Satisfied with the dust in my home

By Scott Beveridge


WEBSTER, Pa. – It struck me yesterday while cleaning my old kitchen hutch that I had waited entirely too long to perform that task.


The date was 1997 on the yellowing newspapers that were used as shelving liner in the rustic wooden furniture. And then the date struck me that I had just surpassed the 25th anniversary of having moved into this century-old fixer-upper in Webster, a Mon Valley village, which has often been considered "the other side of the tracks" by snooty people.


I would have told someone he was crazy had he suggested to me in my teens that this Pennsylvania town would remain my home into my 50s. I had dreams then of someday living in a lofty New York art studio or maybe somewhere beside the water other than this town along the murky Monongahela River 30 miles south of Pittsburgh.


But this big house offered itself to me in 1987 for $4,000, a price that I couldn't resist, even though the floor was rotten below the bathroom commode and everything was covered with a decade 's worth of grimy dust.


The real lures were the facts that the house's faux oak graining on the woodwork hadn't ever been painted over, the two pocket doors on the first floor hadn't been removed and the two main ornate fireplaces still worked. There was something here worthy of preservation.


Over the years, though, a sense of community in this small town has thankfully survived, as well. Otherwise cranky people will offer smiles at the post office in perhaps unconscious efforts to keep peace and get along with everyone. Others who live here tend to hold their tempers when someone else runs a stop sign they are approaching rather than curse obscenities at the thoughtless driver.


And sure, most of us here have relatives, coworkers and met strangers who live elsewhere and make it obvious, almost immediately, they think they are better people for where and how they live. That would be living anywhere in the "Mon Valley," where some people are viewed as being no better than a river rat.


However, one thing I have learned in certainty from my travels is that people are people and the mix of good and bad among them seems to be pretty well balanced regardless of a zip code.


I know people from out of town who spend too much time in front of their computers drafting conspiracy theories to back up their kooky opinions. I sometimes get their emails.


And I also know people over the hills who, like the guy who lives across my street, will brush the snow off their neighbor's car on a freezing cold morning for no other reason than to be kind. Here is this tiny town neighbors still take time to pull off the road to return wind-tossed garbage cans to their owners or keep a watchful eye over others' property when a stranger loiters.


Its reasons like those that make me satisfied at having never left the dust that settles here. Well maybe it's the cheap taxes, too.

Coal and a fancy automobile

Props to the Charleroi Area Historical Society for sending along these photos of my hometown of Webster, Pa.


Handwriting behind the one, atop, indicates it was taken by Mrs. A. C. Sarber, Webster, PA - in 1907, and those show are Al Sarber & Tom Giler, Alvin Wenzel & Veron Haywood and Leonard Pierce & Mike Martin.

This is what appears on the side of the other:  Pittsburgh Coal Co. Webster Works, Webster PA  7747. Written on the back:  Mrs. A. C. Sarber, Webster PA  - Equitable Mine. Taken in 1907 by Wm. Sarber.

Sometimes ugly is pretty

Take a peek out my kitchen window this morning. Here's an example of how a blanket of new-fallen snow can make things look beautiful, even an ugly falling down house beside an overgrown vacant lot. It's too bad the deer weren't there at the time.

The day President Kennedy waived to us

President John F. Kennedy is shown in 1962 speaking outside the Washington County Courthouse in Washington, Pa., ending a mid-term election sweep through Pennsylvania's steel country. Observer-Reporter

By Scott Beveridge

There isn't much I remember about the autumn morning in 1962 when the president of the United States paraded through my scrappy hometown in southwestern Pennsylvania.

It's because that October 13 when John F. Kennedy swept through Webster, Pa., fell six weeks beyond my 6th birthday, and I doubt that I understood then what he did for a living.

What became etched in my mind involved local moms, including my own, gathering their small children along the side of the dusty road passing through our village and waiting there in excitement for a glimpse of Kennedy's motorcade after he left a speech in nearby Monessen.

