I Love This Place

by Colleen Nelson

I confess – the only time I’d ever stopped in Point Marion before writing this story was to eat some excellent homemade pie at Apple Annie’s with several co-workers and I wasn’t driving. Definitely not on my beaten path! So imagine my surprise and delight when I finally crossed the bridge from State Route 88 South to the Fayette County side of the Monongahela River and found myself greeted by a mural on the side of a building facing the Mon, painted by artist Eddie “Spaghetti” Maier of Morgantown.  “Welcome to Point Marion” it reads, every line a cheerful mix of stylized trees, water and sky, bicyclists, paddlers, musicians and even the magical albino deer that I would learn was once the town mascot. The town spreads out behind it, streets of well-kept houses from many eras, a back-to-the-1940s downtown with open stores and historic signage, then left to another bridge that crosses the Cheat on its way to Friendship Hill Historical Park, three scenic miles away. Tucked between these two rivers lies a tiny triangle of history lovingly preserved by many of its original settler families. Point Marion!  What took me so long to find you?

This little town at the confluence of the Cheat and Monongahela rivers has been keeping a low profile for centuries, sandwiched as it is between bigger towns and industrial hubs up and down the Mon from Morgantown to Pittsburgh. For thousands of years it was the hunting grounds of Eastern Woodland indigenous tribes, rich with game – more than enough for all to share.

That would change in 1723 when Jaques Cheathe, a French Huguenot from Quebec made a deal “with the Cherokee Elk Clan to hunt, fish and trade here.” The next year he would set up a trading post, becoming the first European resident on that triangle and while he was at it, keep an eye out for “English frontiersmen making settlement.” The superpowers of their day were sparring in the wilderness over possession of these lands, settlers eager for their share of the new world were moving in and trading posts became forts as the tension and bloodshed grew.  

By 1763, when the French relinquished claim to the land, what remained of those early years were “Mehmonananagehelak” the Shawnee name for “falling in river bank” and “Cheathe”, names that morphed into Monongahela and Cheat. 

Mason and Dixon crossed the Cheat in October, 1767, met with Chief Catfish and his wife, stashed some supplies, then hewed their way through virgin timber to Core before their Lenape guides warned them to go no further. The line they surveyed, separating the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania, passes through the Cheat near the hydroelectric dam that holds back Lake Lynn, a scant few miles from town. Nearly every long time resident has a relative that harkens back to these early years.

The 400-some page book Point Marion – from the beginning, published in 2000, is full of these great historical tidbits and family histories, compiled by “eight citizens of Point Marion who felt that the history of our area be preserved for future generations.”

“My mother helped write that book!” Dave Callahan unfolds himself from the center of his universe of newspaper clippings and photos on the wall and couches, recliners and refrigerators in the storefront of the family business Clar-Mac Sales on Penn Street. Some of his own published history hangs on the wall – “My ancestors came as farmers to the Monongahela River in 1771.” 

Dave’s family tells the story of Point Marion’s first big cash crop – lumber, taken from the steep hills channeling the Cheat. During spring and fall high waters, the family would “cut timber and float logs downstream to sawmills in Point Marion.”

When George Washington visited the point in 1784, the land Colonel George Wilson now owned was not yet a town but it did have Morgan’s Tavern, built by Zackwell Morgan, founder of Morgantown. Pennsylvania had already designated the Monongahela River a public highway, ferries were in operation and packet boats were moving lumber, goods and services up and down the river.

When Jacob Sadler bought Wilson’s land in 1801, this area was still little more than farm country, but the river was about to change all that. Steamboats arrived in 1823, and by 1842, John Sadler had 28 lots facing the river laid out and the first person to buy one would have naming rights to the town. For the many old Revolutionary War veterans who lived here, the choice was easy. The Life of General Francis Marion was the most widely circulated book in the neighborhood and so the “Swamp Fox” general who never set foot here had his name added to the point and a town was born.

Attempts were now being made to control water levels on this first super highway of the region. Pittsburgh built the first lock in 1841 and by 1856 there were locks to New Genevia, Denbo and Rices Landing. 

