Steep Grades and Dangerous Curves of the Lehigh Gorge around Penn Haven - Train Wrecks Post 2 of 3

May 11, 2014, 12:46 pm

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Events of consequence, deadly ones on the rails, often turn on the smallest details.

Post #1 covered the accidental deaths of those struck and run over on the rails around Penn Haven (including two murders…click here to read that post).

Follow-up Post #2 and #3 will report on the derailments and train collisions that occurred here from 1874 to 1910.

This undated wreck, most likely in the early 1900s, occurred just below
the Stony Creek curve at a slight curve known as the Barn Door Curve.
The Stony Creek curve is upriver and at the extreme right of the picture.
The photographer's back is facing Penn Haven, about one-half
mile down grade or timetable east.

The derailments and collisions that occurred in the vicinity, including wrecks around Ox Bow Curve will be discussed here in Post #2.

~~~

Mud Run Train Disaster - "A name of terror for all time" - Wrecks of Penn Haven Post 3 of 3

May 18, 2014, 2:58 pm

≫ Next: Think, Love, and Remember - Memorial Day 2014 St. John's Lutheran, Mahoning Valley

≪ Previous: Steep Grades and Dangerous Curves of the Lehigh Gorge around Penn Haven - Train Wrecks Post 2 of 3

Ocotber 10, 1888 – Wednesday evening -Temperance Excursion Train Disaster at Mud Run: “A name of terror for all time.”

The most costly wreck in early Pennsylvania and Lehigh Valley Railroad history took roughly sixty lives. The passengers had attended a Temperance Parade in Hazleton earlier that day. There were men, women and children of all ages aboard the seven separate passenger trains boarded in Hazleton around 6:30 pm. The special orders from the L.V.R.R. included the spacing of the trains at ten minute intervals. This interval was considered more than sufficient since five minute intervals was standard practice.

The three passenger cars, borrowed from the Jersey Central, were telescoped together just above the Mud Run
station on October 10, 1888. There were seventy-eight cars needed to haul the roughly 5,500 temperance attendees from the annual parade in Hazelton back to their homes in the Wilkes-Barre area. Roughly 70 people were loaded into each car. Some say the Central cars were of "flimsy" construction and led to the unnecessary death. The Valley had to borrow cars from the Central because of the unusually high-volume of passengers that day. Over work and lack
of sleep may have contributed.

The company also took the precaution of posting all the special orders associated with this huge undertaking and had all involved employees sign that they read them after they had been “studied for several days,” having been posted on all the bulletin boards.

Penn Haven - Carbon County's Most Desolate Place - The Reds O'Donnell Story

Post 1 of 3 on Lehigh Gorge Train Wrecks from 1874 to 1910 - Civilians and Workers hit and runover, including two murders.

Post 2 of 3 on Lehigh Gorge Train Wrecks from 1874 to 1910 - Derailments and collisions

The Lehigh Gorge - Former Valley and Central Lines Rails-Trails Virtual Tour

Verbal instructions were also given to the engineers to “be careful.” It would appear legally, the Valley Railroad did everything in its power to avoid the unthinkable. But in the final analysis lack of sleep and over work seemed to play the most significant role.

All the special orders, signatures, and ten minute intervals were for naught. The unthinkable indeed happened, killing at least sixty-four.

The victims were members of the Father Mathew Society. Many were Irish Catholic coal miners relatively new to this country. It was reported that there were seventy-eight car loads of people, of over 5,500 loaded onto the eight different trains, which would be about seventy people per car.

This broad sweeping curve shows the entry of Mud Run into the river.
The station would have been about one half mile toward the left. The
train that was struck was sitting just above the station. This would be one
of two curves the approaching train passed through before the collision.

The ill-fated sixth train was stopped at the Mud Run Station because the lights signaled that they were too close to the fifth train running ahead of it. The rear of the sixth train was parked at the edge of a curve.

Brakeman James Hanighan later testified that the train stopped “a short distance above the station” at Mud Run. He said he immediately took a red and a white light “as far back as the depot.”

The Mud Run as it flows into the Lehigh today
beneath the Valley bridge still in use today.

He went on to say he signaled with his red light and was on the platform when the last train went past him “at a lively rate.” He estimated the speed to be twenty-five miles per hour, nearly twice the speed sworn by one of the engineers, Henry Cook.

This said train, the seventh, was pulled by Engine #466 (Engineer James Sharkey) and assisted by Engine #452 (Engineer Henry Cook assisted by his fireman Hugh Gallagher).

According to rail officials of the Valley, it is alleged that lookouts aboard the #452 should have seen the flagmen and yielded to the red signal light. However, it was the crew of the #466, not the #452, who had control of the air brake system.

Engineer Cook’s testimony was at odds with Hanighan’s. First, he estimated his train’s speed at “twelve to fourteen” miles per hour. Other expert testimony supported this to be a safe speed under the circumstances.

Cook also said that he was alert, leaning out the right side of the cab and slowed to ten miles per hour when he approached the platform at Mud Run. At this point, he noticed the “violent swinging of a white light.”

“I immediately whistled down brakes,” he said. However, the engine behind him, the #466, had “charge of the train” and had the control over the air brakes.

Other witnesses said Cook had been on duty for several days “with but little sleep.” Cook claimed to be still “fresh and wide awake.”

Thomas Major of East Mauch Chunk had never run a passenger train before. He thought one engine was enough to pull the train, and besides, had they had just one, the engineer would have had a better view.

Major also said he had been on duty since Monday night at nine o’clock (a near twenty-four hours) with but six hours of rest. Despite this, he said he “did not feel sleepy.”

Fireman Joseph Pohl testified from his hospital bed in Bethlehem, where he was recovering from leg injuries sustained in the accident. He had been on duty since five o’clock that morning, a more than twelve hour shift. He said he saw the white target and told the engineer everything was alright.

He just then momentarily rested his head in his hands when the next thing he knew, he heard the “whistle for down brakes.” He saw the engineer’s hand go to the lever, but had no recollection as to whether he was able to turn it or not.

Engineer Cook’s main defense was that he never saw or heard any danger signal, “when such should have been exposed.” He also asserted, and no one disagreed, that there were no “torpedoes” deployed onto the tracks.

(Torpedoes are small explosives/metal encased fireworks that detonate when a train approaches a disabled train. See the accidental death received by a young woman from a prank torpedo left on a trolley track in Mauch Chunk – click here.)

Henry Cook alleged that no flagman or light was placed east, or below, the Mud Run Station. Other witnesses alleged brakeman Hanighan was inside the station and not on the platform as he claimed to be.

The crash according to one survivor of the seventh train occurred at 7:45 pm.

Even at such a low speed as twelve miles per hour, the force of the impact was deadly. The rear three cars of the sixth train were telescoped together, mangling and trapping people in a mass of flesh, blood, iron and steam.

Besides those killed outright, others were scattered about and pinned under the engines. The trapped and wounded “could put their heads out of the windows but could get no further, as their lower limbs were held in the wreckage like a vice.”

On the scene was James J. McGinty who was the recorder of deeds in Luzerne County. He estimated the speed of the train at fifteen miles an hour. He said, “I have read thrilling accounts of railroad disasters, but never pictured in my mind anything like this.”

He went on to say, “The injured would say, “Oh, lift that iron and take me out; for God’s sake help me.” Another would say, “My leg is fast, cut off my leg; get an axe and cut it off.” Every few minutes another of the poor victims would die. Some were scalded by escaping steam, some were crushed to death, and some dying slowly of their awful injuries.”

Directly beneath Engine #452 lay four young boys, mangled and severely burned. They were members of the “Father Mathew Cadet Society” and were so ravaged that they were barely recognizable as human forms.

Some of these survivors, pinned in contorted positions, suffered fatal scalding burns from the escaping steam of the engines. A man known only as “McGinty,” “risked all danger,” got inside the wrecked engine and “pulled out the fire.”

In the hope to free those trapped, a trainman attached a locomotive to the rear of the merged telescoped cars and engine, and tried to pull them apart. The first tug brought “such cries of distress that the surrounding friends ordered the engineer to desist on pain of his life.”

One group attending the parade was known as the "St. Francis Pioneer Society." One of the trademarks of their attire is to carry broad axes. In the mayhem that ensued after the wreck, many sprung to action to help the suffering and dislodge the entangled. The Pioneers soon discovered their largely decorative axes were of little use, breaking apart in demolition work.

Friends and relatives in most cases could do nothing to help in the agony of their trapped loved ones.

John Lynch was hanging outside the car, his legs trapped inside. He screamed in such agony his friends supported his weight on their backs to help alleviate his suffering. He was burned about his arms and shoulders and was in serious condition.

Another woman was also pinned by her legs. The men with axes were able to free her one leg, but a misdirected swing severed her other leg from her body. She calmly accepted her fate, withdrew a gold watch from her pocket, and directed those attending her to give it to her friend back home. Her friends accompanied her to a hospital car where it was said she died en route home.

News of the Mud Run Disaster took on a national scope when Frank
Leslie's Illustrated newspaper of New York picked up the story. The above
illustration most likely drawn from eye-witness accounts does bear
scrutiny to actual some of the nuances that unfolded just after the collision.

Some of the papers seemed happy to report that “many temperance pledges were quickly forgotten” as the survivors boarded trains away from the disaster.

Within thirty minutes, a train with the Valley superintendent and physicians was dispatched from Bethlehem. Bonfires were built to give light to the rescue efforts.

Though quite remote, there were a few homes in the area. Soon these homes were lit up and converted into temporary shelter for the wounded who could be gathered there.

At 6:30 the following evening, “a funeral train arrived in Wilkes-Barre bearing fifty-seven bodies partially prepared for burial.” The bodies were lain “upon boards across the backs of seats, each covered with a white cloth.”

Frantic friends boarded the cars despite officials asking for them to show some restraint. They began tearing off the sheets in search of their loved ones, revealing the “gay uniforms of the St Aloysius’s men, cadets and other members of societies.”

Two special trains carried the wounded to hospitals at Bethlehem and Wilkes-Barre. Forty doctors were said to be on the ground at daybreak.

The initial reports had the death toll ranging from the upper fifty’s to the low sixty’s. An article in the following day’s Philadelphia paper recorded from a dispatch from Easton that fifty-six were killed outright and another forty injured could die.

A Wilkes-Barre paper reported on the following day of forty-six dead names and also stated that there were still ten unidentified bodies. It went on to say that two of the victims died overnight in the hospital with “six or eight more” expected to die.

On October 12, a New York Times reprint of a Scranton newspaper listed the dead and wounded. There were seventy names listed under the killed column. Of the wounded, several there were listed as “serious” and others listed as “will die.” The small town of Pleasant Valley (today’s Avoca) had thirty-one names alone.

Reporters of the 1880s were perhaps more impetuously aggressive than one could imagine. One reporter was able to track down engineer Henry Cook as he tried to sleep in his bed in Wilkes-Barre on the very night of the wreck. The reporter noted with plain unspoken disdain of his only injury being “a bruised ankle.”

Despite his reluctance to talk, the reporter assailed Cook with provocative questions such as: “Were you asleep?...Were you drunk?...Rumor has set out some ugly stories about you.”

The New York Times of October 12, 1888 published Cook’s reply to his thoughts on the enormity of the accident. They wrote, “Yes,” Cook said with a groan, “and I suppose the blame will be fixed on someone, and railroad companies don’t usually take such blame themselves.”

The alleged transcript between Engineer Cook and the
reporter on the night of the accident.

The coroner’s jury investigation cited the engineers of both the #452 and the #466 for negligence. Also, the brakeman of the sixth train was cited for only going 400 feet instead of the proper distance of one half mile. They also found fault with the conductors of the sixth train for not personally seeing to it that the brakemen protected the rear of their train.

A later trial acquitted all the defendants.

Some debate was held over the use of the Jersey Central cars which according to one person interviewed then said that if Valley cars had been used, there wouldn’t have been as much loss of life. The Valley cars were said to be of a sturdier construction. The cars were on loan to the Valley due to the large number of excursionists signed up for the annual parade.

The Lehigh Valley Railroad took the lead in the court of public opinion by posting what they felt was a fair monetary settlement number in the papers. Mr. William Connell, a coal operator was appointed by the L.V. R. R. as an impartial administrator for victim’s claims. He was said to “not have interest in the Lehigh Valley Company.”

“He finds that nearly all the claimants want $5,000 each. The company desires to avoid litigation, and is anxious for an amicable settlement…the general feeling is averse to going to law in case there can be a reasonable settlement outside the courts.”

It seemed like all the papers at once began to throw around the same numbers: $5,000 per adult and $1,000 per child killed. A meeting of the St. Aloysius Society held a meeting of over 500 people in Scranton and passed a resolution authorizing Rev. Father Crave of Pleasant Valley (Avoca) to draw upon them for $500 or $1,000 to be at his disposal to help in cases of need for the “sufferers” of the Pleasant Valley parishioners.

The above list was printed in the New York Times the next day. Of those listed here, at least two were said to be near death while another three were listed as "serious." It is unknown how accurate these lists were, but these early reports listed 64 dead outright with several more not expected to live.

March 11, 1889 – Monday - One Last Mud Run Death –

The coroner’s jury inquest trial was conducted over three days in late October of 1888. But other civil cases related to the trial were on-going into March of 1889. Many witnesses, defendants, and concerned family members of the sixty-odd victims were flocking to town on both foot and rail.

One man named Ottoman Schmidt had been in town and was walking the track home when he was struck and instantly killed at the Mud Run Station. The paper reported that there were a “number of cases similar to that of Schmidts” at this terribly famous spot.

One article describing the Mud Run Disaster from October 27, 1888.

This is a 64-person list of dead as of the next day's papers. There are bound to be omissions and additions and other errors in this list. Names from the above list of Annie Curran, John Coleman, and Owen Kilcullen appear both on the list and their graves are pictured below.

Also buried at St. Mary's is 15-year-old
Patrick Curran. Also killed was Annie Curran of
Minooka

John Coleman rests in Avoca's St. Mary's
Cemetery, a vicitim of the Mud Run Disaster.
Also killed were Michael and Patrick Coleman.
He was 40 years old at the time.

A native of Castle-Connor, County Silco Ireland was Owen Kilcullen thirty-five, vicitm
of the Mud Run Disaster.

↧

Think, Love, and Remember - Memorial Day 2014 St. John's Lutheran, Mahoning Valley

May 25, 2014, 4:55 am

≫ Next: “Work, Work, Work:” Lehighton’s Baking Past -Post #3 of 3

≪ Previous: Mud Run Train Disaster - "A name of terror for all time" - Wrecks of Penn Haven Post 3 of 3

Today is a glorious day.

We are alive: we have sunlight on our face, we have wind in our hair, and we have dew upon our feet (and sometimes rain that dampens our skin.)

We have our minds that allow us to think, to love, and to remember.

It is Memorial Day and to remember is what we must do, to honor those who served America.

Over the course of America’s history, 40 million soldiers have served.

If you could ask any of them, what they missed most while they were away, they’d tell you, they simply missed their home. They missed things we take for granted: a hot bath, their own comfortable bed, and of course their mother’s home cooking.

We take many things, such as our home and our freedom, for granted.

We have no idea how much these mean to us until they are lost.

So the next time you are tired, the next time you are hungry, the next time you think you had a rough day, I want you to think about, I want you to remember, the 40 million who have served, think of those who suffered and remember those who died.

Not all who served died for our freedom, all gave a small, but mighty sacrifice of simply being away from home.

Think of all of them and you will appreciate your freedom all the more.

This blessed and fertile Mahoning Valley has produced much. It has produced a wealth of soldiers too.

We have both the living and the dead with us today.

We the living will all eventually join the dead. It is for us, while we are living, to honor the dead, for their sacrifice, for they too once lived like us, enjoying freedom and all the comforts of home.

We are here to honor all who served our country.

Look around, there are many among us:

Members of the UVO, Chester Mertz who served in WWII, and many others seamlessly hidden among us. These men and women know sacrifice. We the living, promise you, your service will not be forgotten.

Chester Mertz a Navy Veteran of WWII tends to flowers of the grave of
his parents at St. John's Lutheran in the Mahoning Valley.

The dead are also among us, they lay silently here on these grounds:

Oliver Musselman KIA at Antietam,
September 17, 1862. He was 19.

Oliver Musselman died Sept 17, 1862 at Antietam. He was only 19. Jonathan Gombert, also a Civil War Veteran, is buried here too. He made it home alive. But he too made a sacrifice at Antietam, giving up his right arm.

The Jonathan Gombert farm today.

Merlin Hollenbach is buried up there. He was thinking, I’m sure, of his home three days before Christmas. He landed in Vietnam on his birthday, just a month before. He was most likely thinking of his mother baking his favorite cookies, wondering how his father was doing setting up the family tree, surely he was thinking of his new wife Irene. But on December 22^rd, 1967, far from his home, Merlin Hollenbach as a medic among the forward observers, died in an ambush, in the swampy jungles of Vietnam.

Merlin Hollenbach was newly married,
twenty-one, and only in Vietnam one with
as a medic attached to forward
observers when he was killed
in an ambush three days
before Christmas 1967.

A memorial from Merlin Hollenbach's family at St.
John's Lutheran. Hollenbach died three days before
Christmas in 1967.

But not all died from enemy bullets. Moses Mertz has rested here for nearly 100 years. He died in France but he lies right over there. We know he had a weakened heart, we know he was in a hospital in France, and he died far away from his family and loved ones. It has been said of Moses that he died of a broken heart, from an unbearable homesickness…

Moses Mertz, son of Nathan and Sallie Mertz of Mahoning. As his draft card below reveals, he was a blacksmith's helper in the Lehigh Valley Railroad Packerton Shops. He listed an exception to military service as a "weak heart." Some say he died of a broken, homesick heart in France on October 2, 1918, just days before the end of the war.

Today is a Glorious Day.

We are alive: we have sunlight on our face, we have wind in our hair, and we have the dew upon our feet.

We have our minds that allow us to think, to love, and to remember.

We have been summoned here,

To think about their sacrifice, to always love our freedom, and

To always, always remember…their sacrifice for us.