Kennedy was 45 and on a two-day tour of steel towns around Pittsburgh to stump for Democrats in a mid-term election, The Herald-American newspaper across the Monongahela River in Donora reported two days later. The speech could have easily been delivered last year because it was given at a time when Kennedy's party was about to lose seats in Congress and the governor's mansion in Harrisburg, Pa., the newspaper archives indicate at the Donora Public Library.

"Only twice in the last 100 years has the party in power, the party of the president, succeeded in picking up votes in the off year," Kennedy said on a stage erected in an A & P parking lot in Monessen. The message sound eerily familiar to those offered in the 2009 election two years after President Barack Obama won the White House.

More than 25,000 people had packed the streets around the grocery store and "every available space from one part of the city to the other," The Herald-American reported about Kennedy's visit.



Kennedy was in Democrat country that sunny morning because nearly every registered voter, dead or alive in that small city then under mafia control, shared the president's party. He won the Westmoreland County city with 7,500 votes two years earlier, with just 1,600 ballots there going to Richard M. Nixon.

"I am very conscious of who voted for me and who didn't," Kennedy said.

He began that Saturday in McKeesport after having visited Aliquippa and Downtown Pittsburgh the day before. More than 300,000 people lined the streets in Pittsburgh to catch a glimpse of Kennedy, who "was greeted more like a matinee idol than a chief executive," The Tube City Almanac reported.

Kennedy criticized Republicans in Washington, D.C., at every stop, particularly for their opposition of spending money on such domestic challenges as medicare, education and housing.

Surely the president had to be alarmed at the state of the housing in my town, where houses had turned black from decades of exposure to pollution from the steel mills in Donora and Monessen. The poor town didn't have sidewalks. It didn't even have much grass, either, because the acidic air that spewed from the Donora zinc works had killed most of the vegetation.

The Donora newspaper didn't bother to mention the president's motorcade passed through Webster en route Monessen, and then again to another stop at the Washington County Courthouse in Washington, Pa. The article simply stated Kennedy passed by Donora on the "opposite side" of the river.

Yet we were proud to greet Kennedy on Second Street near the ramp to the Donora-Webster Bridge as he waived to us from a black Lincoln Continental sedan with an open convertible.

It was a historic day for us, even though my mom and her female neighbors expressed much disappointment that the president had come to town without his fashionable wife Jacqueline.

President Kennedy, center, greets people outside Washington County Courthouse, Washington, Pa., at the end of a two-day campaign swing through southwestern Pennsylvania on October 13, 1962, during the mid-term election. Observer-Reporter

The town was cooler then

This place where I live - Webster, Pa., - survived pretty much just like the photo, above, into the 1960s. Nearly everything in this photo since has been demolished.

Yes, pollution from that U.S. Steel zinc mill barely visible across the Monongahela River in Donora did a lot to destroy these cool old buildings. Had they survived, this part of town could easily have doubled as a set for a movie about the Wild West.

Judging by the photo, the village looked much more interesting then than is does today. A new brick machine shop has sprung up and the neighboring houses have all been covered in boring vinyl siding. 

The weekly inspiration

From the Webster United Methodist Church in southwestern Pennsylvania today: "If you're old, give advice; If you are young, take it."

The Rev. Bruce Northey, pastor

Downed trees add to flooding concerns

A downed tree at the foot of Power Street in Webster, Pa., after a storm two weeks ago dropped as much as 2 feet of snow on southwestern Pennsylvania. (Scott Beveridge photo)

By Scott Beveridge

Trees took the brunt of the big storm this month, as so many of them have been uprooted under the weight of the heavy snow and ice.

Many of them still are leaning across power lines, appearing as if another inch or two of fresh snow would lead to more outages. More than two weeks after Stormageddon, the roads are still like obstacle courses with tree braches sticking out of the snowplow mounds.

But the toppled birch, maple and weeping willow trees along the Monongahela and Youghiogheny rivers, which spill into the Ohio, are causing even greater concerns if a major flood develops during a quick thaw accompanied by rain. A river rushing with big trees would have devastating consequences on everything in their wake, and could clog and lead to worse flooding.