The approaching Civil War brought a bit of crisis identity to the politics of the time – Virginia was just on the other side of the Mason Dixon Line. In 1862 “the town ladies made the first American flag and it was hauled to the river bank on a sled and raised on freshly cut pole.” A year later, West Virginia was carved out of the northern reaches of the Confederacy and by 1867 Point Marion was beginning to bustle, with “eleven dwellings, a store and a circular sawmill.” In 1871 Dave Callahan’s relative, John A. Clarke built his first sawmill “at the head of Hope Hollow”.  A flash flood took it out the next year, so operations were moved to Crow’s Ferry, a mile from town. By 1874 there was a combination planning mill and sawmill where the Cheat River Bridge crosses the point. It was destroyed by a tornado but “undaunted, Clarke rebuilt and continued operations there.” It took the flood of 1888 that brought the river up “39 feet 10 inches” to move the family business to Freeling Street “where it served the building needs of the community until 1960.”

History was beginning to pick up steam. Natural gas, oil and coal were now the big movers of the day and Lock #9, built in 1879 made Point Marion accessible by slack water year round. Industry was making the region profitable but it would be tourism that made Point Marion a genteel Victorian town in the “Gay 90s” and all the way up to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Eager to escape the summer heat and pollution of Pittsburgh with its belching steel mills, those with economic means came to camp out, fish and cook over a fire along the river banks. The town responded, building hotels, Castle Keiser, Harvey House, Central Hotel and the Point Marion Hotel on Penn Street.  The first rails into town brought passenger trains and visitors had their choice of eateries, hotels and a park filled with cherry trees and a gazebo for live concerts. 

Another economic boom on its way as the twentieth century dawned, thanks to visionary businessman Alfred “Barney” Mapel, who arrived in town with his dad decades earlier and opened a grocery store, then later, an apple drying plant when he saw the business opportunity.  But it was his affiliation with gas and oil magnate J. Bennedum that would put Point Marion on the map. Mapel brought natural gas to town with his Star Gas Company and persuaded Belgium glassmaker Leon J. Houze to team up with Juleus Quertinmont and Florise Duliere to form a cooperative. A ready source of sand, the base ingredient of glass was now available from Cheat River dredging and soon Point Marion became “virtually the hand window glass center of the U.S.”  And it was Mapel who supplied the natural gas that fueled the furnaces and helped anchor the glass industry in Point Marion for the next century.

John “Rod” Houze of Point Marion has a collection of more than 2000 pieces of his family’s products that runs the range from the hand blown glass panes of the early days to the patented colored glass processes that created welding and nuclear industrial goggles, binocular lenses, sun glasses and the brilliantly colored decorative art glass that was shaped, screened, engraved and sometimes used as a medium by artists like Peter Max. In the 1950s, the company was commissioned to make authentic hand shaped panes for the windows of the White House restoration project.

That industry is gone now and the long field that was once filled with factory buildings was converted into a park and a football field where the Point Marion High School teams once played. The high school is now a personal care home and the owners give free rent to the town library that is in a room on the corner of the old school building where it once shared space with the school library when school was in session. 

The rail beds that ran along Railroad Street have been pulled up and in their place is the Sheepskin Trail, which Dave is happy to tell me, now connects to Star City and Morgantown, 13 miles away. Plus “we have a boat launch for motor and fishing boats and a dock to fish from. People have a lot of fun here. You need to come back when the weather warms up!”

That “Welcome to Point Marion” mural tells you this town is using the power of public art to tell its story.  Go a block and there’s another mural – this one a mosaic of glass celebrating that industry while showcasing the history to be found here. A third mural of Old Glory on the VFW building is a 21st century backdrop to the historic plaque celebrating first secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin’s National Park home on Friendship Hill.

Apple Annie’s closed and moved to Morgantown when the pipes froze and destroyed its building on Church Street two years ago but there’s still good eats to be found if you come cycling or paddling into town, or are heading for some cross country skiing, hiking and sledding at Friendship Hill. The owners of Fredricktown Market bought Foodland on Main Street last year and have added a section for butcher cuts and hot food to go that is as tasty as what is served up in their home store. The Subway next door to the Mon River Bridge is a great gathering place for visitors and locals alike.  Want more?  N&Js Pizza Palace is on Penn Street and the Riverside Diner serves breakfast and lunch. 