~~~~~

More Mahoning Valley Veterans:

WWI: Anthony Dougher was mentioned
in last years Memorial Day address
at St. Peter and Paul Cemetery while
Moses Mertz was mentioned this year.

Daniel Kressley served in Co F of the
132nd PA Regiment. He was discharged
in January of 1863 due to disability but
re-enlisted in the 202 PA Regiment until
August 1865.

Here is a closeup of the 1907 plaque that stands in the current Mahoning Elementary School built in 1954. It was originally posted in the wooden one room school house and was erected by friends and classmates of Civil War servicemen who originated from the school. It contains the following names: Killed: Oliver F. Musselman (Sgt Co F 132nd), Otto Stermer (Co F 132; Antietam), James Eames, John Miller, John Callahan, William Nothstein. Also listed: Henry Snyder, William H. Fulton (1st Lt, Co G, 132nd), Joseph Acherman, Samuel Eberts (27th), William Stermer, Nathan Stermer, D. W. C. Henline, Thomas Musselman (Co F 132nd; wounded at both Fredericksburg and Antietam), Jacob Nothstein (Co F 132nd; buried at Zimmerman Cemetery), Daniel Houser (Co H 11th), Thomas Strauss, Reuben Reinsmith (Co G 34th), Robert Sinyard, William Sendel, Amon Fritz (75th), Josiah Musselman (Sgt Co A 202nd), Daniel Kressely (Co F 132), Stephen Fenstermacher (Co G 34th), Peter Eberts (4th Sgt Co F 27th Militia), David Eberts (27th), William Eberts (27th), Henry Zellner (Co G 34th), Jacob Strauss, Aaron B. Miller, Moses Neyer (Co F 132), Aaron Snyder (Co A 202nd), Elias Hoppes, John H. Arner (Co F 34th), and James Kresge. Also listed are teachers Joseph Fulton and James Swank.

Josiah Musselman is buried at the Zimmerman
Cemetery near the old Wos-Wit.

Josiah Musselman was a seargent in Company A of the 202 Regiment Pennsylvania Volunteers. He was the son of Mary (Miller) and Charles Musselman, born November 5, 1837. He married Emaline He died on December 20, 1912 and was buried in the Zimmerman Cemetery, Mahoning Township on Christmas Eve.

Thomas Musselman buried at St. John's Lutheran in
Mahoning Valley.

Daniel Creitz of Co I 176th PA Regiment.

Daniel Creitz was born in May of 1836 and was a farmer from Lynn Township. He served in Company I of the 176^th PA Infantry Regiment from November 8, 1862 until October of 1863. He was the husband to Mary Creitz (b. March 1840) and they had twelve children, nine of whom lived to adulthood. One of their youngest children, Daniel Creitz had a farm near the Jonathan Gombert farm in Mahoning Township. By 1900, Daniel Sr. and Mary moved onto the farm with their son. By March of 1879 Daniel was declared disabled and by September 23, 1915 his widow Mary filed for widow’s benefits.

Henry J. Lange/Long was born in Germany February 16, 1833. He served in Company G of the 132^ndPA Regiment from August 15, 1862 to May 24, 1863. Henry and many other veterans from the Valley in the 132nd hit a bees hive on the "Bloody Lane" during the Battle of Antietam. The men had bees covering their bodies and inside their coats while taking hostile fire. He and his wife Sarah farmed the Mahoning Valley and had at least eight children: Henry, Anna, Mary, Alfred, William, Jenetta, George, and Edgar. He died May 2, 1921.

Henry J. Long's tombstone
reads "Lange" as he was also
known. His several
great grand son Henry Long
is bugler for the current
Lehighton UVO, and his son,
Kevin "Spike" Long is
commander.

George Arb's grave at St. John's Lutheran.

George Arb enlisted for a three year term on October 15, 1861. He was wounded and discharged on a surgeon’s certificate.

Jonathan and Anna Gombert. Jonathan lost his right arm at
Antietam and later became Carbon County Sheriff in 1900. My
grandfather Zacharias Rabenold was hired as his servant when he was
just sixteen at that time and served as saddler on Gombert's farm as well
as "orderly" at the Carbon County Jail.

Henry Snyder served in Company I of 81^st PA Infantry Regiment. He enlisted for a three year term on October 15, 1861 and served until the company mustered out at the end of the war on June 29, 1865.

Henry Snyder of Co I of 81st PA Regiment.

Justus G. Walton of Co I 67th PA Regiment.

Justus G. Walton was a sergeant in Company I of the 67^thPA Infantry Regiment. He enlisted for three years on October 22, 1861. At some point he transferred to Company F. He mustered out with Company F on July 14, 1865. He was the son of Body and Polly Walton of Mauch Chunk and was second oldest of at least eight children (in order): Thomas, Washington, Wilson, Alfred, Peter, Joseph and Rebecca. In 1850, his brother Thomas was a machinist and Justus was most likely an iron casting moulder.

Valentine Newmeyer enlisted in Company F of the 132^ndInfantry Regiment from August 15, 1862 until May 24, 1863.

Jonathan Gombert gave up his right arm at the Battle of Antietam. He was born on June 19, 1835 to Philip (1792-1880) and Salome (1794-1878) Gombert He enlisted in Company H of the 81^st PA Infantry Regiment. He married Anna Loucile (Hontz) Gombert. Her parents were Jonas and Sarah (Reinsmith) Hontz and lived from October 4, 1842 to June 7, 1920. Three of their children were Sarah, Andrew, and Ella. (Andrew would die in a tragic accident with his hay tedder at the age of He died January 16, 1911.

William Grow of the 34th PA Militia most likely died in
June 1888, but little else is known of this veteran
buried alone at St. John's Lutheran.

William Grow 34^th PA Militia served until August 24, 1864. It appears on his government burial card that the granite company was contracted on June 9, 1888.

Henry Wehrstein was the son of John and Catharina Wehrstein. In 1860 he was a twenty-one year old tailor living in Mauch Chunk. He served in Company F of the 132^ndPA Regiment from August 1862 to May 1863. After the war he and his wife Elizabeth settled in Mahoning Valley and raised a son James, where Henry continued on as a tailor.

Henry Wehrstein Company F 132nd PA Regiment.

Jacob Hoffman, born July 3, 1848 was able at a young age to serve in Co C of the 54th PA Regiment. He died in 1909 leaving a wife, four daughters, and a son.

Jacob Hoffman Comapany C 54th PA.

Moses Hontz/Hantz (1843 to 1907) served in Co. G of the 81st PA Regiment. He was married to Sarah Hontz and they had eight of their eleven children grow to adulthood. Of them alive and living with them in 1900 were: Carrie (age 17), Lizzie (12) and Raymond (10). They also had their grandson Willie Eberts living with them too. Moses was a well-known boatman on the canal as well as farming in the Valley. Moses enlisted for three years on September 16, 1861 and discharged September 15, 1864. His brother Amon Hontz also served in Company G.

Moses Hantz also known as Moses Hontz, brother to
Amon Hontz. Both were said to be born in Weissport
but are buried at St. John's Lutheran in Mahoning
Valley.

Amon Hontz took a minnie ball at the Battle of Spottsylvania Courthouse. Both brothers also fought at the Battle of Antietam.

Ammon and his brother Moses were born in Weissport
but are buried in Mahoning. Ammon took a minnie
ball at the Battle of Spottsylvania Courthouse, VA.

Nathan Gombert

Nathan Gombert was born on October 5, 1847. He died on December 1, 1925.

Samuel Mertz lies in Lehighton Cemetery and is pictured
below.

Daniel Kressley was born in Lynnport on January 18, 1844. His parents moved to a farm in the Mahoning Valley when he was just six years old. He enlisted in Co F of the 132nd PA Regiment. He was at the Battle of South Mountain and at Antietam where he was wounded at the "Bloody Lane." After discharge for typhoid fever in Jaunary of 1863, Daniel re-enlisted and served out the war with the 202nd PA Regiment. He returned to the Mahoning Valley where he taught school for thirteen seasons. He also farmed, worked for the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and the Lehigh Valley Railroad in between sessions. He and his wife, the former Mary Dilcher had eight children, two sons and six daughters. Both sons became ministers Clement Daniel and Thomas M, both serving in Schuylkill County.

This 1914 veterans reunion in front of Lehigh Fire Co No. 1 marked the 50th Anniversary of the last year of the war. Daniel Kressley is incorrectly identified as the second from left and is the third from left. These photos appear
courtesy of the Thomas Eckhart "History of Carbon County" Volume IV, page 196.

Daniel Kressley, though sickened with typhoid fever in
Jaunary of 1863 and discharged, he later re-enlisted in the
202nd PA Regiment and served to the end of the war.

Merlin Hollenbach KIA December
22, 1967.

↧

“Work, Work, Work:” Lehighton’s Baking Past -Post #3 of 3

June 10, 2014, 7:29 pm

≫ Next: The Mystery of the Recluse of Gnadenhutten: Frederica Misca

≪ Previous: Think, Love, and Remember - Memorial Day 2014 St. John's Lutheran, Mahoning Valley

It is believed that many bakeries began baking a pastry similar to Lehighton’s “Persian” after World War I. It is widely accepted that it was originally created to honor the tough and well-loved Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing. His last name was somehow altered into the misnomer of the “Persian” pastry.

If Lehighton has a pop-culture baking legacy, it would be the Young “Persian” Doughnut. The Young family made it a staple treat in Carbon County, making it distinctly their own. Take an iced cinnamon roll with a dollop of raspberry jelly and you have it.

(This story is Post #3 of 3 posts on early Lehighton Business. Please check out the previous two posts as well: #1: Connecting the Dots of Lehighton Business and #2: Lehighton's Vibrant Business Moves Forward.)

We know a few things: James Oliver Young (center, on chair) was as tough as nails. Many of the men he led into battle
from Lehighton sung his praises. He came home more or less unscathed, but the war instilled a bit of restlessness in him. The 1930 census, just after his mother died, showed him living in the Carbon County Prison. He dropped in on his brother Marcus the baker from time to time, where he was always welcomed. He'd work there for a stretch until the rumblings of rambling once again took him away. He fought under General Pershing and some say that this is how Marcus came to create Young's "Persian" doughnut. We have been able to identify several in this photo of the WWI lads on the night before they shipped out on July 13, 1917. Can you help us identify more? Please contact me.

A list as it appeared in the Lehighton Press
the following day, July 13, 1917.

Marcus Valentine Young was the Young’s Bakery patriarch. His older brother James O. was one tough cookie. He not only fought in WWI, but he established himself as a fighting man along the border war with Mexico and Pancho Villa just before the war.

He had just the right experience to lead the first group of Lehighton men to march off to that war. And so he did.

Even years after his death men who served under James came into the bakery with stories of the stone-cold bravery he exhibited. It is here, through the experience of his brother James, that Marcus was inspired to create this well-known treat. (There will be more on the Young family military history later.)

This post will focus on three of Lehighton’s most important baking families, each playing a significant role in Lehighton’s baking legacy: The Kennels, the Blazevichs and the Youngs.

Had it not been for several small tragedies in each of these families, Lehighton may have missed out on this specialty pastry.

Baking is far from a “cupcake” job. All these families worked extremely hard, for the business was relentless. The exhausting early morning hours of hauling hundred pound sacks of flour over a shoulder, the hours of standing while mixing the batches of dough, molding bread by hand at the table, or shuffling loaves in and out of a hot oven every twenty-five minutes, make the baker a slave to both his dough and to the fire of his oven.

One key root of the Lehighton baking family tree reaches back to North Whitehall Township in Lehigh County. The Kennel family was one of the frontier families who settled along the Coplay Creek in the early 1700s.

The Charles Kennel Bakery:

This early Kennel Bakery ad helps date the start of the venture he
started with his mother Alice.

Jacob and Susanna (Schneck) Kennel were farmers and raised their family together starting with Elias (b. 1819), Aaron (b. 1823), Paul (b. 1828), David (b. 1830) and Jonas (b. 1832). At some point before Jacob’s death 1868, he and his son Elias started a sawmill along the Coplay Creek near Wotring’s grist mill.

Walter Kennel was born to Aaron and Gloria in 1860. However Walter would be orphaned by the age of three. His father died by 1863 and his mother died sometime before that. Walter then moved in with his widowed uncles David and Jonas Kennel on their farm in Neffs.

By 1880, he had left the family farm and sawmill and was living with and working at Reuben Semmel’s tannery in North Whitehall Township.

Walter married Alice and they had just one child: Charles Kennel, born in 1885. Walter, like his own parents, died a premature death in 1893. Walter was just thirty-three and Charles was just eight.

By 1900, Charles and his mother Alice were still living next to Semmel’s Tannery, though by now it was being run by Reuben’s son Oliver. Alice was making do as a “house keeper.” Although Charles was well into what was considered working age at fifteen, Alice could afford to keep him in school rather than force him out to work and contribute to the family income.

By 1910, Charles and Alice were living in Slatington. He was working as a telegraph operator for the Lehigh Valley Railroad and she was not working. Still working the telegraph for the railroad, they were living at 122 South Second Street in Lehighton by 1917. Charles was unmarried at thirty-three and his mother was fifty-two. Charles and Alice lived this way while he was still with the railroad until about 1925.

Charlie Kennel stands in front of his bakery delivery sedan. He employed
Marcus Young at his three-story brick factory, later to be named the
"Lehigh Valley Baking Factory."

By then the Kennels were making a move into the baking business. It has been said that Alice Kennel, not Charles, built the large three-level brick building that would become first Kennel’s Bakery and later Lehigh Valley Baking Factory. It is unclear though how this young widow came upon the money to do so. The building still stands there today as a storage unit.

The bakery was more than a neighborhood bakery, it was a baking factory. It had two ovens with a combined capacity to bake 500 loaves of bread at a time. Given the twenty-five minute bake time, Kennel’s bakery could produce 1,000 loaves an hour. By 1930, Kennel’s bakery had three-shifts and employed nine men plus others who ran the bakery route. (In 1933, the bakery was known to employ five men.)

From the 1926 Lehighton High yearbook.

Despite the widespread use of the car and truck, from the 1930s on up to 1940, one of Kennel’s delivery men still delivered bread by horse and carriage. Edward Christman, who lived on Alum Street near the First Ward school, made a living in this way, selling loaves of bread, five-cents at a time.

(My own grandfather, Calvin Haas, ran three such bread routes. One was for George Strohl’s Bakery in the late 1920s. He earnedenough money to eventually build his own grocery store at the corner of Fifthand Coal Streets - see Haas post by clicking here).

George Strohl's Bakery pre-dated Young's Bakery just two doors to the right
in this picture from Mahoning Street. This structure has been torn down
and was rebuilt as a multi-unit apartment building not much bigger than
what is seen here. There is a professional building and parking lot
to the right. The home with the towers across the street was also
owned by Strohl.

At the end of each day, Christman would unhitch his horse from the delivery wagon and park it in the garage behind Kennel’s bakery. It was a daily ritual each knew well. The horse would walk on his own, unescorted, up the alley. He’d find his stable, walk into his stall, and wait to be fed.

The size of Kennel’s operation was considerable. The lower level was used for storage. Kennel would purchase an entire freight car of 100-pound sacks of flour. He would hire draymen “Benner and Hartung,” John Benner and Charles Hartung, to haul the flour on their open wagons from the Central Jersey Freight Station. (The station was behind the Lehighton/Mansion House Hotel, most recently Kovatch Jeep at the end of the bypass. The foundation of the station is still there.)

This advertisement for
Benner and Hartung hauling appeared
in the 1928 Lehighton High
yearbook.

The flour was dumped into a bulk flour bin and raised up to the second level by cup elevator where it dumped into a giant mixer with an automatic scale that also mixed in the correct amount of water. Such an operation was necessary, because at various times of the year, Kennel’s bakery worked all three shifts at full tilt.

One successful avenue for Kennel’s bakery was the Carbon County Fair in Lehighton. He supplied all the hamburger and hot dog buns sold there. Buns back then sold for a penny a piece, when hamburgers sold for a nickel. Kennel also served on the Fair Board during the 1930s and 1940s.

When you weren’t standing at your mixer or oven, you were standing at the bread table. Any dough from the table, meaning dough that had to be worked into shape by hand such as Vienna bread, sticky buns and etc would be placed on large racks and placed into a raising machine for the “first raise.”

Then they were removed and placed into pans and go into a steam closet for the “second raise.” This closet could hold three large racks at a time. From this closet the dough entered one of two ovens.

One of the ovens was slightly larger than the second one, but together could bake 500 loaves of bread at a time. Consider that each bake would last twenty-five minutes and running three-shifts a day, this Lehighton factory could produce 24,000 loaves of bread a day.