The US Army Corps of Engineers said Friday it is “fighting a flood” that has the potential of putting the Three Rivers in downtown Pittsburgh 25 feet of flood stage. It would be a record cresting along the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio rivers. A perfect storm could be in the making with more than 50 inches of snow in the mountains and at least 7 ½ inches of rain in the snow pack.

High water is a concern as far downstream as St. Paul, Minn., where there is a 90 percent chance the Mississippi will flood because of severe winter weather, the Twin Cities Pioneer Press reported Friday.

“In many places, flooding is almost a sure bet, forecasters said, with a substantial possibility of severe or record levels,” the newspaper said.

The following are quotes reporters at the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa., gathered last week about the threat of high water:

"It's going to take a miracle to get rid of this snow without a flood," said Bill Drzal, a meteorologist and hydrologist for the Weather Service in Pittsburgh.

"We are praying for a slow warm-up, but there is so much water in the snow," said Jeff Yates, public safety director in Washington County.

“There is the potential it could be one of the worst,” said Jeff Hawk, corps spokesman in Pittsburgh.

Warning: storm tripping hazard ahead

By Scott Beveridge

The photograph, above, illustrates how I found my car the morning after Stormageddon delivered this region 2 feet of snow, buried under white stuff and parked under a downed telephone line.

It was two weeks ago tomorrow. Removing the wire then was understandably low on everyone's priorities. There were old people here in Webster, Pa., who needed to be evacuated by their neighbors to places that hadn't lost their heat to the widespread power outages.

So, I waited a week to notify Verizon, which apparently owns the overhead telephone lines around here. Rather than wade through frustrating telephone prompts to reach a live voice at the utility, I sent the company an e-mail that listed my address and the nature of the problem.

My message since has been ignored, without so much as my receiving one of those automated computer-generated replies guaranteeing that my message would be given attention. It probably would be a waste of time to send the company another message, yet I will send another message.

Be warned Allegheny Power and Dominion Peoples that there is a dangerous tripping hazard at the entrance to my property when you next send representatives to read the meters before passing along your next bills. If either of your meter readers trip, fall and become injured, please ask your company's attorneys to contact the owner of this dangerous downed wire and sue it, rather than me.

A tip for keeping the plant and cat alive

Cat eats houseplants, originally uploaded by dlangsen.

A colleague at the newspaper seems to have been slightly annoyed by her plant-eating cats.

Seriously, who wants half-eaten spider plants and succulents, especially in the dead of winter when indoor gardens are supposed to help chase away the cabin-fever blues?

Christie Campbell shares her thoughts about plants and their ability to brighten winter moods this month in her column for Living Washington County magazine, a by-monthly publication of the Observer-Reporter newspaper in Washington, Pa.

In it, she cites a Dutch study that concluded companies could increase productivity by placing one large plant beside two employees sitting beside computers. Somehow this trick has the ability to reduce stress and cold outbreaks at the office.

Campbell, whose infectious laugh can cheer up the entire workplace, goes on to offer a valuable tip she discovered for keeping her house cats from munching away her plants and destroying the natural environment they add to her home.

“If you are troubled by cats, soak orange peels in water overnight,” she instructs. “The next day remove the peels and pour the water into a spray bottle. Spray your plants with this water because cats aren’t fond of citrus odors.”

It's a good idea right now to water and check my plants. The cat that was here last week, temporarily orphaned when a neighbor fled after Stormageddon killed the power for five days, has gone back home. I hope it didn't get hungry here for the parsley growing in a jar on the kitchen windowsill.

Meanwhile, the lights have been flickering again here in Webster as another bad storm bears down on southwestern Pennsylvania. Two inches of fresh snow have already fallen tonight. Meanwhile, five buildings collapsed this week under the weight of the nearly 2 feet of snow that fell a week ago during a disastrous storm.

This is especially depressing because here is the latest storm warning from The Weather Channel online:

A Winter Storm Warning is in effect. A significant winter storm or hazardous winter weather is occurring, imminent, or likely, and is a threat to life and property. Stay vigilant for severe weather.