Point Marion, I’ll be back!

GreeneScene of the Past

by Colleen Nelson

You can thank forward-thinking businessman Alfred “Barney” Mapel for bringing twentieth century family fun to Point Marion. His Camp Run Park on the east side of Morgantown Street had what up-to-the-minute towns craved as the 1900s came calling  – a ball field, swimming pool, acres of picnic and party space and best of all, a hot new roller skating rink. Point Marion families had been ice-skating on the river for generations so they were ready to roll!

Later, when glassblower Leon Houze built an imposing, multipurpose facility on Rail Road Street sometime during World War I, it too sported a fine expanse of smooth flooring – large enough to be the auditorium for Point Marion High School on School House Hill, a place for basketball games, graduation ceremonies, talent shows and dances. The Point Marion Community Fair was held there and big name bands and acts came to entertain. There was a stage, a wrap around balcony and at some point that seems lost to living memory, folks started wheeling around there too.

The Odd Fellows bought the building from Leon Houze in 1928 and by the 1930s roller-skating on Friday and Saturday nights was a happy tradition for the kids who would grow up in and around Point Marion. Martha DeSicy Kimble’s parents met at the rink and married in 1936. Old photos and great memories like that live in the hearts and desk drawers of neighbors so when I took my request for both to Facebook’s Point Marion Pennsylvania page, managed by ex-resident, now resident historian Travis Bernard Hunt, I got what I was looking for.  Travis remembers skating there as a kid, starting in 1989 when he was six years old. “It was the most exciting place to be on Friday night! Favorite song at the rink was ‘Paradise’ by Guns N’ Roses – the faster the song the faster you went!”

There was no such thing as Guns N’ Roses when Suzanne Koval’s 79-year-old mom crossed the bridge from Greene County to skate Topsy Turvy Trio, Couples, All Skate and Ladies Choice in the early1950s – it was “Moonlight Serenade” and “Moon River”, with a little “Hokey Pokey” thrown in for giggles and grins. Many girls wore velvet skating dresses and “pompoms and bells on their skates and you had better know how to waltz on skates! It was a beautiful time for amateur skaters.” 

Jane Reed Bohan tells us that in 1957 admission was fifty cents, history teacher Alfred Springer rented skates for a quarter and the last song of the evening was “Red Sails in the Sunset”. “My brother was a skate boy and the rink was always full. There were sock hops with Leon Sykes as DJ. Always a happy place!”

 “I remember helping put away coats and shoes and giving the round metal number tag. And the concession stand giving pop to skaters.” Lisa Henigin Miller’s family owned the skates and ran the concession at the end of the Odd Fellow years – her father Fred started out as a skate boy in the 1970s and went on to keep the rink rolling. She was seven years old when the family sold the skates to the Lions Club in 1983. 

“My parents rented the rink out for my 16th birthday party, that would have been 1990,” Christina Bosley remembers.

“We rented the rink out for $75 a night,” last operator Mary Jane Beckner tells me on the phone from her home in Wadestown, West Virginia. Her memories of keeping the Lion’s Club rink open every weekend –  “I can count on my hands and toes how many times I missed a night!” –  with her husband Troy who kept the wheels turning on those skates – and daughter Janet Smith are still an easy recall. She skated there herself as a kid. “I was born in 1935, just up the street from the rink.”

When the Beckners took over the rink in 1983, Mary Jane laced up her skates and worked the floor. A favorite memory is setting up tables on the rink when the district governor of the Lions Club came for his annual visit and serving dinner on roller skates. “‘Why walk when you can skate?’ I told them!”

Mary Jane, now 84, had knee surgery in 2006 and the rink closed May 20th, 2007. “Nobody got paid to work there, it was all volunteers and it was hard to find people who would commit to be there every weekend, so…it was a great 23 years.” 

That fine smooth floor is long gone but the old building, still imposing and looking uncannily like the Alamo, has new owners who plan to use its vast interior to do repair work on racecars, according to Travis. Check it out the next time you take the time to tour Point Marion. And just imagine all the kids who did the “Hokey Pokey” there on a Saturday night!