The Youngs Come to Town:

Marcus Valentine Young was born on his family farm back in March of 1884 in Kresgeville. Theodore and Alma Ann Young started their home on a small farm. Besides the farm, Theodore also made a living as a blacksmith.

As a young twenty-six year old and before they had any children of their own, Theodore Young was successful enough to hire and provide board for a blacksmith’s helper. Eventually, their oldest son Ezra “Ezree” and second oldest Albert would assume that role with their father, thus was the beginning of the Youngs in family business.

Theodore and Alma had seven children and all seven survived to adulthood: Ezra D. (b. January 1881), Albert T. (b. November 1883), Clara (b. June 1887), James O. (b. June 1890), Harry L. (b. July 1893), Marcus (b. March 1894), and Ervin D. (b. 1899).

They lived a long walking distance from the one-room schoolhouse at the present day four-way stop at Wildcreek. One day in early June 1902 the course of events took an unexpected turn. Father Theodore died at the age of forty-seven.

Theodore Young's untimely death caused his wife and young family
to move from Kresgeville to Lehighton, thus starting the chain of events
leading to the evolution of Young's Bakery.

Marcus was the second youngest at just nine. “Ezree” took on the full responsibilities for his family and looked out for his five brothers and one sister Clara.

Eventually mother Alma decided she couldn’t do enough to support her family living on the farm. So one day sometime between 1904 and 1910 they said goodbye to it.

Leaving it to oldest son Ezree to continue on, they packed up into a horse and buggy and made the day-long journey into Lehighton from Kresgeville. In less than a day shewas employed in the kitchen of the Lehighton Exchange Hotel (click here for more details about this business.) They lived in an apartment on South First St.

Life would be different living in town. Farm chores were replaced by a wide variety of jobs: Albert, now twenty-five, was a laborer on the railroad; Clara, twenty-one, was a servant in a private home; Jameswas a molderer at Lehigh Stoves in the Flats; Harry, sixteen, was working at one of the many silk mills in town.

Second youngest, Marcus, found work at the “BenjaminK. Culton” bakery on first street, (across the street from Alfies Pizza today). Both Harry and Marcus would make these early careers of their youth into their life-long professions. (The Benjamin Culton story is chronicled in another post on this blog “Lehighton’s Vibrant Business Past” –click here.)

Marcus Valentine Young's WWI draft card.

By the age of twenty-three, Harry was living in Paterson New Jersey and working for the Eugene Baer “Helvetica” Silk Mill there (This is where the Baer family first got its start before also opening a millin Lehighton - click here for more details.)

At the age of twenty-seven, Harry moved temporarily to Sherbrooke Quebec, employed as the superintendent of the Julius Kayser Silk Throwing Plant there making $3,800 a year in 1920. Eventually he ran another mill in Ohio before finally retiring to Florida. Descendents of Harry and Ethel May (Williams) Young still live there.

Youngest brother, Ervin, became a big band musician in Brooklyn, in addition to his career with a pharmaceutical company. He worked clubs and in places like the Waldorf-Astoria. He also worked the cruise ship circuit to the islands of the Caribbean.

Music was a key ingredient in sister Clara Young’s life too. Her and her Lehigh Valley Railroad engineer husband Harry had one son: Donald Seiwell (1916-1973). A drummer of certain skill, he turned down a music scholarship offer to work at the rail yard.

Donald would have two sons who made a living playing music. Son Darryl is a retired music teacher at the Jim Thorpe School District.

The other of Clara Young’s grandsons, Denny Seiwell, later played in ex-Beatle Paul McCarthy’s band “Wings,” playing drums on many songs including his signature hit “Live and Let Die.” Donald and wife Faye also had a daughter Paula.

Sometime around 1915, Marcus Young married Ella Mae David. They had two children together: Ethel, born in February of 1917 and Woodrow, born October 3, 1918.

Just then, the terrible Influenza Pandemic was making its rounds through the area as it did worldwide. The entire Marcus Young family was sick with it.

The obituary from the "Lehighton Press" from October 1918. The
writer was unaware that Ella had just given birth to son Woody
about two weeks prior.

It was only two weeks after Woody was born when Ella Mae died of flu. Ethel was sent out to be raised by her mother’s parents, Albert and Rosa David of Ninth Street. Woody divided his time with his father and on his Uncle Ezree’s Polk Township farm. Even on up into his young adult life, Woody spent his summers out on the farm.

Marcus was still earning a living at B. K. Culton’s Bakery on First Street. But sometime after 1920, most likely at the same time Culton closed his shop, Marcus and his brother James were working as fire tenders on the Lehigh Valley Railroad engines. The railroad job would be short-lived, for by 1930, Marcus was working at Charles Kennel’s Bakery on Second Street.

Also around 1920, Marcus married his second wife. Lulu was the daughter of Mahlon and Della Warner of Ninth Street. She had one child she brought to the marriage, Clarence Warner, who was being raised by her parents. Besides their three previous children, Marcus and Lulu had five children together: Albert (b. 1921), Marcus “Marc” (b. 1922), Madalene (b. 1923), Frederick (b. 1925), Russell (b. 1927).

The Kennel’s Bakery job provided enough for Marcus to raise his family on. By 1940 he was a foreman there. The last living child of Marcus and Lulu Young is Frederick. He still recalls many of these early years well and how his father made $30 per week then. He remembers his father always working middle "bread and bun" shift, and how Lulu would walk down to the bakery at supper time each day, with young Fred in tow, to bring a hot-meal to her husband.

Bretney the Baker on Second Street - From the Brad Haupt Collection. Bretney had a bakery next door to his son's
photography studio on Second Street, between today's Lehighton Hardware and the Lehigh Valley Baking Company. This could very well be the same delivery carriage Ed Christman used for Charlie Kennel in the 1930s. (See Post Two of "Lehighton's Vibrant Business" for more details by clicking here.)

That is when Fred recalls seeing deliveryman Ed Christman unhitch his horse and watched in awe as the horse found his way home to his stall. According to Fred, the delivery wagon used by "Bretney the Baker" was identical to the one Christman used. Given the Bretney shop was just two doors away from Kennel, it stands to reason that this delivery carriage could be the same.

Sometime after 1942, Marcus began thinking about venturing out on his own. Until then, Charles Kennel had been a life-long bachelor. He married a much younger Mahoning Valley woman at about the same time his business began to suffer. Kennel lost his bakery to the First National Bank of Lehighton around 1940.

Sadly, Charlie died rather young at the age of 65 in 1950. His mother Alice lived until 1960, to the age of 96. Some have said she worked as an telephone operator in Lehighton.

By October of 1946, with all his sons home from the war, Marcus rented his first bakery at the corner of First and Ochre Streets at 368 North First Street. It would be short-lived though. About then, Fisher Motors eyed the lot as a prime corner location for their new Pontiac Garage. Marcus needed to find a new home.

Former Lehighton High School teacher Edgar Paulsen was looking for a buyer for his corner grocery store at Fourth and Mahoning. After a few liens were paid (despite Paulson’s assurances that the title was clear), the Young’s began to set up shop of their own.

After all his sons returned from the war, they began gathering up bakery supplies: mixing bowls, an oven and the lot. The Young's also started rounding up suppliers for the incessant essential ingredients: flour and lard. At that time suppliers didn't deliver and these items had to be picked up.

The Blazevichs Come to Town:

Avram "Monk" Blazevich first worked in Nesquehoning and later
took over Kennel's Baking Factory, renaming it "Lehigh Valley Baking
Company." It was located in the rear of South Second Street. The three-
story brick building is still there today, down the alley from the Lehighton
Fire Company.

Another tributary into the stream of Lehighton baking was forming in McAdoo. A widowed miner’s wife was making do with her three children: Theodore (b. 1924), Eugene (b. 1929), and John Jr. (b. 1931). Her name was Anastazja “Stella” Yanick (b. February 27, 1897) and she was a Polish Orthodox immigrant.

Her eldest son Zigmund Yanick (b. April 8, 1917) had already made his way to Nesquehoning and perhaps that is how she met her soon to be new husband Avram “Monk” Blazevich (b. 1890).

Bonnie and Brenda Benner look happy with their mother in the snow in front of the home of Stella Blazevich. It also contained the store for their family bakery. The home is now gone, though Linda still lives in her childhood home next door. Brenda Benner's aunt Betty Benner married Albert Young.

Blazevich was also recently widowed and living with his son Alexander (b. 1922) at 131 Mill Street in Nesquehoning at the bakery owned by Sofron “Serf” Nikodinoviek (b. 1890). Avram and Alexander had a truck bread route while tow other lodgers Augen Gerosa (b. 1892), a “cake baker” and Elia Christoff (July 6, 1891) who also ran a truck route, lived there.

It was “Serf” Nikodinoviek and “Monk” Blazevich who purchased the bakery from Charlie Kennel. By April of 1942, Stella and Avram were married and living at 23 South 2^ndStreet in Lehighton and were the operators of the Lehigh Valley Baking Company at 128 South Second Street.

A 1940s deliveryman for the Lehigh Valley Baking Company.

(According to Avram’s draft card at the time, he was listed as 6’ 2” and 170 pounds with blonde hair and blue eyes but with a “ruddy” complexion, perhaps from hours a facing the large brick bakery oven.)

Once the new owners, the Blazevich’s, took over the bakery from the bank for $8,000, Marcus resumed working there as their foreman. At about this time, Marcus concluded he too could start one of his own with his coming of age sons.

All the Young men (including Clarence Warner) served in the military during the war except for Albert who was “4-F” due to ear troubles from his youth. (More details of the Young family will be available on a future post).

Albert was working in the Packerton Car Shops and later worked for Interstate Dress Carriers (I.D.C.) of Lehighton.

Russell tried the business for a time and took his father’s advice: “If you don’t like what you’re doing, if you don’t love your job, move on from it while you’re still young,” which is exactly what Russell did.

By the late 1940’s, Marcus and his sons were well on their way into making the Fourth and Mahoning Street location their own. They did some remodeling, put a garage door on the horse carriage house in the back, and had Charlie Kratzer of Ninth Street put new siding on it.

Then in the early 1950s they began to modernize by installing a new oven. It came from a company in Baltimore and it was delivered from the Jersey Central Freight station by Benner and Hartung.

The purchase price included the service installation by a man sent from the company. Marcus and his sons helped by running each piece and part up from the cellar. Fred remembers pouring “bags and bags and bags” of insulation into the walls.

When it was supper time, the worker asked where he could go to eat his supper. Marcus said he’d have none of that. The man was already so appreciative of all the help the Young’s were giving him, they were finishing the job much faster than he would have do so alone, and still and all, he didn’t want to further impose of their hospitality.

The Young represented themselves in the Lehighton Halloween parade in the late 1950s, replete with giant replicas of the famed "Persian" doughnuts. It is believed to be Betty Benner Young as the cake. Betty was married to Albert Young.

“You eat right here with us,” Marcus said. And they did.

The oven could make 100 loaves at a time, baking a batch of bread in twenty-five minutes. It cost them $5,000, which was steep money at that time. They knew they would have to work hard and non-stop to pay off such a debt. In a few short years they did.

The next item need was the 120-quart mixer that could take a 100-pound sack of flour at a time. This $2,500 investment was also the first to be paid off before anyone thought of taking any extra money for themselves.

Every few days, the sons would take the back seat out of the car and drive to Mauser's Flour Mill at Treichlers for three to four 100# bags of flour. They would also stop by a slaughter house near Freidens for lard. Marcus telling them, "Get all that you can get."

And thus Marcus was able to set in motion a business that would carry his family through for fifty years. Set up well enough that his grandson Fred Jr. and his wife Dawn would end up retiring from the business on November 24, 1995.

Marcus died in 1955, leaving his sons with a livelihood that would serve them their whole life. The brothers worked side-by-side, hour-by-hour in the painstaking work of bakers six days per week.

On Sundays, they’d hike up the old trolley line to Flagstaff Park. They enjoyed these simply pleasures and they enjoyed all the time they spent together.

According to Fred, “it was work, work, work in the bakery business.” They didn’t even think about vacations in those early days. A few years after their dad died, Marc suggested they shut down one week per year in the summer. And so they did.

They had built up a good retail and wholesale trade by then. The baked for restaurants like Trainer’s Inn and others. In the days leading up to their week’s vacation, they’d bake ahead, storing the bread in large, walk-in freezers in Bowmanstown, where the gas station/pizza shop is today.

They helped build customer loyalty just like the Blazevich’s did at Lehigh Valley Baking. Each holiday they offered their ovens to their customers and roasted their turkeys and hams for them for free.

They also offered their oven space, since it was easier to keep it heated than to restart from nothing, to the area churches when they cooked their large congregational dinners and for their food stands at the Carbon County Fair.

"My brothers and me, we got along real good together." - The Young brothers pose here in their "Brothers of the Brush" outfits. "Brothers of the Brush" was a social club leading up to Lehighton's Centennial celebration in 1966. This picture was taken just months before Albert (front, center) died in 1958 after only three months of marriage. Others in front are Marcus (left) and Woody (right). Back row, left to right: Russell, Clarence Warner, and Fred.

“My brothers and me, we got along real good together.”

Albert on his wedding night. He died three months later.

Fred remembers the occasional nights he and his brothers would stop in the Lehigh Fire Company for a beer and be accosted with shouts of, “Don’t you guys ever get sick of each other?” Causing Fred to recall his dad’s warnings, when tempers would heat a bit, “If you can’t work together, you’re gonna get the boot.” So Fred replied, “What do you want us to do? Fight?”

The Blazevich’s ran the Lehigh Valley Baking Company into the 1970s. Stella’s sons ran it for several years after her death in 1968. Though they had good foot traffic in the Stella’s storefront home on Second Street, their business was mainly wholesale.

One of their larger accounts was through the Hazelton-based Gennetti’s food market chain. They sold their bread under their own label, but they also sold donuts and pastries. They were famous for their Kaiser rolls and marble ryes.

One of their employees, George Markley, was a then recent pastry baker from Steven’s Trade School. Many people in the Lehighton area only know George through his work with the Lutheran Brotherhood. But today, George still has the pained shoulder from the years of hefting 100-pound bags of flour.

According to George, when they would run specials on their breads, they’d bake “thousands and thousands of rolls per shift.” George remembers working mostly overnight and also second shift.

“A deliveryman would show up around 5:00 am,” he remembers. He also recalls working many weeks of sixty hours or more for mere peanuts on the dollar.

Stella’s children inherited the bakery upon her death and tried to keep it operating, some of them running deliveries themselves to area Farmer’s Markets, restaurants, and stores.

I know this may sound as tacky as day-old dough on a dry bread board, but I can remember the days of going into Young’s, with Woody behind the counter with my thirty-five cents my dad gave me each week from his little blue coin purse.

Celebrating their mother's 90th birthday in the banquet room of Trainer's Inn in 1982: Back row, left to right: Fred, Russel, Clarence Warner, Woody, and Marc. Front row, Ethel, Lulu and Madeline. Woody and Ethel were from their father's first wife Ella who died of the Influenza outbreak during the fall of 1918.

My usual was a ten-cent glazed and a twenty-five cent Persian. But sometimes I’d be tempted by the 5-cent pretzel rods in the jar on the counter.

I can still picture Marc at the mixer, his lips were in the shape of what I thought was a permanent state of whistling. I can still see Fred then too, the only one with a full head of hair. I remember how seamlessly they worked together, with few words. All of them always dressed in white. I’d sit on the sacks of flour, all the while they worked around me, allowing me to silently sit and watch.

When one lives in moments like these, you never think it can ever end.

One day in December of 1981, a heavy slush was lying around the pavements of the bakery, and Woody couldn’t rest knowing it needed tending to. The strain was too much and he collapsed on the sidewalks. It broke their hearts. You could say their life belonged to the bakery. Neither Marc nor Woody had ever married.

Even Fred, back at the end of World War II, when asked to continue baking for the troops in the army field bakery, declined the offer, only thinking about getting back to his brothers.

Marc said he couldn’t work another day there without his half-brother Woody. He missed him too much.

At that time, it was Fred’s son Fred Jr. who wished to make a go at the family business. And several weeks after Woody’s passing, the oven once again fired with another father and son Young team. Eventually Marc was able to return and the three men worked together.

The last of the Young crew in the 1990s. Fred Jr at left, his father center loading a tray of hoagie rolls, while Marcus takes a brief moment's pause. Only Fred Sr. survives.

Marc passed away a year and a month after the Fred Jr. and Dawn retired the business for the last time. Shortly afterward, Fred and Dawn moved to South Carolina. Fred, a Vietnam combat veteran, died a few years ago.

The famous Young’s “Persian” is history. Young’s started making the iced cinnamon roll with a dollop of jelly filling from the 1950s until the Bakery closed in 1996. Since then, a few different names have kept its spirit alive, most recently Bill Gothard at Lehighton Bakery which closed just in the last few years.

Fred Sr. is widowed from his wife Roberta and lives in Maple Shade in Nesquehoning. He gets plenty of visitors: his son Allen, his good friend Pappy Warner, and his old neighbors John and Melissa Moser who take the time to take him out for dinner at his favorite spot, the Beacon Diner at Hometown.

Ask him why he likes to go there, he’ll tell you: they have delicious raisin pie.

Though he’s a bit hard of hearing, his mind is sharp. And if you are lucky enough to share a word with Fred, one thing is abundantly clear, he is the last of those of the generation that knew how to work.