Spreading some love and less whine

A Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County worker, who declined to identify himself, prepares this morning to shut off the water to a house that is collapsing under the weight of snow and ice along Route 136 in Monongahela RD 3, Allegheny County, Pa.

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – Catherine Piscitelli is one example of someone having enough smarts to leave her home when the utilities go dead during a hellish snowstorm.

Without cable television and electricity, she was staying with relatives yesterday when heavy snow and ice in the wake of Stormageddon caused her house to begin to collapse along Route 136 in Forward Township, Pa.

So maybe there are people who can be thankful that the utilities have been a little slow in finding enough help to return these expensive modern conveniences to the thousands of houses that became cold and dark amid this natural disaster.

While others still whine about their more-insignificant problems, I have been witnessing recent acts of kindness that have become few and far behind in the years preceding these nasty storm fronts that began Friday and continue to terrorize the Northeast.

Strangers actually are smiling and talking to each other in convenience stores because they don’t have televisions and the Internet at home to separate themselves from socializing.

My terrific neighbor and his son surprised me with the gift of shoveling out the foot of my snowplowed-in driveway the morning after the first storm left behind as many as 2 feet of snow. Another friend tonight told me the story of how a guy we know rescued some folks in his truck, only to have it break down, and now he is sick with a cold or flu from spending so much time outside.

Thankfully, my power was restored yesterday afternoon. And, Comcast has a crew imported from Ohio working right now in my tiny village in the frigid cold to rewire this community.

Meanwhile, fellow blogger Amanda Gillooly has a post to this blog ready for tomorrow with colorful musings about love and Valentine’s Day that falls on Sunday. That will be a welcomed relief from this nightmare at a time when we, here, can all use a little more loving and a lot less bitching.

Snowtorious Big drags on

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – The power company finally arrived here today, five days after Stormageddon knocked out the power, and the orphaned cat and I are enjoying the electricity and heat.

Comcast, though, has yet to restore the cable television and Internet in the village of Webster in southwestern Pennsylvania, but we are not complaining.

People around here are experiencing far worse problems in this disaster that is still playing out as high winds are creating drifts and threatening to play more havoc on the utilities. The whiners around these parts who are still safe need to shut up at this point.

A house up Webster Hollow Road from mine burned to the ground last night. Police said no one was injured, and the cause of the blaze is still unknown. I suspect it had something to do with its occupants attempting to keep warm in this nightmare.

An hour or so ago my buddy who freelances for one of the local television stations called to say he heard a house a mile down a different road here is splitting apart under the weight of all this snow and ice.

Right now, I'm too exhausted to go outside in the bitter cold to report on that situation. I'll see you tomorrow.

Power company arrives, four days after Stormageddon as scary new storm approaches

A National Weather Service map shown in a webinar today of the snowfall predictions for southwestern Pennsylvania through Thursday on the next storm barreling down on the region in the aftermath of a winter weather disaster.

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – A power company, one dispatched from neighboring New York, finally shows up this morning in our tiny southwestern Pennsylvania village, four days after the lights went out from the crippling snowfall known as Stormageddon.

The news its driver delivers is encouraging, but he offers only a glimmer of hope the town folk will soon be able to once again crank up their home furnaces.

“They told us to tell everyone Thursday, or sooner,” he says about when the power might be restored. “We’re not making any promises.”

His passenger hops out and takes a quick look at a dangling wire on my street. The two men are just here to assess the damage.

“Did you take a ride up the hollow?” I ask.

“No,” the driver says.

“You need to,” is my response.

Along the narrow, winding Webster Hollow Road is where the two-day storm that thundered in Friday pulled as many as 10 large trees from their roots. The landslide brought down a string of lines feeding the village with electricity, phones and cable television.

The lineman says that road inspection is probably someone else’s job and he drives off, and so do I to begin reporting the next chapter of the storm story for the Observer-Reporter daily newspaper in Washington, Pa.

Some interesting tidbits of what turned up during my day are as follows:

The National Guard finally showed up to help run a new American Red Cross shelter as more than 19,000 houses are still without power in Washington County, and a new storm is approaching that could deliver another heavy snow. The guard’s first assignment is to relocate people who had called ambulances to take them to Washington Hospital because they were cold, not sick.

