and Recreation summer camps of 2016. A photograph I took of her and Linda at Art Blast that Labor Day shows them holding a quilt made of muslin squares that summer camp students decorated with permanent markers, then sprayed with denatured alcohol to melt the lines into rainbows and inject a chemistry lesson into the fun of making art.
“Nick Perreco has been wanting to buy the building for years and when it was time to sell I made sure he knew,” Candace said. When the sale was finalized in January, the Monon Center officially closed, with permission from the new owner to take the time needed to deal with the inventory.
“We’ll have an online auction sometime in the future when every attempt has been made to place what is here with another historical society or nonprofit,” Candace said, noting that the Bradford House had already chosen a number of early 18th century items and have them on display and most of the river history will be going to the Monongahela Historical Society. “These artifacts need to be somewhere where people can see them. That is our goal – to get them where they belong.”