Thanks Fred, I too have developed a taste for the stuff.

~~~~~~~~~

Postscript:

Here are some other noteworthy pictures associated with Lehighton's baking past:

Bill Leslie, along with Sylvester "Wes" Solt and Marcus Young who first tried to buy Kennel's Bakery from the bank but were unable to secure the loan. It worked out anyway, for both Bill's Bakery and Young's went on separately to make their own distinctive products.

The Lehigh Valley Baking Company as it looked this past winter. Lehighton Hardware is to the photographers rear in the alley.

C. E. or Charlie Kennel's grave engraved on
the end of his parent's stone in Neffs.
Charlie died at the age of 65 in 1950.

The Young Matriarch - Alma widowed from Theodore - She had the courage
to leave the farm she knew to bring her family to Lehighton for more economic
opportunity. Lehighton Cemetery on the Legion plot.

Add caption

Marcus Theodore Young, Fred's brother, son to Marcus and Lulu never married and is buried next to his other unmarried
half-brother Woodrow who is buried next to their uncle James O. Young who served in the first world war. All of Marcus V. Young's sons served in WWII except Albert who was 4-F due to his ears.

Marcus Valentine Young next to his first wife Ella who died in the Influenza outbreak in October 1918. Together they had Ethel and Woodrow. His wife Lulu is also buried here.

Walter and Alice Kennel's grave in Neffs.
Alice lived 67 years as a widow until 1960.
Walter died in 1893.

↧

The Mystery of the Recluse of Gnadenhutten: Frederica Misca

November 26, 2014, 1:42 pm

≫ Next: The Lehighton Gravers: Alvenia and Adaline (Post 1 of 4)

≪ Previous: “Work, Work, Work:” Lehighton’s Baking Past -Post #3 of 3

Frederica Misca, a shadowy figure of early Lehighton lore, came to live among the ruins of the fateful Moravian settlement. In her own time there were many who praised her saintliness as well as many who detracted and scoffed at the very mention of the hermetic zealot’s name.

Click here for "Gnadenhutten Massacre" post on the 11 Moravians killed here and details of Ben Franklin's defensive response.

This is a scan from Eckhart's History of
Carbon County. It is the only likeness
known to be Misca. It is taken from a
copy of the lithograph she allegedly
gave to people who purchased $50
subscriptions for her proposed
church she wanted to build at the
Moravian Massacre site in
Lehighton. The entire print is
included below.

So little is directly known of her now, that it is nearly impossible to know the complete truth.

According to Brenckman’s History of Carbon County, Misca purchased two tracts of the Moravian land and arrived here in 1825. She lived here in the hope of turning it into the permanent home for a Presbyterian Church, to honor the deaths of the eleven Moravians who were martyred here.

We have one sketchy account, written by Moravian newspaper and almanac publisher, Brother John Christian Blum.

Blum was born in Pennsylvania but moved to Salem, North Carolina when his family migrated down the Great Wagon Road. They settled in the Moravian village known as Bethabara in 1787 when Blum was just three.

In August of 1831, Blum was part of a group of Moravian pilgrims who left Salem through noted Moravian towns of Lititz, Nazareth, and Bethlehem They passed through Lehighton to see the “stone coal” fields west of Mauch Chunk. They even rode the railroad while there.

He recounted details of seeing the “stone coal” operations and how they traveled on cars “rolling along at a velocity of nine miles in twenty-eight minutes!”

Eventually their pilgrimage brought them to the Gnadenhutten Massacre site by September.

Misca's book, translated by a Rev
McClure from 1836, was published at about the
same time Rev James Alexander referred to
Misca as a hoax and a
"Pennsylvania huckster."

Blum referred to Lehighton as the place noted as “a great missionary place among the Indians, where our brethren and sisters were murdered.” They paid homage at the marble tombstone and then happened to make a call on the lonely inhabitant of the place, the one many referred to as the “Recluse of Gnadenhutten,” the self-proclaimed German baroness, Miss Frederica Misca.

Blum noted that the church and the dwelling house of the minster still stood there. And though he was most generous in his descriptions of the numerous people they had thus far met, he cast Miss Misca in a less than favorable light, believing her to be “somewhat deranged.”

After silencing her many dogs, she at first “addressed us in English, but soon discovering we were German, she began using the local Dutch dialect, which is far removed from our German.” She said, “Gentlemen, I suppose you are from Bethlehem.”

If this account can be trusted as accurate, how then does this “German baroness,” only living here about five years, prefer to speak in a Pennsylvania Dutch dialect over the supposed High German tongue of her pedigree?

Her solitude in this place seemed to be tempered by the presence of the many animals in her care. Her goat Sophy had just bore two kids the night before. She recounted this to the weary travelers as she bent down to one of her dogs saying, “Lilla, kiss mama,” to which the dog licked Misca’s face.

Blum goes on to describe how talkative she was, telling of her many pets including another dog named “Columbus” she brought with her here from Germany. Blum retells how she said she had, “…seven cows, that is six cows and one bull named Hemrich.”

Frederica was pleasant in touring the graveyard of the departed Moravians but bristled at the requests by the pilgrims to see the interior of the dwellings there.

A mention of Misca in Lehighton Cemetery Association's
Constitution, published in 1920.

“She made off and ran as fast as she could to prevent our entrance, as we thought. Following her we arrived at the door, which, however, she opened for us. We found the church hall filled with wheat and rye in the straw, and Frederica used part of it as a threshing floor. She talked a great deal on different subjects, saying she was very desirous to purchase the place where she lived and requested Brother Herman to tell Brother Schweinitz, or Schweinrich, as she called him, that it was her wish to buy it.”

Perhaps the two tracts she purchased occurred after this late 1831 encounter or she was hopeful of purchasing more of the land.

Blum described Gnadenhutten as “situated in a poor slate country.” This was somewhat confirmed later on, when Lehighton pioneer resident Lewis Graver, known for his timbering and brick making here, also quarried slate there.

An 1877 newspaper account spoke of “seven to eight men clearing off the top rock…reached a depth of about seven or 8 feet,” finding specimens of slate easily split at uniform thickness, pronounced 'A No.1' and said to be equal to the “celebrated Vermont slate.”

This is a view from Graverville toward Lehighton: Note the cemetery at the left/center of the horizon and First Ward Elementary school at the right. The photo is dated at around 1899 when the Henry Graver brick-works were still in operation. Both the First and Third Ward buildings were built with Graver bricks. The land was originally owned by the Moravians and later Misca. (Photo Courtesy of Larry Graver).

Lewis Graver was born to Henry and Elizabeth in 1813. They came to Lehighton, under contract to timber the Moravian’s lands he would later own, when Lewis was twelve.

An August 18, 1888 article in the “Carbon Advocate” proclaimed Lewis to have “known Frederica Misca well.” Graver was also known in the late years of his life to still show the curious “foolscaps” paper deeds direct from the Moravians, though they were “worn through with age.”

In this 1938 aerial view of South Lehighton, you can see the rectangular "Graver's Swimming Casino" mid-left with the
Graver's Ice Dam dominate at the center and right of the pool. At bottom, you can see the symmetrical pattern of Henry Graver's "Gnadenhutten Fruit Farm." In the mid 1950s, this view would be bisected left to right by Route 443.

Lewis Graver’s son Henry was known to have an apple orchard on the 175 acres later to be known as “Graverville.” Henry’s early huckster wagon delivered potatoes and apples to the area and into New Jersey. Graver the younger even took this home-made hard-tired, chain-driven jalopy all the way to Florida in the 1910s. He eventually established a permanent winter home there prior to his death in West Palm Beach Florida in December of 1926. His fruit business was known as the “Gnadenhutten Fruit Farm.”

Henry Graver relaxing in West Palm Beach Florida with his "Gnadenhutten Fruit Farm" huckster wagon. Note the chain-drive, hard tires, and lanterns. One can only imagine how difficult this journey must have been in the 1910s with mostly dirt roads and the heat of the south. Henry died in West Palm Beach on December 18, 1926.
(Photo Courtesy of Larry Graver.)

A 1916 newspaper account told of the recent Graver family reunion that was recently held on the massacre site and former home of Misca.

The First Presbyterian Church of Lehighton was built in 1874. It was said to have originated as the “Gnadenhutten Presbyterian Church of Lehighton" in the year 1859. The Reverend Edward Franklin Reimer employed the circulation power of the New York Times to help shed light onto the Frederica Misca mystery in a letter to the editor in April of 1904.

The end of Rev Reimer's 1904 letter printed in the
New York Times seeking information on Misca.

Rev. Reimer stated his church was experiencing the “most prosperous days it had ever seen” and he wanted to find out more about the “Recluse of Gnadenhutten” to pay homage to her founding efforts. To his knowledge, Misca arrived in the area around 1825.

Few people claim to have known much about Misca. Besides Graver, another Lehighton resident, Catherine Snyder, daughter of Peter Snyder of Towamensing Township, was born around 1825. It was claimed in her 1909 obituary that she remembered seeing the recluse as a young girl.

The only reference I was able to find as to her eventual demise comes in the Rev Reimer letter. Misca was known to travel far and wide, selling subscriptions for her proposed church. She had produced a lithograph depicting a shining new church under her prayerful likeness complete with supplicating hands amid the burning remnants of the settlement. The prints were given with each $50 subscription she secured.

The Misca lithograph depicted her
amid the burning ruins of the massacre
as well as her proposed church beneath
the watchful eye of the Moravian
martyrs killed November 1755.

Reimer related that Misca disappeared while out on one of her fundraising tours through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. She was said to have been attacked and died in a Baltimore hospital. Another account claimed she had disappeared near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

In January 1836, a book written by “Frederica E. Misca” was translated from the German by the Reverend A. W. McClure. McClure wrote in the preface of that book, “The Love of Jesus, A Treatise Upon the Confirmation and the Lord’s Supper,” that Misca “consecrated her soul and body, and all the living that she hath, to the cause of her Redeemer.”

He went on to say she devoted “years of toil, and all her pecuniary means.” McClure too was passing the proceeds of his book onto the mission of her life’s work. His preface was dated June 2, 1836.

However in a letter, dated April 14 of the same year, the Rev. James Waddle Alexander, the son of famed Presbyterian minister Archibald Alexander, wrote a letter to a life-long friend that shares a different sentiment of Misca.

He writes, “You probably see by the papers what a hoax there has been about Miss Frederica Misca, who turns out, instead of a German baroness, to be a Pennsylvania huckster.”

Regardless of what anyone can believe about her, her work and devotion ultimately led to her intended hope that one day a church dedicated to her faith would be built in Lehighton.

According to Brenckman, a New York gentleman named George Douglass came to the aid of Misca’s cause in 1831. Douglass helped fund the balance of her mortgage on the property and soon after lumber and windows were hauled to the site. A deed of November 1, 1833 was drawn, making Douglass the sole trustee of the property.

Douglass transferred his trust to the members of the Mauch Chunk Presbyterians in 1852. Some of the property was sold, the proceeds helping the construction of the Mauch Chunk Presbyterian Church. Passage of a 1870 church act by their assembly sold the remainder of the property to the Gnadenhutten Cemetery Association.

By February of 1872, money was transferred from Mauch Chunk to Lehighton for the building of the First Presbyterian Church at Third and Mahoning Streets.

It is unknown for sure whatever became of Frederica Misca.

↧

The Lehighton Gravers: Alvenia and Adaline (Post 1 of 4)

December 13, 2014, 6:58 pm

≫ Next: Lehighton Gravers: Lewis and son Henry: Farm to Canal to Bricks to Pools (Post 2 of 4)

≪ Previous: The Mystery of the Recluse of Gnadenhutten: Frederica Misca

A colored advertisement for Alvenia Graver's Millinery
Shop in Lehighton. She first opened with her twin sister
Adaline as "Mrs. L. Wehr & Sister." Unlike her sister,
Alvenia kept her maiden name for business though she
married Sheriff C. W. Lentz. (Courtesy of Larry Graver.)

The Graver family literally built Lehighton. They not only serve as a link from the Moravian and Frederica Misca days, their descendents continue to be part of business life in this area today, even though Lewis and his brother Andrew Graver came here nearly 200 years ago.

The Penn Lace Building, on the site of the former Daniel
Olewine tannery, was most likely built with bricks from the
Graver family brickyard of South Lehighton.

Lewis Graver came to Lehighton when he was just twelve. His father, Heinrich Graver brought his young family to timber the Moravian lands with both Lewis and Andrew in 1825.

As a young man, Heinrich Graver’s father (“Andreas Graber” born in 1735) emigrated from Germany to the Montgomery County area and later to Lehigh County.

The beginning: The Recluse of Gnaden Hutten/Lewis Graver lands

Post #2 - From Lewis to Henry Graver
Post #3 - Graver's Bathing Casino
Post #4 - Henry Graver's Diminished Dream

Eventually the Graver’s conducted a brickyard in the south end of Lehighton on those old lands. They eventually also had a fruit orchard, skating rink, ice dam and ice factory and the largest swimming pool in Pennsylvania.

The 175-acres also included bungalows for vacationers. These eventually turned into the homes of permanent residents known as “Graverville.” "Graverville" is a term nearly gone from the Lehighton lexicon.

This post is the first of a series featuring the various Graver family business ventures in Lehighton.

Here, we begin with Lewis Graver’s twin daughters Alvenia and Adaline Graver.

Alvenia and Adeline Graver were born on May 3, 1853. They conducted their “millinery and notions” shop on South Street Lehighton. They announced their opening for “new and fashionable CHEAP CASH Milinery and Dressmaking” store in the building “formerly occupied by Dollenmayer’s Jewelry” in May 1880.

They began as “Mrs. Wehr and Sister” as Adaline was married to Mr. Lewis Wehr. And though Alvenia at first was just the “Sister” end of the partnership, by 1883 it had become the shop of “Miss Alvenia Graver,” an agent for “King’s Dyeing Company.” The sisters would make trips to Philadelphia to purchase materials for their shop.

It appears that Adaline’s husband Lewis had an ice cream parlor on Bank St as a June 1884 ad attests: “Son, take thy best girl to an ice cream parlor…get the best, and thou art probably aware, the best cream is kept by Lewis Wehr.”

(Curiously, another powerful Lehighton and Weissport millinery businesswoman, Maria Culton, also had a husband, Ben Culton, who owned an ice cream confectionery shop in downtown Lehighton. Click here for their story.)

In July of 1892, the family Adaline Wehr was joined by the families of her sister Emma (married to town druggist T. D. Thomas) and their brother Ed Graver for a week of rest and play at Towamensing’s "Lake Harmony."

A 1900 census showed Lewis Wehr’s occupation as “hide tanner.” In 1902, Adaline was forty-nine and had a “rheumatic” attack that lasted several weeks. According to her April obituary, these “seemed to be moving round to different parts of her body” which affected her heart.

The Graver family plot at the Lehighton Cemetery - Centers upon family
patriarch Lewis Graver.

From the "Carbon Advocate," printed in Lehighton, Saturday,
November 5, 1887

Adaline left four children: Gertrude, Mabel, Leah, and Vesicon. She was also outlived by her mother, Leah (Lauchnor) Graver.

Gertrude went on to marry Harry A. Andrews. It is unclear what happened to Vesicon. They also had two brothers die as infants.

"Carbon Advocate" ad from July 1883.

Leah Wehr would later move in with her Aunt Alvenia. Mabel Wehr, the spinster sister, would live the rest of her life with her father. Lewis Wehr buried her after her apparent suicide from mercury poisoning in 1919. She was thirty-nine and is buried on the Graver plot with her parents.

A "Carbon Advocate" ad for Alvenia Graver after
she continued with the business she and her
sister Adeline Wehr started. This one from April 1891.

Alvenia Graver was thrice married (Maria Culton too, was thrice married.) She was first married to Charles W. Lentz. Their only child to live to adulthood was son William Graver Lentz who was a veteran of the Spanish American War. They had a daughter, Mattie, who died in 1884 at the age of five. However there is a mystery here.

Searching William’s military paper work, his death certificate and more, his birth date is listed as August 11, 1878. His baptism record at Zion UCC in Lehighton was in November 1878. His sister’s birth date on her tombstone states November 13, 1878 which is confirmed on her January 1879 baptismal record.

Lentz and Graver married on April 4, 1878, just four months before William Graver Lentz was born on August 11, 1878.

Obviously if these two dates are correct, they cannot both be natural born children of Alvenia born just three months apart. In census records in later years, Alvenia claimed having just one child with “none” living.

Mattie Minerva Lentz’s tombstone says she is the daughter of Alvenia. One answer to this mystery lies with William's death certificate. It says his mother was "Elizabeth Graber."

Alvenia had a sister named Elizabeth who married Samuel Seiler and lived in Allentown. She died in 1927. Her death certificate states indicates "unknown" in the box entitled "If married, widowed, divorced" as well "unknown" in the box "Birth date."

Census records for Elizabeth state she had three children, two who survived. It looks as though she had a son Edgar and and daughter Emma. None of the records indicate that William Graver could have been a Seiler but it is one possible explanation.

The most likely mother to William would be Alvenia's sister-in-law Elizabeth married to her brother Martin Graver, but they had a son named David born in 1884 and a son named Martin born in 1885. Martin later lived with Alvenia after her second marriage. No other sons are known to have come from Martin and Elizabeth.

Sheriff Lentz and his brother in law Henry Graver (subject Post 2)entertained Judge D. W. Neeley of Poncha Springs Colorado in November 1881. In early December, the three men left Lehighton for Colorado.

From the "Carbon Advocate" December 1881. The above article
contains a typo - the town is "Poncha" Springs.

According to the press, Lentz and Graver didn't "expect to return east until spring, if all goes well.” Nothing further could be found on Judge Neeley beyond this one obscure newspaper article.