While 911 dispatchers were fielding more than 8,000 calls over two days during the last storm crisis, some local police were still pulling people over and radioing in for license checks.

Many residents are complaining that their local elected officials, emergency management coordinators and police failed them by not checking on neighborhoods without power or informing their residents about the locations of shelters and other places to get warm. Others defend them by saying those folks are busy, too, facing similar problems in this disaster.

The new “double-barrel storm” is expected, according to the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh, to dump as many as 10 new inches of snow in the area, beginning tonight and stretching into Thursday.

The first several inches are supposed to be wet and heavy before the temperature dips and the snow turns light and fluffy. Strong winds should follow the storm, creating what could be another powerful punch to bring down more trees and power lines. That is why the National Guard is here with Humvees to possibly evacuate more people to shelters, if the storm pans out.

The Weather Service people here work hard and are especially jovial when reporters call them for sources. But, I hope they are dead wrong on this storm.

At this point, it’s mostly rain here in Webster and the first snow-mix this afternoon left a dusting that has created a slippery mess on roads, some of which are still covered with ice craters. We were supposed to have already received as many as 4 inches of snow, atop the 2 feet that arrived earlier in some places.

Meanwhile, tree-clearing crew showed up in Webster this afternoon to begin the task of removing those downed trees along Webster Hollow Road. Fortunately, my house here is warm, and the pipes to my bathroom have defrosted. I’m one of the lucky few with auxiliary natural gas heat that doesn’t depend on electricity to work. So far, my resourceful neighbors appear to be dealing with this mess, as well, as it comes at them.

Four days after a winter weather disaster in southwestern Pennsylvania, a large tree dangles on power lines along Route 136 in Forward Township.


Washington County Public Safety Director Jeff Yates, left, briefs U.S. Army National Guard liaison officer Jason Mounts of Buffalo Township today on the disaster needs following last week's snow storm, as 18 percent houses in the county are still without power. Mounts first task will be to coordinate transporting people who sought shelter from the cold at Washington Hospital to an American Red Cross shelter.

Bracing for Son of Stormageddon

Washington County Public Safety Director Jeff Yates watches a National Weather Service webinar today predicting the Son of Stormageddon to arrive Tuesday as the region digs out from a snowstorm disaster.

By Scott Beveridge

WASHINGTON, Pa. – The webinar today with emergency management folks from the tri-state area and the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh left everyone with a knot in their stomachs.

Another heavy snowstorm is approaching, one with the potential to cause a disaster worse than the one that followed “Stormageddon” on Friday and Saturday and left thousands of houses without heat and electricity.

The trees and many utility wires are still wrapped in thick ice and snow, and this new storm expected at 10 a.m. tomorrow will surely cause more, possibly worse destruction, Washington County Public Safety Director Jeff Yates said this afternoon.

“I can’t even fathom where we are going with this,” Yates told the Observer-Reporter newspaper this morning.

Yates, who has had little sleep since Friday, actually buried his face in his hands at the news. I wanted to drop an F-bomb. An emergency management official chimed in and said, "That's a big-ass storm."

“Buckle up,” Weather Service Meteorologist Rich Kane said during his webinar presentation when he predicted 9 to 13 inches by Saturday “double barrel” storms. Within the hour, his forecast changed to the possibility of 10 to 14 inches of snow.

This could not have come at a worse time.

Twenty-five percent of the county is still without power from the last storm that dropped as many as 2 feet of snow in the region. Yates also confirmed my suspicion that the Mon Valley, where I live, suffered the brunt of the storm.

It looks as if a tornado ripped through there, as hundreds of large trees have been uprooted by the weight of the snow. One local fire chief said today it will take the rest of the year to clean up the damage.

The power has yet to be restored to my house, but a natural gas fireplace and heater have kept the temperature there about 58 degrees at night during single-digit temperatures. However, the water pipes are now frozen in the bathroom so I probably will be boiling water to clean up in the bathtub. Lights some candles. I’m feeling the ambience.

As for the cat that I rescued from a neighbor’s house last night; it quit shivering and crying and seemed, at last check, to be adjusting to its new digs. However, I am not in a rush to go home once more to a dark, chilly house, especially now having worries that tomorrow’s storm might keep it in the dark for days to come.

The snow-coated Donora-Webster Bridge five days after Stormageddon arrived in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Surviving Stormageddon Day 3

Cold and ignored in Westmoreland County

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – Allegheny Power, you are not entirely to blame for the power outage in this tiny village nestled among four municipalities with a combined population nearly 30,000 people.

We here in Webster, Pa., have long known that global positioning systems direct first-time visitors, inexperienced ambulance drivers and delivery trucks to nearby Donora, in place of our houses.

So here I offer the utility company a photograph of as many as 10 trees that were uprooted by "Stormageddon" after it began Friday night, pulling down the cable and electric wires. My brother remarked just two weeks ago that there was no excuse for these trees being ignored by the power company for so long because some of them were already leaning on those wires.

Meanwhile, I saw my first Allegheny Power repair truck today across the Monongahela River in Donora, a town that never lost its power to the heavy snow storm. It passed too quickly before I had a time to flag down its driver and direct him to tiny Webster with a population of fewer than 200 people.

Linemen, if you see this, the answer to our power outage can be found on Webster-Hollow Road. There are signs directing motorists to Webster from Route 51 in two locations in Rostraver Township.

By the way, can anyone tell me the identity of the emergency management director in wealthy Rostraver? To this date Sunday afternoon, no one has gone door-to-door in Webster to check on the elderly and sick, or to direct the neighborhood without heat to the nearest shelter for warmth and food. It's shameful.

Here I sit at Ringgold High School, near Monongahela, where senior citizens have been sheltering and raving about the local police and firemen for the wonderful job they have done to get them to safety. Thank you Monongahela.

UPDATE:



The situation facing the power company is much worse that it seemed before I ventured out of town this afternoon to Monongahela.

There are large trees down across utility wires along the entire 5-mile distance along routes 906 and 136 between Webster and that neighboring city. It will not be an easy task to remove them and restore power in the area.

Meanwhile, I passed a large convoy of line repair trucks tonight on Route 51 in West Mifflin heading south in the direction of Rostraver. The amount of houses without power in this area appears to be widespread along Route 201 in Rostraver and in Jefferson Hills, Allegheny County.

The natural gas heater and fireplace at my house had the indoor temperature at 68 degrees at last check. Others are not so lucky.

UPDATE No. 2:

As it happens, I have taken in the evacuated neighbor's overly-attentive cat until this mother of a storm has lifted and power returns to the neighborhood.

The candles are lit once more. Abbey has fresh cat liter, food and water, yet she still whines.

Outside, really the only way to describe it would be to say a hurricane swept through here Friday. The emergency folks are saying over there in Washington County it could be Friday until power is restored in some parts there. Here, in Westmoreland County, I am still in the dark and no one has said, to my knowledge, when rescuers will chop up the hundreds of trees that have fallen around here in order to return power to these parts.

Meanwhile, the cat is crying, seemingly afraid of its new digs. I want to tell her she should be so lucky to be warm once more as the temperature is dipping outside to 10 degrees.

To her credit, it is dark and scary tonight.

A new light shines on an old church

By Scott Beveridge

WEBSTER, Pa. – There was a friendly and long forgotten sound in the form of a church bell that chimed in my village a few weeks ago.

The clanging originated from a steeple atop the old Webster Presbyterian Church where I learned about God as a child growing up in southwestern Pennsylvania.

The new pastor there said he just discovered the bell rope that sunny autumn afternoon when I approached him to say it was cool to once again hear the ringing. Our conversation then drifted off in passing as he went about his task of repairing the church.

I’m not sure why the many church bells were silenced in this neck of the Monongahela River valley about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. They used to echo off the hills in Webster, Pa., and nearby Donora to announce Sunday services when I was a kid in the 1960s.

The bell ringing seemed of die out, unnoticed, as flocks of people relocated for better opportunities after the mills began to slowly disappear. And many other local churches would close, too, and fall into disrepair as the jobs vanished.