Perhaps the leaving of his wife and two young children at home for this trip can be seen as the type of behavior that led to the couple's eventual estrangement.

Lentz and Alvenia ended their marriage by March of 1884. At about this time, he must have been romantically involved with Atlas “Addie” B. Kuntz of Millport (today’s Aquashicola) as they had a daughter (Naomi Lentz) born by December 1884.

Sheriff Lentz died an untimely death. According to his obituary of 1902 his greatest enemy was himself, as he was generous to a fault. One obituary stated he fell six feet over a rail at Rehrig’s Saloon in Mauch Chunk, striking his head on the stone.

On May 22, 1894, Alvenia Graver married her second husband: a Mr. William H. Westlake of North Charleroi. North Charleroi, a small town north of Pittsburgh, is also known as the town of “Lock #4” on the Monongahela River.

Alvenia appears to be Westlake’s second or third wife, as he had children prior to 1894 and records seem to support at least one other wife.

Perhaps Alvenia intended to move to Pittsburgh with Westlake, as the papers stated, since it appears this is the time she closed her millinery shop.

Westlake was an agent for the P. V. & C. Railroad (Pennsylvania, Virginia & Chesapeake, a forerunner to the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad) at the time. He also, just the month before the wedding, became the patent holder for a water and dust proof folding trunk.

The Pittsburgh papers announced that the wedding was a surprise to his friends. After the ceremony he returned to his home town alone, expecting Alvenia to join him by July.

However things must have bent to Alvenia’s will as they were residing in Lehighton by 1900 with Westlake’s school teacher son Earl. Westlake listed his occupation as “landlord” while nothing was noted for Alvenia’s profession.

By 1910, she still listed her last name as Westlake even though she was living without him. It is unclear where Westlake was living in 1910. In the censuses of 1920 to 1940, he lived with his son Earl in San Fransico as a “widower,” though Alvenia was alive until 1932.

Alvenia was living with her twenty-three year old niece Leah Wehr (sister Adaline’s daughter) and twenty-two year old nephew “Raymond” Graver on Bridge Street as a “keeper of a boardinghouse.”

Martin “Raymond” Graver, the orphaned son of Martin and Elizabeth (Straussburger) Graver, mentioned earlier.

Alvenia married Henry Weiss sometime after 1910.

Weiss was born in Lehigh County and raised a family including sons Henry Jr. and Jefferson Parades Weiss. They all moved to Emporia Virginia by 1900 and engaged in various enterprises.

Jefferson worked at his own garage and his brother Henry was a surveyor for his father’s real estate firm.

All this changed when Alvenia moved from Lehighton to Emporia when she wed Weiss, her third husband. She lived with Weiss and Henry Jr, now divorced, and Jefferson, now widowed.

Weiss seems to have made a name for himself in Emporia by 1900 as he had three African American servants, was proprietor of the “Emporia Hotel” and listed his occupation as “publisher.” In 1897, he was active in trying to lure a sugar factory to his town for economic development.

Weiss was born in 1844 and lived in Lehigh County. Apparently widowed of his children’s mother, he married a second wife, Matilda Grim of Northampton County North Carolina on May 3, 1885.

He was in Emporia Virginia by February 1884, a small town just south of Petersburg and Richmond, when he wrote a letter to his old commander.

Colonel Tobias B. Kaufman was in command of Weiss’s 209^th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment. Kaufman was born in Boiling Springs but had moved to Iowa after the war.

It seems Colonel Weiss enjoyed chatting and reminiscing with the former confederate soldiers he met as well as strolling around at Fort Stedman and through the battlefield at Petersburg, known as the “Battle of the Crater.”

In the letter, he refers to a “Johnny” (as in “Johnny Reb”) he met by the name “Britton” who was “seven feet tall” who had captured Colonel Kaufman and who took Kaufman’s sword and revolver. Britton was known to have worn the sword until the end of the war.

This book contains the letters between Weiss
and Kaufman as well as those with Britton, the
"Seven foot tall" rebel officer.

Colonel Weiss’s chance meeting led to an exchange of letters between Kaufman and Britton and in time, led to the return of both the sword and his revolver. The letters attest to the cordial and respectful manner these two old foes held for each other.

Even though Kaufman’s capture led him to be sent to the Confederate Libby Prison in Richmond and later shipped out to Danville Prison, a friendship flowered and endured. Kaufman was returned to his unit on April 14, 1865 as part of the surrender signed by Lee and Grant.

As was the case with her second husband from Pittsburgh, it is unclear how Alvenia met husband number three in Virginia, but it appears that they were married sometime after 1910.

Where Weiss adopted the title “Colonel” is uncertain. He served in Company H of the 209^th Regiment as a private throughout his enlistment from September 3, 1864 to May 1865.

The term must have been bestowed upon him as a social convention due to his standing in the community, since no other military record can be found.

“Colonel” Weiss died and was buried, apparently in Virginia. By 1930, Alvenia was back in Lehighton living with her niece, nephew, and her twin sister’s widowed husband Lewis Wehr.

She lived until 1932 as the “Widow Mrs. Alvenia Weiss.”

And although she was married three times, her grave stone still refers to her as “Graver,” even though it concludes with: “Wife of Colonel H. W. Weiss.” She was seventy-nine.

And here is where a comma must be placed on the story of the Lehighton Gravers. Please click this link on Post #2, a more thorough look at Lewis and his son Henry Graver. Post 3 is also in development.

Footnotes:

William Graver Lentz survived the Spanish American War, came home, and married his wife Jane. He was a salesman for National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) living in Bloomsburg. His 1950 death certificate, completed by his wife, listed his mother as “Elizabeth Graber.”

Sheriff Charles W. Lentz and his second wife Addie had one daughter together, Miss Naomi Lentz born in December 1884. She was only thirty-three and single when she died in October of the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.

Her mother Addie apparently never remarried and died alone, an invalid at Good Shepherd, crippled by arthritis.

U.S. Army Retired Captain William H. Westlake is buried in Gold Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno California. Alvenia Graver’s widow lived with his warrant officer son Earl until his death 1945.

A Few Other Untimely Graver Deaths:

One of Lewis Graver’s grandsons, Henry, the son of Layfayette Graver, was killed when the gasoline stove in his apple cellar exploded, catching his clothing on fire. He was burned to death on their Pine Run farm on June 10, 1931. He is the great uncle to Richard Graver who runs the Graver Apple Orchard today. He was just twenty-five. (Perhaps this was actually an exploding distillery?)

Another branch of the Graver tree that endured a chain of unfortunate deaths was that of Lewis Graver’s eldest son Martin, born in 1845. Martin lived in Packerton and was drafted into the Civil War while he was a laborer on the Lehigh Canal. He died and buried among the Graver family plot in the Lehighton Cemetery in 1884. He was thirty-nine.

Martin had a son named David Graver who was an engineer on the Lehigh Valley Railroad. He was killed at 6:00 am on February 27, 1943 while crossing First St. He was while walking to the Packerton Yard and struck by a car. He died of a broken neck and left leg. He was fifty-nine.

David Graver had a son Paul, who stood trial for the murder of his boss’s wife. Paul Graver was an amusement operator at Gilhool’s Harverys Lake Casino. Dorothy Gilhool’s body was beaten to death and found half frozen near the lake in 1954.

Witnesses swore that the forty-two year old Graver was one of the last people to see her at a late night party. An expert on fibers testified that hair found in Graver’s room matched those of Mrs. Gilhool.

Another son of Martin’s, Martin “Raymond” Graver, who lived with Alvenia at her boarding house, died of influenza in 1941 at the age of fifty-five.

Charles Thomas, grandson of Lewis Graver and son of town pharmacist T. D. and Emma (Graver) Thomas died in November 1954 of smoke inhalation when his home burned.

↧

Lehighton Gravers: Lewis and son Henry: Farm to Canal to Bricks to Pools (Post 2 of 4)

December 23, 2014, 7:20 pm

≫ Next: The Graver's Bathing Casino - Lehighton Gravers Post 3 of 4

≪ Previous: The Lehighton Gravers: Alvenia and Adaline (Post 1 of 4)

At the time of his death, no one had lived in Lehighton longer than Lewis Graver.

He came here as a boy, with his brother Andrew and his father Heinrich, to timber the Moravian lands at the south end of town when he was twelve. The two brothers would live out their lives here.

A long way from his Weissport farm and canal roots: Henry Graver rests on an early jaunt to Palm Beach,
Florida in 1917.

Lewis Graver’s 1892 obituary referred to his parents, Henry and Elizabeth, as “farm people.” They were also known as hide tanners. The family’s first homestead “almost opposite” of the first boatyard to be established along the Lehigh Canal in Weissport. It went on to say that this original boatyard got it start with Lewis and Andrew Graver.

The beginning: The Recluse of Gnaden Hutten/Lewis Graver lands

~Graver Post 1: Alvenia and Adaline Graver Millinary

~Graver Post 3: Graver's Bathing Casino

~Graver Post 4: Henry Graver's Diminished Dream

As with any research of this kind, there are a few anachronism in the records of Lewis’ life: His 1893 obituary versus information written by noted local historian Ralph Kreamer in 1993 as well as contradictory information from the 1905 "Genealogical and Personal Memoirs of the Lehigh Valley" by Jordan, Green and Ettinger.

Kreamer maintains that Lewis started the Lehighton brickworks in 1834 when he was just twenty. However, according to his obituary, Lewis was still working on the canal until 1841. The 1905 biography states he was born in 1811 while his tombstone maintains that it was 1813.

1834 was the year of a major flood that caused severe damage to the canal. The canal was out of commission long enough to cause Lewis to seek other work. From that point forward the obituary contends that Lewis devoted himself to farming. The 1905 biography notes that Lewis sold off his interest in the boat yard to his brother Andrew at about the time he bought the approximately 200 acres that would become "Graverville."

Brick making seems to be one of a few of Lewis's pursuits at this time. The facts do bear scrutiny that the Graver brick manufactory was the oldest in the county. He was also known to have established a milk route to Mauch Chunk and other markets.

This shot of the Graver Brick works, dated 1899, shows the Lehighton Cemetery as well as a product of their labors: the First Ward school building on the horizon right. It was built with Graver bricks in 1896. It was one of many in town built from Mahoning Creek clay. The man with the 'x' is very likely Henry Graver.

One other brick yard operated for a time in the borough. W. S. Koch started one also using Mahoning Creek clay at the present day site of Blue Ridge Pressure Castings. It was later purchased by Ira Seidle and Dallas Bowman. It ceased operations in 1920.

It was soon after the flood that Lewis Graver married his wife, the Leah Lauchnor. They wed on January 3, 1842 when he was twenty-eight and she was twenty-one.

They had a large family of five girls and six boys: Martin, Elizabeth Seiler, twins Adaline Wehr and Alvenia Lentz-Westlake-Weiss (see previous post), Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin, Henry, Lafayette, Edward, Emma Thomas, and Annie Graver. (More on them appear under the footnotes below.)

It was Henry, the middle son, who took over the family enterprise of brick making and would convert this industry into the ice industry, which eventually led to their swimming, real estate, and skating enterprises.

There are a number of sources that give the sum of the Graver lands was said to be 175-acres. Of course, these sources could all be citing from the same source. It encompassed all of what came to be known as the hamlet of “Graverville.” One early account from the Lewis days referred to this estate as “The Pines.”

Here is Henry Graver (right) with his mother over his shoulder. The others
are presumed to be siblings taken at "The Pines," the Lewis and Leah
Graver homestead, in South Lehighton.

Slate was said to be quarried there as well. A June 1877 article said Graver’s men removed “seven to eight feet of top rock” to expose some “A-1, Vermont quality slate of uniform thickness.” The remaining piece reads more like a paid ad by stating that customers should “invest in the company’s stock without delay.”

At far left is the current American Legion Post #314 and the original Lewis Graver homestead. The double brick
home at right was built by Graver in 1889.

The earliest reference of the Graver Brick business devolving from Lewis to Henry can be found in a June 1882 article describing it as “H. A. Graver’s” brick yard. Lewis would have been sixty-nine years old. The 1905 biography tells of Lewis's retirement after eighteen years in the business in 1881. The biography later contradicts itself stating that Henry took over the brickworks in 1884.

Certainly as Lewis gave more and more of the work to Henry, settling more into retired life, he most likely was there to provide a constant voice of both promise and woe to Henry as he advanced his business pursuits.

In the beginning, Lewis and his family were hardworking farmers over the ancillary brick works. But the ensuing years were good to the industrious Henry. And yet still, as farm work revolves around the cycles of the seasons, so too did the operation of the brick works.

From August 18, 1888 "Carbon Advocate,"
a Lehighton newspaper.

Judge D. W. Neeley visited here for the month of November in 1881. Henry and his brother-in-law, Charles W. Lentz, received Neeley as their guest from Colorado.

At the time, C. W. Lentz was serving as Carbon’s coroner with several murder investigations under his belt. In time he became a popular sheriff of the county, doing so directly after returning home from his expedition with Judge Neeley back to his hometown of Poncha Springs.

This trip points to two things: Henry’s early and apparent wanderlust as well as speaking of him as a businessman who had accumulated enough to avail himself such a trip.

Graver and Lentz traveled with Neeley and expected to stay until spring as long as “all went well.” Lentz was newly married and left two young children back home with Henry’s sister Alvenia, a milliner in town. (Click here for post of Alvenia and her twin sister Adaline.)

Henry remained a bachelor until his thirtieth year, marrying Catherine “Cate” Hoats of Washington Township, Lehigh County on September 30, 1887. He represented the first ward on the Lehighton Board of Education and was also known to be a member of the Knights of Malta.

Newly weds in front of their newly built home at 105 East Penn St. The
Henry and Cate Graver home remains today, it's detailed woodwork intact.

Brick season started as the earth began with winter's thaw in March or April. According to an article from October 4, 1890, early October was the month operations closed out for the year.

One of the first mentions of Lewis Graver bricks going into a Lehighton building was reported in the Carbon Advocate in August of 1879. It stated that “J. A. Hom’s new hotel building is progressing finely…bricks being furnished by Lewis Graver of South Lehighton.” (See footnotes below on more of the fire that consumed Hom’s first hotel.)

The Henry Graver home as it appears today at 105
East Penn Street, it's charming woodwork still in tact.

J. T. Nusbaum built his clothing store, known as “The Original Spot Cash Store” on First Street, with Graver brick in 1888. Other notable buildings built with Graver bricks were: The old “Carbon House” which stood at the corner of First and North Streets, First Ward elementary school built in 1896, the Baer Silk Mill in 1898, as well as Third Ward built in 1902.

Bricks were also used for many homes throughout Lehighton. The “Carbon Advocate” reported that Lewis built a “two and a half brick home opposite the old homestead” in June 1889. Henry Graver later built his own home of at 105 East Penn Street in the spring of 1891.

The brickyard employed about seven men in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Another article of 1889 mentions that Henry Graver had enough orders to keep the men “humping all summer long.”

This clay was drawn from the banks of the Mahoning Creek at the same location where the “Graver’s Bathing Casino” would be built in 1925 (see future post). This is the current location of “Snyder Tire” today.

The Gravers were known for their horse corral. Horses were kept there into at least the 1950s. The Lehigh Coal and Hardware Company of town trusted the Graver’s to take care of its “valuable sick horse” at the “meadows of Graver’s brick yard” in August of 1891.

According to an article by local historian Ralph Kreamer, “two horses rotated a long plank in a wide circle” to power the mill. This action crushed the clay into a malleable and pack-able material suited for filling the brick molds.

The excess clay was scraped off, and being too pliable to be handled, the bricks were dumped onto the ground to dry over night. The bricks made here were both the “pressed” and “common” types.

Rain was known to come at this most critical juncture. In June 1882 heavy storms ruined 10,000 Graver bricks. In May 1885 storms wrecked 30,000 waiting to be fired in the kiln.

From the "Carbon Advocate" - June 3, 1882

After one day on the ground, these bricks were placed in an unheated drying shed for one week. These drying sheds were still on the property into the 1960s, used by the Graver ice plant as garages and storage sheds.

The kilns were fired for seven days according to Kreamer. Workers were careful to keep the temperature steady or else the brick might crack. Bricks farthest from the fire often times lacked uniformity of size. The ovens were at first fired with wood and later anthracite coal.

The bricks took another seven days before they were cool enough to handle. Thus multiple kilns were necessary.

Certainly the Gravers kept close ties to their farming roots. Just two years before his death, the paper reported Lewis had grown a strawberry “that measured seven inches in circumference” (June 22, 1889). Henry Graver had built a wooden truck body on top of an old jalopy truck chassis. On the side he had painted “Gnaden Hutten Fruit Farm.”

The Allentown Democrat reported in January 1914 that “Henry Graver is loading a car with apples and potatoes to be shipped to some part of New Jersey.” It is unclear whether the car mentioned was Henry’s truck or whether it was a rail car. Remnants of the orchard are still visible in the 1959 aerial photo accompanying this article.

Always innovating business ventures this April 1893 news clip shows
the beginning for what would become "Graverville."

On January 3^rd, 1892, the Graver family honored their parents for their Golden Wedding Anniversary. Gifts from their children included: a silver tea service from Miss Alvenia Graver, a silver fruit dish and cake stand from Mrs. Lewis (Adaline) Wehr, a china dinner set from Mrs. T. D. (Emma) Thomas, a plush rocker from Henry and a chest from Ed Graver.