The Webster church stood out, though. It was built in 1888 before the steel mills overshadowed the area, becoming the first church in a town with six saloons that once satisfied the thirsts of riverboat captains and their likes. It was a landmark for a village whose residents wanted to establish a solid foundation when the United States was rapidly expanding to the west.

The women of my generation who belonged to the church did their best to set a positive example and make Sunday school fun and interesting for children. Kids were not allowed inside the sanctuary until they turned 10 or 11 and could prove to the adults they wouldn’t disrupt the sermons. By that age, though, most of the children quickly became bored by the services and soon lost interest in church.

It wasn’t until many years had passed that I discovered the church was an antique, built in a style more common to New England. The clapboard building was a museum in itself, especially on the inside that contained its original pews, wainscoting and doors. A preservationist on a drive through town later said the church’s Gothic-style, green stained glass windows were rare and priceless.

Sadly, the last time I was inside the church 15 years ago the pews had been replaced by 1970s-style seating that clashed with the architecture. The organist, she gasped when I said something about being surprised by the new look that also included beige wallpaper. She huffed before saying the congregation had grown tired of sitting in uncomfortable pews.

The Presbyterians would dwindle in ranks, abandon the building last summer and sell it to the Mon-Valley River of Life congregation. The new members, while strangers to town, appear to be working hard to fix the place up because they have been repairing the windows and roof and making other visible renovations.

That’s a good sign for an old church that was built at a time when the residents of Webster had high hopes for a future that would never come to fruition.

The warnings signs were there

Introduction: Welcome to nowhere

By Scott Beveridge

A sprawling junkyard greeted motorists when they drove into Webster from the south end of town in the early 1960s. The rusting 1957 Chevys piled atop beat up 1948 Fords should have warned anyone who was planning to move there to turn around and drive off at top speed to a nicer landscape

There should have been sign that read, BEWARE, because a good many of the people who lived around the bend had earned their reputation of coming from the wrong side of the tracks.

Ahead laid a tough-as-nails village in Southwestern Pennsylvania steel country where differences were often settled with fists and blood after its men downed shots of whiskey chased with union-brewed beer.

Although most Webster folks were dirt poor, everyone within its tiny borders was white and everyone there wanted it to stay that way. Many parents were satisfied when their sons obtained a 10th-grade education, and enlisted in the military or found work in the mills. Their daughters often got pregnant at 15, had shotgun weddings and immediately lost much hope for a better future.

Webster’s forefathers surely had bigger dreams for the town they nestled along a sharp curve in the Monongahela River.


The God-fearing Christians included a German, Andrew Beazell, who was among the first to farm the fertile soil in 1773 before the United States made peace with the Indian Nation. Beazell’s son Benjamin would incorporate the town in 1833, naming it after orator Daniel Webster. Like Webster, the villagers were staunch nationalists. Its families had also supported President George Washington’s troops who camped in town to settle the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s.

Neighbors boasted about their boatyard and its employee, Samuel Walker, who 20 years later built the first steamboat to chart the river. By then, the streets and houses had been laid out in Biblical fashion. The sun rose due east above every back door and set facing the front porches. Yards were separated by white picket fences, and most contained lush orchards and flower and vegetable gardens. Riverboat pilots dried their sea legs inside their mansions that were built with ornate trimmings to match the finest paddle boats of the day. City dwellers in smoky Pittsburgh, 30 miles to the north, even traveled by boat to picnic and sunbathe along Webster’s shoreline and later rest up the road in one of four fancy hotels.


There were even plans for an opera house when Webster, with more than 2,000 residents, had become one of the largest settlements for miles. This utopia, however, was shattered after U.S. Steel Corp. began in 1901 to build a giant mill directly across the river and establish the Borough of Donora. Webster already had the coke ovens and a mill to supply its boatyards with iron. But, that operation was too small to compete with Pittsburgh coke and steel barons Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie when they came to Donora. So, the village began to dig deeper into its hillsides to find the coal to supply the new furnaces across the Mon.