The article stated, despite Lewis being seventy-nine and Leah being seventy-two, that both were “still enjoying excellent health.” But just three weeks after such a hearty celebration, Lehighton lost its oldest of the pioneer residents.

The Carbon Advocate of January 30^th gave a detailed account of Lewis Graver’s life. It also stated that his demise was the result of a “short illness with acute pneumonia.” He had thirteen grandchildren and the paper suggested the following epitaph: “…well done thou good and faithful servant.”

Leah survived her husband another sixteen years. Her death came “suddenly and unexpectedly” though she was near ninety years of age.

Leah’s February 1908 obituary referred to Henry as “the retired brick manufacturer.” Other sources say it closed in 1910.

Certainly some of these dates could be approximations. However it was clear that by 1910, crushed shale bricks began to replace the irregular, more prone to cracking, clay bricks made by Graver. And so the Graver yard is said to have drawn to a close.

October 1938 aerial shot: Here we see the pool, skating rink and
large "tadpole" shaped ice dam built by Henry Graver in 1909.
The pool was built in 1925. Note the symmetry of Henry's fruit
orchard at bottom center.

However, the industrious Henry Graver had other plans: to manufacture ice.

Here is a 1938 aerial shot of the Graver Bathing Casino. Note the
roof line near center top of frame which is the large roller-skating
rink. The pool's nine-foot deep end is at top near the
Mahoning Creek. Note the change houses and refreshment
stands squaring off the pool. The shot was taken in October as the
pool is partially drained. The lower extreme of the ice dam is also
seen here. The various other buildings are all Graver homes
and the beginning of what came to be known as "Graverville."
The site of the pool and change houses have been converted
into the Snyder Tire operation.

On November 5, 1909, it was reported that Henry was building a “large icehouse on his property.” Just two weeks later, it was reported that he was building a second one as well as an “ice dam, which covered two acres.” Henry gave “proprietor” of an “ice house” as his occupation in the 1910 Census.

In 1911, it was reported that the Graver Ice Company filled the Stegmaier Beer Cold Storage on the Lehighton flats with ten inch ice. A February 1912 report said Graver’s Ice House was filled with 45,000 tons of ice.

This 1959 aerial shot once again shows the pool partially drained and the
skating rink. The newly built Route 443 bisects the ice dam.

At first the ice was simply harvested from the dams, an offshoot of the Mahoning Creek. However the next generation of Graver’s would build a year round production facility (future post).

A large, gas powered, circular saw was used to cut the ice into 30” x 48” pieces in the 1920s. A channel was cut up the middle to float the ice toward the storage house. The blocks were conveyed thirty-feet up to the top of the icehouse where successive layers were separated with sawdust to keep the blocks from melting and re-freezing together.

The ice was sold in increments of twenty-five pounds up to one hundred and sold in increments of five, ten, twenty and fifty cents respectively.

One of the early deliverymen for Graver’s other than Stanley and Ralph Graver was Bill Rex of Lehighton who lived in one of Graver’s bungalows on the side of the mountain.

Graver Brothers Ice sign customers would hang in their
windows to indicate the amount of ice they needed as
the delivery man approached the house. The cost for
the above increments went from five, to ten, to twenty,
to fifty cents for the above weights.

Though long out of use, the remnants of the far end of this ice dam can still be seen today. Down the bank from “Pizza Hut” at the base of the Mahoning Mountain is a stagnant pool of water that was the far extreme of this dam.

The near end started at the rear of today’s Snyder Tire and is now under a substantial pile of fill. Route 443 was part of the eventual demise of this dam as it bisected these two areas in the late 1950s.

Bill Rex delivered ice for the Gravers. The large building to the left was the Graver Skating Rink. The Henry Graver
home was to the right and to the rear of this photographer out of frame. (Photo one of many courtesy of Larry Graver.)

The business was built up sufficiently enough that by 1920, Henry was retired. Son Stanley was living with his parents and listed his job as “ice peddler.” Henry listed “none” for his. This business must have been profitable enough for Graver to begin to feed his passion for travel.

In February 1917, a Palm Beach Florida paper related the following information:

“A vehicle which attracted much attention in Palm Beach and vicinity was a house-auto which had toured from Lehighton, Pa. It is a chain driven type, capable of a speed of about fifteen miles an hour. It is really a comfortable room, 6’x12’ in dimensions, in which are three beds for the occupants, a complete set of cooking paraphernalia, and ‘all the comforts of home.’”

Henry Graver is center with his two friends in Palm Beach: On the chair is Daniel "Jacob" Kistler of Lehighton, the
liveryman and hotel proprietor and Frank Schwartz, originally of Lehighton and later a Mauch Chunk furniture dealer and undertaker who is on the ground right.

“The car is the property of H. A. Graver, known in Lehighton and vicinity as the man who proved that peaches could be raised on the mountainside of his locality. With him as guests were Frank Schwartz and D. J. Kistler.” (Kistler owned the livery in downtown Lehighton as well as the Exchange Hotel - click here for a post of those and other Lehighton businesses.)

It looks like Henry in the doorway of the modified version of his jalopy once again in Florida. That's his wife Cate between the two life guards in the center of the picture. This is where Henry would be inspired to build his pools.

It also mentioned that the “tourists” had complained that they had to pay an additional ten dollar license fee even though the one they had did not expire until the next Thursday. However they did have a compliment for the Florida roads, stating that they “on the whole in excellent condition.”

This looks to be Bertha Graver, daughter of Henry and Cate with an unidentified male sight-seeing in the cotton
fields of the south during the height of the share-cropping days.

Another tourist shot of the Gravers and Frank Schwartz in an orange
grave somewhere in Florida.

The article concludes with other Lehightonians living at least part of the year in Florida: Pierce F. Rehirg (click here for the murder mystery surrounding his death), George A. Esch, Thomas Graham, George Hartung, Jacob Kistler, Frank Schwartz, Rev. H. L. Straup, George Johnson, and F. P. Semmel besides others permanently located.

This appears to be how the jalopy traveled to Florida. However, the first trip in 1917 may have been over the entire 1,200 mile journey. Close examination of this shot seems to show Henry and perhaps Cate and most likely their grandson
Reuben Graver.

Henry's "home-auto" on a barge crossing some Florida water.

The earliest photos show this “house-auto” next to what look to be a ramshackle home, an area of which had a framed up, walled in patio area with palms used as sheathing.

Sometime between 1917 and Henry’s death in 1926, Henry and wife Cate would spend most if not all their winters in Florida in perhaps a more permanent home.

Henry and Cate had three children: Ralph Henry Graver (born 1892), Stanley (born 1894) and a daughter Bertha (born 1898). In at least one photo, it looks like Ralph in his life guard suit with his sister Bertha, Henry and his oldest son Reuben at about seven years of age in Palm Beach.

It appears that the wooden body of the jalopy mentioned in the 1917 article gets renovated at some point before 1926. In later pictures, the wooden frame looks to have been altered and there is a lower entry step. The tongue and groove slats on the outside look newer, of a darker stain, and the “Gnaden Hutten Fruit Farm” is gone.

Here we see Ralph Graver with his sister Bertha along with Henry seated at a more permanent winter home in Florida. The youngster could be Ralph's oldest son Reuben.

It is unknown for sure whether Henry drove the 1,200 miles to Florida at fifteen miles per hour on what had to be mostly dirt roads in a truck with hard tires and without shock absorbing mechanics.

However there are two interesting pictures of his remodeled jalopy: One on a barge crossing a bay or a swamp and another on a flatbed of an “Auto Transfer” train, both of which are of the newer version.

Regardless of how he arrived there, the auto-house was featured in many pictures, pictures that give a glimpse of their lives in Palm Beach. It looked like a life of ease, of surf and fishing, but with some adventure and a business discovery.

The Palm Beach Post article of 1917 also mentions that the Henry Graver “party visited Gus’ Baths, and motored south to Miami.” This innocuous and incidental stop would prove pivotal to the future of Graver family business.

Here is a picture of the Gus Bath House from Palm
Beach. The Gravers would pattern much of their
pool enterprise uponGus's design, right down to the
wooden boardwalkand surrounding change houses.

Peter “Gus” Jordahn was born in Denmark in 1881, nine years older than Henry. He and his wife honeymooned in Palm Beach where he eventually relocated. He built his first bath house in 1914, and shortly thereafter built Gus’ Bath House at the east end of Worth Avenue. It was the first bathing pools in Palm Beach to be open year round. The pool had a wooden boardwalk around it.

"Gus" Jordahn of Palm Beach Florida.
Picture appears courtesy of Palm Beach County Historical Society.

“Gus” was known to dive off the pier into the ocean and swim with the sea turtles. He also had several saltwater pools where he would house sea turtles from time to time.

There is one picture from the Graver family photo collection showing a manatee, referred to as a “sea cow,” being scrubbed down inside a drained pool from the “Kennedy Sea Aquarium.”

One of many pictures in this post from the personal collection of the
Graver family, appearing courtesy of Larry Graver. A "seacow" or manatee
from the Kennedy Aquarium in West Palm Beach, Florida in the 1920s.

It is puzzling that Henry’s oldest son Ralph is absent from both the Lehighton and Palm Beach, Florida census records in 1920. It is possible that he was living in Palm Beach as it is known that Ralph was employed as a life guard at Gus Jordahn’s Bathing Casino in Palm Beach, Florida.

Henry is in the surf left, his son Ralph is center standing while Cate
is seen middle right with her grandson Reuben in front of her.
The woman in the far right is a constant companion in most
pictures of Catherine. She appears to be either a caretaker of sorts
as she is always nearby, often at Cate's feet or is perhaps a niece.
She is a family mystery.

Thus Henry had one more business venture lurking in his brain. He was inspired by Jordahn’s Casino in function and design. The business model also intrigued him.

Henry, with his sons, set out to build not one but two of the largest pools in Pennsylvania at the site of the former brickworks.

Here Henry and Kate pose to the rear of their 105 East Penn Street home with the brick yard drying sheds to their rear.
Route 443, otherwise known as the "Lehighton-Tamaqua Highway, would later be built behind them. Again, the woman
at Cate's feet appears in many family photos whose identity is a bit of a mystery. The woman over Henry's shoulder looks to be their daughter Bertha, born in 1898 and who died in 1933.

And here, a few years later, it appears to be the same woman with Cate on the ground. Henry is at right. The couple at center, could possibly be the parents of Cate Graver. Her parents were
George and Mary Hoats of Slatedale.

The Lehighton replica of “Gus’ Baths” was built first, in 1925. The Lebanon version, built to the same specs as the 100’ by 150’ Lehighton pool was started in 1926 and completed in 1927.

Henry placed this new venture in the hands of his two sons. Ralph would take charge of Lehighton while Stanley lived the summer months in Lebanon. The pools were the largest in the state and were wildly hailed in the local papers both here and in Lebanon County.

This also led to the building of a larger skating rink larger than any currently around Carbon today. And, subsequently, this directly led the “Graver Brothers” in the real estate industry that would carry them into the 1970s.

Henry would live to see the first but not the latter. He passed away in his West Palm Beach winter home, his wife Cate and daughter Bertha at his side when his end came. He was sixty-nine but led a full life.

Cate passed at the age of sixty-three in 1931.

Bertha, who never married, followed in 1933. She was thirty-five.

Please stay tuned for Post three on Ralph and Stanley Graver soon. Happy Holidays everyone!

Footnotes -

Lewis and Leah Graver’s Children:

Their oldest son Martin moved to Packerton and worked on the railroad, Elizabeth Seiler married and moved to the Lehigh Valley, Adaline and Alvenia took on a millinery shop with Alvenia eventually moving to Emporia, Vrigina and back to later run a boarding house on Bridge Street. Son Lafayette farmed the Owl Creek area of Franklin Township, the current home of Graver’s Orchards, which is run by Lafayette’s great grandson Richard Graver.

T. Jefferson Graver was prone to epilepsy and lived with his mother until the day he died of an attack and drown in the family outhouse in August of 1902 at the age of forty-seven. At the time of his death the only siblings alive were Henry and Edward, and Emma, Elizabeth and Alvenia.

Henry and Catherine Graver’s Children:

On his 1917 draft card, Stanley stated his occupation as “farmer.” He first married Verna Nansteel in October of 1912. They were divorced by 1918. In 1920, Stanley was living at home with his new wife, the former Sadie Dreher. It appears that by 1930 they were separated, Sadie living alone in a boarding house and working as a cook in Manhattan while Stanley was living in Lebanon, owner of “Turkish Baths” and living with his widowed “maid,” Pauline Cole.

The fact that he was married three times in addition to a few anecdotes of Stanley attests to the nature of Stanley’s temperament. He was fond of the horse kept on the Graver pasture and he was known to take one as far as Lake Harmony where he would allegedly entertain himself with spirits until his horse would either runoff or he would otherwise lose track of it to the point where family members would be called in the next day to help find it. He was also known to be quick to fire workers at the ice plant without much cause, requiring his brother Ralph to re-hire the worker before he ever left the grounds.

Ralph Graver learning the ropes of the pool
business with Gus Jordahn in Palm Beach Florida.

A February 1930 advertisement for “Dr. White’s Lon-ge Hai-la Cough Medicine mentions Ralph working for Gus. The ad builds Graver’s credibility by mentioning he and his brother manage the Lehighton and Lebanon Bathing Casinos, as well as “large ice houses, and refers to Ralph as “one of the best swimmers in the country and a former life guard at Palm Beach.”

There was also a similar ad that appeared In November of 1926 for “Dr. White’s Lung Healer,” available from First National Laboratories of Lehighton.

The Jonas Hom Hotel Fired and the Mansion House Hotel:

Hom's wooden hotel was first converted from a barn by M. H. Barol in 1868 at the intersection of First and Ochre Streets. Jonas Hom took over the wooden hotel after Barol and on May 23, 1879 it was ruined in a fire. The “Lehigh and Schuylkill Railroad” depot ran behind it and it was alleged the fire started by a spark landing on the roof from a passing train. Others said it started from within. This hotel was later renamed “The Mansion House” and was run by Jonas Hom’s son C. A. Hom after Jonas’s death of consumption at the age of fifty-eight in 1882. At some point in the 1880s, it was said to have been run by A. P. Claus (born 1842), a son-in-law to Jonas. Claus was married to Sarina Hom (born 1849) who was the eldest of the Hom children. Jonas's son Columbus H. Hom ran it until he too died of tuberculosis in 1893. His brother Zacharias H. C. Hom ran it until retiring around 1906. The Carbon Advocate apologized for not running the story in the next day’s edition due to the fact that the staff was assisting Hom remove valuables and helping to extinguish the blaze.
In 1906 it was run by Kistler and in 1912 it was purchased by the Central Jersey Railroad. The Central planned to demolish it and build a station there. However, those plans never materialized and it functioned as a hotel until February 13, 1928. (Many thanks to Lamont "Mike" Ebbert for his research.)

Above: The proximity of the Mansion House Hotel in relation to the Central Jersey freight station at the Ochre Street where it intersects with First. Below: First Street view looking toward the Packerton Yard. The bricks came from the Graver brick yard.

The grave of Andrew Graver - Lewis
Graver's older brother and boat building partner-
as it rests at the Bunker Hill Cemetery in East Weissport.
~ 4 May/22 April 1809 to 10 March 1886 ~
Graver family records use the May date while
Andrew's obituary used the April date.

↧

The Graver's Bathing Casino - Lehighton Gravers Post 3 of 4

January 21, 2015, 6:24 pm

≫ Next: Graver's Ice Factory - Post 4 of 4

≪ Previous: Lehighton Gravers: Lewis and son Henry: Farm to Canal to Bricks to Pools (Post 2 of 4)

Chester Mertz of Mertztown, Mahoning Valley still remembers Henry Graver’s deer pen. “Deer were rare in those days, nearly all gone from around here.”

He remembers being a boy in the 1920s, driving up Gilbert’s Hill and being stopped by the hands of a Dutchman farmer who hissed a calm alert to a stop with, “Hirsch, Hirsch.”

An early picture of one of the "Graver's Bathing Casino" Swim and Dive Competition - Possibly August 11th, 1926 - Picture faces the Mahoning Mountain with Lehighton off frame left. The remains of this pool basin can be seen today
in the garage area of "Snyder Tire." (This photo, as well as most of the remaining photos in this post appear
courtesy of Graver family historian and great grandson of Henry Graver, Larry Graver. This author is much
obliged for the patient help of Larry for this post.)

Here is a picture from the Lehighton Graver's in the 1920s. Photo from Eckhart History of Carbon County.

Here is an overview of Graverville, complete with change house and pool at right. The large center building
is the roller rink and the bungalows to the rear on the hillside along with the original brick home of
Henry Graver in the center collectively known for years as "Graverville."

It was the first time he had seen these animals, thinking until then, that they only existed in imagination and myth. But there they were, graceful beasts, gliding through the field of rye, seeming to be on the fly.

“We’d climb around Henry Graver’s old and empty deer pen, a fence that seemed too high, much higher than any cow pen or horse corral we’d ever seen and we’d sit and wonder what those deer were like.”

~The beginning: The Recluse of Gnaden Hutten/Lewis Graver land

~ Graver's Post 1: Milliners Alvenia and Adaline Graver
~Graver's Post 2: Henry Graver
~Graver's Post 4: Diminished Dreams of Henry Graver

The deer were long gone from the pen by the time Chester saw those first deer in the early 1930s. And even though people flocked from Delano, Mahanoy City, Hazleton, and the Lehigh Valley to swim in the “Graver’s Bathing Casino,” Chester himself never did.

Chester had only two places to cool off. They’d swim in the Mahoning near Rehrig’s bungalow, where the Rehrigs kept paddle boats to maneuver the slack water of a small dam there.