Webster’s riverboat captains, having witnessed how these giant mills had damaged other farms along their travels, immediately put their estates on the market. Anyone else with enough money soon followed their lead. In no time, Donora’s smokestacks were spewing the dirtiest air in the nation and would contribute to the infamous fluoride fog of October 1948 that killed 20 people and sickened hundreds of others. Poor Webster sat directly downwind of the fumes, which had eaten the paint off the houses and stripped the ground of its vegetation. That deadly smoggy weekend became known as America’s worst air pollution disaster, one that led to the nation’s first clear air legislation.

My parents, two brothers and I pulled into Webster to stay in the fall of 1960, a few years before Donora entered the history books again for becoming home to the first major steel mill to permanently shut down in the United States. This was not going to be a walk in the park.

Chapter 2

(Captions: The Route 906 entrance at the south end of Webster in the 1950s; a map of the village from the "Atlas of Westmoreland County Atlas" published in 1867;" The restaurant inside a Webster hotel near the intersection of Webster Hollow Road and Second Street in the late 1800s; and U.S. Steel Corp. in 1909 laid the groundwork for its infamous zinc works in Donora on the north side of the Donora-Webster Bridge. Another source: "Early Days in Rostraver," by Mary E. Piersol, Bess Dailey Winchell and Ernest Frank Carter, "The Times-Sun," West Newton, Pa., 1949)

Pool of memories

The infamous Donora zinc works, shown above in a photograph taken circa 1945 in Webster.

By Scott Beveridge

DONORA, Pa. – By some accounts, residents of Donora had begun to complain about a foul odor shortly after U.S. Steel Corp. opened a zinc mill in their neighborhood a century ago.
The mill superintendent, however, insisted that the air was safe to breathe, so the story goes. To prove his point, he moved his family, including an aging relative, into a mansion he had built on a hillside directly above the row of smokestacks.
Those living arrangements in 1916 didn’t last long. That same year, the company began construction of a plan of airtight, Prairie School blockhouses for its bosses on a hillside at the edge of town as far away from the mill as possible.
The plan of houses, where flowers bloomed and trees grew tall, became known as Cement City. There wasn’t a blade of grass, however, on the ground in the immediate vicinity of the mill. The hills were barren of trees, too, downwind and across the Monongahela River in the scrappy village of Webster. The vegetation was sacrificed for a top secret operation that forged metal plating with the strength to bulletproof U.S. military tanks.
The boss' stately, three-story brick mansion would be donated to Donora’s Spanish immigrant community, whose strong, young men had the right genetics to withstand the torturous heat while working beside the zinc smelters.
Donora would become infamous for a killer smog that was the impetus for the nation’s first clean air legislation in 1963. Stagnant air had trapped the mill's pollution in the deep valley town for three days in late October 1948. Twenty people died gasping for air and hundreds were sickened by the fumes, before rain moved in and allowed the pollution to dissipate. The event prompted physicians to publicly link air pollution to poor health for the first time.
Also in the 1960s, the Donora Spanish Club was home to the town’s only outdoor, exclusive swimming pool. My family, and our white Anglo-Saxon Protestant relatives, were proud to wear Spanish Club patches on our bathing suits. While I don’t remember anyone saying it out loud, the club had an unwritten rule then that blacks were not allowed in the pool.



Racism had nothing to do with keeping the water clean. I suffered many reoccurring inner-ear infections from spending too much time scavenger hunting on the bottom of the deep end of the pool.
Still, it was a safer alternative to swimming in the filthy, dead Monongahela. And the club’s bartender provided my father with beer on Sundays at a time when state law prohibited public bars from opening on the Sabbath.



Today, four decades after the mill shut down for good, there is a lush jungle on the Webster hillside. The river runs much cleaner now that the company, and many others like it that once dotted the region’s landscape, no longer dump acid byproducts directly into its water.
Somehow, the Spanish Club manages to stay open in harsh economic times in Donora. Although the big house on the hill looks badly in need of attention, the swimming pool should be open this summer. Last year, it was refreshing to see a few black children running around its lawn.