“We’d also swim the deep hole on the Mahoning near Rudelitch’s, where the truck (New England Motor Freight) terminal is today.”

It was the Great Depression after all, and dimes for admission were hard to come by.

The chutes at Graver's Casino in the 1930s with the Mahoning Mountain right and the Lehighton 'Heights' left.
One can see how safety regulations have changed since this photo was taken.

The Graver’s were one of those early, enterprising families. They were artisans, building many things with their hands. Lewis Graver built canal boats with his brother Andrew. He also timbered, tanned hides, made bricks, and farmed (click here for Post #2).

Lewis Graver’s twin daughters established themselves in the millinery business in downtown Lehighton (click here for Post #1). And son Henry continued the brickworks until around 1910.

Henry Graver continued to farm with livestock as well as keeping his domestic deer stock. He also expanded his interests into one of the first peach orchards in the state as well as ice harvesting, ice manufacturing and the cold storage businesses.

Graver's ice houses packed with twelve inch ice -
from 'Lehighton Press'February 1923 just two years
before the opening of the bathing casino.

But it was his twelve or so winters in Florida that led the family into the amusement business. It was the ‘Roaring Twenties” and Henry was about to take a $15,000 chance.

Henry and his two sons portrayed their new resort as a destination, with plentiful Mahoning Mountain air, a place for city families to come and stay in bungalows among the pines that once were home to the Leni-Lenape hunters.

The Burd Brothers Well 'Diggers' of Union Hill discovered
the remains of three human skulls along the Mahoning Creek
just below the Graver property. This helped fuel the Indian
massacre mystique that the Gravers hoped would help to
attract tourists to their resort. This article appeared in
the 'Lehighton Press' in April of 1915.

The Gravers also promoted the mystique of the Moravian “Gnaden Hutten” settlement and the subsequent massacre that took place there 175 years ago with the hope of drawing tourists and their dollars (click herefor the Gnaden Hutten story).

The centerpiece of course was the large cement pool. The Graver’s Bathing Casino’s water was at first pumped from the Mahoning Creek. They used a “Gould’s Centrifugal Pump” that had a 600,000 gallon output over ten hours time.

Later on, the water was filtered by a gravel and sand filter house with chlorine.

Still and all, this was a marked improvement and was a luxury that few people in those days had ever experienced. Most at that time, like Chester Mertz, only had the local river or ponds or canal for swimming.

It had a shallow end of just inches of water for toddlers on up to nine feet for diving boards and “chutes” for “deep sea” sports. It also had cement fountains in the shape of flowers the children found entertaining to jump from in the middle of the main wading section. Some of the fondest memories of those youth was entering the cascading water shouting for the sensation of the sounds caught up in a sound proof barrier of water.

The stairs as they look today. The set going right led to the
wading end. The set going right led to the swimming and
diving end. The wall between them went the width of the
pool to separate the less experienced swimmers from the
deep end. These stairs and wall can be seen in the
pictures below.

This current day picture shows roughly the same orientation and angle
as the photo above. Note the stairs along the far wall remain today
behind Snyder Tire. The double stairs were separated by the wall
seen above that divided the wading end at right here from the
deeper, swimming and diving end at left. A partition wall
at one time kept the areas separate and safe.

This picture was taken from the roof of the roller rink and looking toward Lehighton. The old brick building to the left rear on Bridge Street was once the Penn Lace Mill and most recently was Ott's Beverage. The building has been idle for some years now. Notice the children standing on the diving wall and the double stairs at each end of the wall
leading to either side of the wall. These same stairs can be seen in the two modern pictures of Snyder Tire today.

This 1960s photo is practically the same view as the shot above. Note the dividing wall and newer refreshment stand
which was under construction for the photo below.

Construction of new refreshment stands along East Penn Street at Graver's Lehighton.

It had change houses that were said to rival those at ocean seaside resorts. Two buildings, one 150 feet long and the other 200 feet, were for changing and locker rooms, complete with “porcelain fixtures and mirrors for the ladies.” There was no mention of these amenities for the men.

The roomy 100 by 150 foot pool not only provided a spot to soak away a hot day, but it also became a place to flex one’s natator prowess.

The Graver’s, as well as other pool facilities, sponsored annual swim meets. Newspaper accounts would boast of up to 3,000 spectators and participants, all at a dime a piece admission.

Locker rentals were fifteen cents. The business also relied on the leasing of swimsuits, known then as “togs,” as well as concession sales of ice cream and “doggies.”

There were two rows of bleachers under roof along the west side. It had a ten foot, chestnut planked boardwalk around the eastern and western sides. The grounds were large enough to park 2,000 cars.

The announcement in the paper said the entire operation from the excavation to the swimsuit stock represented a $15,000 investment by the Graver family.

This was to be Henry’s ‘swan song.” The ‘Graver Brothers’ were the ones set to carry the bath houses into the future.

Henry and Cate (Hoats) Graver had three children: Ralph (born 1892), Stanley (1894), and Bertha (1898). Henry ventured to Florida with his wooden jalopy: a home-made, early motor-home (See Post #2 for pictures) and soon was making West Palm Beach his winter home.

Here is Ralph Graver at the Lehighton
pool in the 1950s. He became
the 'senior' member of the Graver
brothers when his father died in
1926. Ralph died in 1965.

Eldest son Ralph and his young family also wintered there. Ralph worked for ten winter seasons at Gus Jordahn’s Swimming Casino where he developed the angles of the business.

It spawned not just the Lehighton pool that opened in 1925, but a second one, identically built in Lebanon, PA, two years later.

Ralph would be the “senior” member in charge of base operations and real estate development here in Lehighton while his younger brother, “junior” partner Stanley, oversaw the Lebanon Bathing Casino.

The Lebanon "Graver's Bathing Casino" was a carbon copy of the Lehighton prototype, replete with dives, "chutes" and "flower" fountains. This picture looks to have been taken from the roof of the change house seen below.
Note the diving stand at the far corner here above, and the same stand in the near corner below.

This picture of the Graver's Lebanon Casino is looking in the opposite direction than the picture above.

Ralph married Pearl Klinger in 1911. She was the daughter of Francis Klinger, a Lehigh Valley Railroad engineer stationed at Delano. Ralph and Pearl had three sons: Reuben (born 1912), Francis (1913), and Ralph Junior (1915) more commonly known as “Jack.”

Ralph and Pearl Graver's children:
Reuben "Rubie" left, Francis,
and Ralph Jr or "Jack" in front.

The Gravers had a knack for promotion, which was necessary, as they did have local competition.

Lakewood Park, Barnesville:

The Lakewood Park in Barnesville had a full dance hall, a lake, a carousel and as well as a 150-foot cement pool like the Graver’s had. Their grand opening was in 1917.

Entertainment there over the years ranged from the Dorsey Brothers and Doris Day. They also had the longest running ethnic festival: Lithuania Day, which ran from 1914 to 1984. The Bavarian Beer Festival was also there in its later years.

This picture captures of immensity of Graver's skating rink with the "beach" area of the ice dam in the foreground, the
eastern side change house of the pool is visible on the right. Notice the cupolas for drawing out stale summer air
as well as the now closed shutters that could be opened on cool summer nights. The alcove with the Franz Kline
paintings built for bands was at the far end nearest to East Penn Street.

The Gravers had a large roller rink for nighttime entertainment which they also hoped would carry them through the winter time. The rink was at the south end of the pool and was equipped with a row of pot-belly stoves every twenty-five feet along the outer wall which paralleled Route 443.

Franz Kline as he appeared
near the end of his short,
but prolific life. His works
appear in most of the
major New York art museums.
Kline had major setbacks in
his youth: He arrived in
Lehighton due to the suicide
of his father that sent him to live
at a home for "fatherless boys."
Additionally, he suffered from
a childhood illness that removed
him from school for a couple of
years. More about his interesting
life will be available soon in
Finsel's book
'Franz Kline in Coal Country -
Early Works, Life & Letters.'

The rink also had an alcove at the near end for bands to play. Ralph Graver’s oldest son Reuben was a classmate of Franz Kline. Kline became an artist of important renown in the 1950s and 60s.

Sometime in the late 1920s, according to noted local Kline authority Rebecca Rabenold-Finsel, while Kline and Reuben were still attending Lehighton High, Kline painted some whimsical band members onto the wooden wainscoting of the Graver skating rink.

An early drawing from the artist Franz Kline. Painted
directly onto the wooden wainscot in the band alcove,
these approximately two foot by two foot band member
paintings were authenticated by Kline biographer
Rebecca Rabenold-Finsel and appear here courtesy
of her

(Look for her forthcoming book co-written with her son Joel Finsel, entitled Franz Kline in Coal Country - Early Works, Life & Letters.)

This 2 inch by 2 inch skating pass has seven
different names and addresses of people
stamped on the back including: Pittsburgh,
Philadelphia; Rockford & Morris, Illinois;
as well as New York and Ohio.
One date on the back is given
as "November 16, 1945" as well as "Herman
Horack of Weissport" dated June 1945 and the
words "No Good" written with it. This was
purchased by the Graver family from a man
in Seattle, Washington about ten years ago.

One of the earliest swim meets to occur there was held on August 11, 1926. Carl Hochberg was the lone Lehightonian to place at the 1926 competition. He was twenty then and took second in the 50-yard swim and third in the two hundred.

The main medal winner, the “merman” as the paper reported, won all three of the men’s events including the diving competition. Richard Johnson was living here while working on the Stroudsburg-Lehighton highway project (Route 209). His hometown was Harrisburg.

(The entire article appears at the end of this post. It is undated, but based on Hochberg's medals, it appears to be from August 12, 1925.)

Competitors in the boys division were Clarence Kramer, son of a Hazleton police officer was seventeen, nineteen-year-old Harry Whitenight of Tamaqua, and a pair of fourteen year olds from Hazleton, Otto Hill and Elmer Fox. Fox’s father was a blacksmith while Hill’s father Gottleib died the year before.

Carl Hochberg of Lehighton placed in many swim
in dive events over the years. Not only did he compete
at his home pool, but he also traveled to Graver
Brothers in Lebanon as well as their competition
pool of Lakewood in Barnesville. More of his medals
can be found at the bottom of this post. The
second place medal from August 12, 1925
at right is the one used to date the newspaper
clipping that appears at the end of this post.

There was no separate competition class for young girls, so seventeen year old Irene Skakandy of Nesquehoning swam against the women. Ninteen year old Virginia Mooney, “Vergie” as her family called her, of Palmerton took the silver in diving.

Also competing was seventeen-year old Isabel Armbruster, from a large railroad family in Packerton, took third in diving. After recently speaking to Carlos Teets, it was learned that he never knew his mother competed in the water events at Gravers.

He did know she placed at a beauty contest there once. She took second, she was told by the judges, because she was chewing gum. Isabel married Harry “Hack” Teets.

Isabel Armbruster Teets of Packerton -
She took third place is diving in 1925
and took second place in a beauty
contest at Graver's, year unknown.
She is the mother of Carlos Teets
of Lehighton.

One curious contestant with a lot of pluck was Eva Nicholson Fisher Straub. The daughter of a Franklin blacksmith, Eva married another township native Lovin Fisher when she was twenty-three in 1905 and she was widowed by 1920.

Here is the vivacious Eva Fisher Straub with her first husband Lovin Fisher.
She later married Oscar Straub of Weissport and entered a Graver Swim and
Dive contest when she was forty-four.

Eva married Oscar J. Straub, who ran “Strauby’s Mill,” the grain elevator in Weissport most recently known as “Sebelin’s Lumber,” sometime after his first wife Catherine died in November of 1925.

Even though she hadn’t placed in any of the water events at Graver’s the forty-four year old made enough of a splash with her note-worthy blue swim suit and her “trite” sayings to deserve her own article in the weekly newspaper’s “Owl Column.”

This undated article was found with
the same article above announcing
the results of the swim and dive
contests. It must be sometime after November 1925 as
that is when Oscar's first wife Catherine died. Eva and Oscar
married sometime after that.

Eva Straub was quoted as saying, “Most women should dive more, so they would be compelled to keep their mouth shut.” As a footnote here, both she and husband number two were buried with their first spouses on Union Hill.

Civic groups also staged their own festivals on the grounds. The American Legion held a carnival there the week before, on August 4^th1926 in which Hochberg took first place in the swim event and third in diving.

One young swimmer got her start at Graver’s when she was just three. Betty Mullen was the youngest and only daughter of Packerton Yardmaster Charles and Evadna Mullen of Weissport. Her brothers all were athletic and with fewer opportunities for women in those days, Betty found herself an outlet in the water.

And though she belonged to the silver medal USA women’s relay team of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics and was a two-time world record holder in the butterfly, Betty first proved adept at diving.

Weissport native and Olympic team
member, two time world-record holder in
the butterfly, Betty Mullen Brey, from
her "Graver's Bathing Casino" days.
Betty remains active in the swimming
community and recently re-located to
Florida to be nearer to her son and daughter.

Her father’s role with the railroad led to many important connections. He procured ice from the Graver family for the dining cars. This relationship led to the agreement that Betty could have free use of the pool.

“There were Sunday afternoons when Charlie Franks would come home on leave from the Air Force, after the war...He'd practice his dives. He could do all of them. When he would leave, I’d imitate what I saw. I was just fourteen or fifteen then.”

Charlie went on to place fourth in a men's diving competition at the Pan American Games sometime in the 1940s, representing our armed services. Although strong and athletic, Charlie did not have the highest quality of life after the war. At some point during his military career, he was accidentally exposed to a large dose of RADAR waves while doing maintenance near a sender. The jolt knocked him off the scaffold he was working from.

Charlie Franks of Lehighton was Betty's
diving muse after the war.

Charlie with his
siblings at Graver's Ice Dam with the
Mahoning Mountain in the background.
His sisters Margaret (back) and Virgil,
his brother Paul with gun and Charlie.

Eventually, her father used his railroad pass for his daughter to attend open swims for women in Allentown on Wednesday afternoons and also into New York City.

These tandem dives of Betty Mullen and her friend Delores Claus (of Eight
Street Lehighton) at Graver's (Betty is on top in both pictures.) In this lower
picture you can see the Henry Graver brickhome at 105 East Penn Street which
still stands there unchanged today. The skating rink is at left. Photo taken
by future husband of Betty, Paul Brey when they were both about fourteen
in 1946.

Eventually, for her last two years of high school, she took the Black Diamond Express into NYC at 3:15 each Friday when she had weekend meets. She would stay over night and sometimes babysit for the former New York State diving champ, Hazel (Muller) Barr.

And when she had practices in the city during the week, she'd return home on the 12:15, arriving at the Lehighton station at 3:15. Her future husband Paul Brey would sometimes meet her in the middle of the night to drive her home if he could sneak out with his father's car. Otherwise she'd take a cab.

The late night's meant skipping morning classes her junior and senior year, which didn't make principal and teachers too happy.

She went on to swim at Purdue as well as for the U.S. Army as a physical therapist at Walter Reed.

Betty Mullen sets one of her two world record times in the butterfly
seen here in this August of 1955 clipping from "The Bee" paper
from Danville, Virginia. She would marry her high school sweetheart
Paul Brey a short time later.

“But I owe my beginnings in the water to Graver’s pool in Lehighton,” Brey said recently. Her father built a starting stand at Graver’s and that allowed her to practice nearly every day all summer long.

She also did tandem jumps with another L.H.S. ’49 classmate, Delores Claus Bauchspies, currently of Bloomsburg.

Betty married classmate Paul Brey who was a standout football player at Lehighton. Their children have honed their athletic pedigree cultivated in her hometown.

Their daughter Brenda swam competitively at LSU. Youngest son Shane was a standout basketball player at Walter Johnson High School and is assistant athletic director at UCF. Oldest son Mike is the longest tenured men’s head basketball coach at Notre Dame University. He was also an assistant coach to Coach Mike Krzyzewski at Duke.

This metal, two foot long sign, once hung over the doorway at the Casino.

The End of the Casino:

This picture from the Times News shows Francis
Graver (son of Ralph) with hose and his son Larry
at right with broom preparing the pool in 1959.
A favorite teacher and coach from Lehighton, Al Domineco,
stands at center who was a longtime Graver summer employee.
Notice the diving platform in the corner here and in the
other photos. East Penn Street is parallel to the refreshment
stand seen here. Route 443 is perpendicular to the left.

The pool ceased operations at about the same time the borough finished it work on the municipal pool at Baer Memorial. The Graver family was said to have offered their facility to the town at that time, but the borough chose to build the new one instead.

The ice manufacturing was also soon to be a thing of the past at Gravers. The remaining business pursuits were reduced to the renting of the bungalows on the mountain side collectively known as “Graverville.”

Sometime in the 1990s, these rentals were offered for sale to their owners, calling an end to over 150 years of Graver ownership. Francis Graver’s son Larry started his “Blue Mountain Machine” business with partner Phil Myers on the site for a time before moving operations over to Route 248 in Parryville.

Reuben Graver’s son Stanley started “Graver’s Texaco” near the turnpike entrance in the 1960s. Three of his sons continue to run it as the successful “Graver Brother’s” garage today.

Footnotes: An Early End to three of the “Graver’s Swimmers” –

Carl Hochberg remained in the Lehighton area working as a knitter at one of the local hosiery mills. He married Helen Ashner sometime after 1930. They had one son: Carl Junior. By 1960 however, he developed a tumor on his right leg. He died in July 1960 at the age of fifty-five. Son Carl also had a son Carl Hochberg who lives in Lehighton to this day.

Harry Whitenight would later marry Beatrice Reed. Together they had a son Ferris who graduated from Tamaqua High School in 1946. Beatrice would die of uterine cancer in January 1939. Harry was a construction worker in the new Pennyslvania Turnpike tunnel on the Northeast Extension. On August 9, 1956, while inside the tunnel, Harry was caught unaware by a cement truck that was backing up. It struck him, crushing his skull. He was fifty.

Virginia “Vergie” Mooney Proud, daughter of justice of the peace Jacob and Sarah Mooney of Palmerton went onto nursing school in Erie Pennsylvania where she met her husband, Ralph Archer Proud. They had three children and were living in Painesville, Ohio. On November 2, 1954 the car she was driving was struck by a train. She was forty-seven.

Few could argue that perhaps Virginia "Vergie"
Mooney Proud could have won the Graver
Casino beauty pageants. Seen here in her
senior photo at Palmerton High. She was killed
at the age of forty-seven in Ohio.

Lebanon Daily News -
April 1934

Lebanon Daily News - December 18

This paper valuables bag measures 8x10 inches.

More of Hochberg's medals, this time
from the competitor's resort:
Lakewood in Barnesville.

These Hochberg medals ate all from Graver's:
On left from August 11, 1926 and
on right from an American Legion
Carnival held there a week earlier.

Lebanon Daily News-
August 4, 1927

Lebanon Daily News - July 1931

Lebanon Daily News - June 1931

This appears to be a flyer/handbill printed by the Graver Brothers to announce their
grand opening. The text, it says, first appeared in the "Lehighton Press" on May 8, 1925.
The article above is from June 1926 from Lebanon Daily News. The bathing picture above appears courtesy
of Bob Fatzinger, grandson of Walter Hammel. This picture also appeared in Ripkey and Ebbert's "Lehighton" book
which is still on sale at Lehighton Hardware and other merchants in town.

VIrginia "Vergie" Mooney of Palmerton married Ralph Archer Proud.

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Graver's Ice Factory - Post 4 of 4

February 16, 2015, 3:50 pm

≫ Next: A Slender Demolition - By Ronald Rabenold

≪ Previous: The Graver's Bathing Casino - Lehighton Gravers Post 3 of 4

Change, not the positive kind, was on the move in Graverville. The swim contests were becoming a thing of the past. The rooflines of the sheds that once sheltered and allowed the bricks to dry, sagged now, like the back of a broken down old mare.

Wash-day at Graverville - Facing west: Route 443 as it appeared while under construction in the early 1940s.

The Lehighton-Tamaqua Highway (what we call Route 443 today) came through here in the early 1940s. Steel being in short supply after the outbreak of World War II, the completion of the bridge over the Mahoning Creek at Graverville was stalled until 1946. The roadway split the ice, pool, and skating facilities from the bungalows of the hillside.

Steam-roller work with shale to build up the road-way to meet the new
Route 443, otherwise known as the Lehighton-Tamaqua Highway. Henry
Graver's brick home is seen at the left. The bungalow in the center is still
on the corner, though it is largely hidden by a cement barrier at the corner.

The roadway was an achievement for commerce in the area. It allowed for more avenues for transport, a boon for the local garment industries, spawning the Interstate Dress Carriers trucking terminal, now NEMF.

Henry Graver residence of 105 East Penn Street. The homes at right with the square roof supports were torn down
in the past few years.

The beginning - The Recluse of Gnaden Hutten/Lewis Graver lands

Post #1 Alvenia and Adaline Graver

Post #2 Lewis to Henry Graver

Post #3 The Graver Bathing Casino

It also built up Lehighton’s suburban commerce with the Carbon Plaza Mall, Pizza Como, McDonald’s, and eventually Wal-Mart and Lowe’s.

The roadway delivered promise to many, but all such promises seemed to pass the Graver’s right on by.

The entrance to the Graver Ice Plant with their 1940s era pickup truck.

Larry Graver was still in high school when he worked at Graver’s Ice Plant. In the spring and fall, he’d prepare and work maintenance on the pool as well. Larry also lived in Graverville with his parents Francis and Ruth (Hallman) Graver. His father Francis was one of three sons born to Ralph Graver, Henry Graver’s only child to produce off-spring.

Larry’s cousin, Stanley Graver, was living in his great grandfather Henry’s house with his parents Reuben “Rubie” and Iris Graver at 105 East Penn Street.

Francis and Reuben were two of Ralph Graver’s three sons. The third and youngest was Ralph Jr., otherwise known as “Jack.”

The skating rink as it appeared shortly before it's demolition
in the early 1990s.

There was little left for Larry and Stanley to get involved with in those days. The building boom of their uncles and grandfathers was over. Refrigerators replaced the daily need for commercially produced ice. And people were traveling farther for their entertainment, to points along the Jersey Shore and beyond.

The beginning of the end was the closing of the skating rink in the late 1950s. At about that same time, the borough of Lehighton had begun to manage the Graver pool in the summer but closed it in 1961. Lehighton opened a more modern municipal pool at Baer Memorial in 1965.

A local paper article from the late 1950s.

The following description of the plant’s operation comes from a December 2014 interview with Larry Graver:

“The ice plant room was about twenty by forty feet. There were sixty-four, two foot by two foot squares that could each make 48” by 24” by 10” pieces of ice.

There was copper tubing into each section filled with a brine solution, the high salt content gave the refrigerant a colder than thirty-two degree freezing temperature to speed up the icing process.

The brass or copper tubing went into each section and bubbled air into the water to keep it moving. This is what gave the ice of this time its signature white color.”

“Pulling Ice” – “We would work the odd rows first, and once finished, we’d repeat the process on the even rows. This helped keep the ice you were working with as cold as possible.

A rolling crane picked up the form with the ice inside it where it was dipped into a solution of warm water to free it from the form. The block was tilted and left to slide on a chute to the other side of the ice house for storage.

At no point during this process did the fresh water in the ice mix with the brine solution. There was a deep, fresh water well on site where the water was drawn. The ice produced here was potable.

There was a large diesel engine that powered the entire operation. It was said that you could hear and feel the mighty thump of this engine as you passed in your vehicle on Route 443.

(The ice storage house would be beneath the current pile of the shale parking lot used by truck and trailers along Route 443 across from Pizza Hut.)

This ran a three-phase generator and had up to ten V-belts taken off of the power shaft that ran the compressors. In order to start such an engine and set the large piston in motion, one had to set the eight-foot flywheel by lining it up a special mark on it with its corresponding marking on the floor.

The ice plant was run by Henry’s sons Ralph and Stanley. Stanley was a bit more difficult to work for. He was known for firing workers at the ice plant and by the time they reached Ralph on the other side of the property, they would be re-hired.

Stanley passed away in 1958 and Ralph followed him in 1965.

So the cousins, who worked the last years of these Graver enterprises, had to look to make their own mark in the business world.

Larry teamed up with Phil Meyers and created Blue Mountain Machine. Though he has since retired and sold his interest, Blue Mountain Machine still operates at 725 State Road (Route 248) but got its start inside the old skating rink on the Graver property.

In the late 1960s, Stanley Graver branched out to Route 209 near the Turnpike interchange and built “Stan Graver’s Texaco” which is now operated by his three sons, Ricky, Allen and Kerry as “Graver Brothers.”

The real estate holdings of the Graver family, the numerous bungalows that still dot the hillside, were appraised in April of 1989. Then, one by one, each was sold to either their current inhabitants or to other private families.

Gone within the last few years, a sign at the traffic light, that told passing motorists of the now bygone hamlet of “Graverville.” Its name still adorns some maps and now and then this now almost mythical place draws a pilgrim to it.

One such seeker, finding nothing to prove or deny its existence, was resourceful enough to find “Graver Brother’s Garage.” Once there he found the great, great, great grandsons of Lewis Graver.

Considering that Lewis first timbered the hemlocks of the north facing slope of the former Moravian mission back in 1825, all one hundred fifty plus years before the ice factory's end, I’d say it was a good run, a good run indeed.

↧

A Slender Demolition - By Ronald Rabenold

February 17, 2015, 7:09 pm

≫ Next: The Lost Stills of the Pine Swamps of Meckesville -(My 150th Post!)

≪ Previous: Graver's Ice Factory - Post 4 of 4

It began as a slender demolition among

A series of radical hesitations,

Almost subliminal,

Ending, as these things often do,

In an unknown submission,

That sprung forth unseen from unknowing

Forbearers,

Bearing the weight of a whisker

Upon my current condition.

My mind inspected this damage.

The loose rocks, fissures,

Spaces with water infiltration,

The invisible fault lines

Descended from bowed, sternly bent heads,

Among repetitions of rapidly developed demurs,

Humming with subservient

Stressors amid vibrations of curious pleasures.

Ronald Rabenold - 15 February 2015

↧

The Lost Stills of the Pine Swamps of Meckesville -(My 150th Post!)

March 1, 2015, 12:26 pm

≫ Next: “Work, Work, Work:” Lehighton’s Baking Past -Post #3 of 3

≪ Previous: A Slender Demolition - By Ronald Rabenold

The “Swampers” or “Ridge Runners” and their contribution to the world (yes, I said world) is largely lost beneath the dust of memories of Carbon County’s mighty role in the Industrial Revolution.

One of the early known distillers of Albrightsville was
Timothy Serfass. He sold his interest to his brother-in-law
William Getz in the 1870s.

Life on the mountain was as austere as anywhere so remote and wooded. Families were known to get through a hard winter with nothing but a few bags of summer sausage and a couple of heads of cabbage.

By late fall, with even butter scarce on the mountain, dinner would routinely center on a simple onion sandwich. Many relied on nearby streams for washing and for drinking water, water that sometimes froze over in the hard months. Deer and rabbit season lasted as long as one was hungry.

Though so removed from town life, families could still garner a living on the railroad through the access points like the ones Mud Run and Stoney Creek provided. Some set up stores, hotels and inns. Some held valid liquor licenses and some didn’t bother going through such formalities.

This is the copper pitcher owned by Joyce
Gaumer's grandfather A. W. Smith who
distilled wintergreen in the 1920s and 1930s.

Robert Getz of Albrightsville had one of the largest potato farms in the early 1900s. He also owned a stave mill, employing as many as twenty-two men. His brother Emory also had a stave-mill.

In the 1870s, Henry J. Deppey had both a saw and grist mill there as well.

It was from the woods of the Pine Swamp that most made their living. Many were lumbermen, more than not, who listed their occupations as “laborer in the woods.”

The plentiful hemlocks were sought for tanning hides in the many tanneries (The Lehigh Tannery near White Haven was said to be the largest in the world.) Cottonwoods were a fast growing tree for crates and staves for barrels.

The “wintergreen” industry though, is a mostly forgotten part of our area’s contribution to world economics.

It was an intensive process. Each still held about 35 bushels of wood chips or wintergreen leaves (also known as teaberry) along with two hundred gallons of water. The mixture was left to steep for up to twelve hours before a fire was lit.

Once lit, the fire was slowly fed from a low heat to one of gradual intensity over three hours. Once the distillation started, the fire was then brought to a rapid boil for about an additional three hours, for a total cooking time of six to eight hours.

One batch usually yielded about one quart of the oil which weighed about one and a half pounds. In 1938, a quart of wintergreen oil sold for about $7.00. This price stayed fairly constant over the years.

Without any adjustments for inflation, the price per pound in the early 1860s was as high as $16 per pound, dropping sharply to between $7 and $8 by 1870. By 1920, the price paid to local distillers went as high as $5.25 per pound. Wholesalers purchased it in 25-pound containers.

A 1918 letter from wintergreen essential oil buying
agent in New York City to Albrightsville distiller
Alexander "Willis" Smith, the grandfather
of current and life-long swamper Joyce Gaumer.

Another figure that held about the same over the years was the price paid to the harvesters of the leaves. Newspaper accounts of 1870s and 1910s both stated they were paid about one dollar per one hundred pounds of leaves.

They also reported that experienced pickers were said to gather between 75 to 150 pounds per day.

It was estimated that the Albrightsville area alone boasted about two hundred wintergreen (‘teaberry’) stills.

Its scientific name is chimaphila maculate. “Chimaphila” comes from the Greek meaning ‘to love winter.’ Easy to see how this low growing plant, evergreen through winter, stood out in contrast against the brown and lifeless forest floor of winter.

When wintergreen was out of season, distillers would render the oil of the black birch tree as a substitute. Its chemical constitution not the same, but as for wintergreen flavorings, it was close enough.

Besides confectioners and apothecaries, compounding pharmacists bought the oil to be used as an analgesic. The chemical make-up in one fluid ounce is equal to 171 adult aspirins.

The oil was sold in balms such as Ben-Gay and other remedies for “rheumatism” or any arthritic pain. It was also touted to cure “baby itch” and in the 1930s was used in experimental cancer research.

These were the early days of “Big Pharma,” and Carbon and Monroe Counties were said to produce 90 percent of the world market wintergreen.

A 1914 account in the Allentown Democrat said 7,000 pounds were distilled world-wide each year. Of that, 80% was made in Carbon’s woods, while another 10% was made in Monroe County.

Add in the Pike County totals, according to articles gleamed from around the state at this time, and this section of Pennsylvania accounted for near 100% of the world supply.

Joyce Gaumer, of Albrightsville today, said she and her grandmother would go pick on the days of a church picnic or whenever money was low.

They’d crawl on hands and knees, ever mindful of timber rattlers, raking away debris with their short rakes with two inch dowel tines, to stuff their burlap sacks with the harvest of the three to five inch plants.

They’d take their harvest to Paury “Purie” Green’s store. Though he knew and trusted them well, Purie would always sort out any extraneous debris of twigs and stone before he weighed their bags.

“He’d pay a nickel a pound. I’d make enough in a day to enter the cake walk four or five times.”

Joyce Gaumer in her Penn Forest or
"Christmans"home today
with distilling pitcher, it's capacity equal
to one batch of the still.

And though it was seen only as a more modern problem, as early as 1882, folks were concerned with hiding their income from the government.

It was said that “internal revenue collectors” would “drop down upon them” to collect a $36 per still tax.

Obviously the headwaters of the Yellow, Mud Run, Drakes, Stoney and other area creeks provided abundant cover for those hiding from the government. But the cold water of these streams was also a necessary function in the process of the distilleries.

In order for the water and oil to condense, distillers ran their copper coils through a stream to be cooled. From there it dripped into either a glass jar or a copper pitcher. The oil was heavier, so the top water was simply poured off.

Joyce Gaumer’s grandfather Alexander “Willis” Smith ran a still. (He was also superintendent of Penn Forest roads as well). He had yearly contracts with New York firms. He typically sent 25 to 50 pounds a season, and got paid at a rate of $5.25 per pound of essential oil.

Read the companion Post "Ode to Spring" - Making Horseradish with Joyce Gaumer by clicking here.

One of the earliest known distillers in Albrightsville was Timothy Serfass (1845-1908). His sister married another founder of the area William Getz (1824-1910). August Huseman was another early distiller.

William or Wilhelm Getz was an
early resident and distiller of the
Pine Swamp.

Sometime before the late 1870s, the distillery was handed from Serfass to his brother-in-law Getz and by fall of 1878, it was in the hands of Samuel Moyer.

This Dreher brother's 1873 drug store ad from
Stroudsburg boasted to pay the
highest prices to the wintergreen
distillers of Carbon and Monroe Counties.

And as with all new brooms, Moyer wanted to sweep well. His rate to the pickers went from the 60 to 70 cent per hundred pound rate of Serfass and Getz to a new area high of 75 cents with Moyer.

Going into the First World War, wintergreen production in Pennsylvania was at its height. Trade though was disrupted due to German U-boats and sharply hurt the local economy. That was also the time when artificial substitutes first began to appear as well.

Still, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, many of Carbon’s unemployed did find a salary solace in it. In 1942, Pennsylvania’s Deputy Secretary of Forests and Waters Charles Baer said given the near 100 year history of the industry in the Carbon area, he saw the beginning of the Second World War as a possible boon for area incomes.

Baer was correct. By war’s end, with America’s lead in providing analgesic and other supplies to many of our allied hospitals, the wintergreen economy once again surged.

But today, some 70 years later, the days of a still providing a livelihood there are all gone.

Talk to any descendant of the “Ridge” or the “Swamp” and you’ll find a palpable pride that bubbles up from this austere distilling past.

A. W. and Alice Smith from Drake's Creek,
a wintergreen distiller.

The Smith home along Drake's Creek.

Looking at Eugene Albert Meckes’s December 1966 obituary will tell you the same thing.

It didn’t report that the life-long resident of the Pine Swamp first worked at the White Haven Fish Hatchery, or for a time in a stave-mill, or even how he lived in Bowmanstown working for the Zinc factory or how he retired from the state highway department in the 1950s.

His obituary proudly listed only one, solitary occupation of his life work as “distiller of wintergreen.”

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