I recently got an email from Robert Haben asking if I had any pictures of the tube mill steam switch engine that was used to dump slag behind Loccisano’s market. He believed that the engine ran through the 1940′s and the large cement dump is still standing today.

I went through my pictures and I did find some pictures of the tube mill that I have not published yet. The picture above is part of the slideshow below that has pictures taken between 1914 and 1917 around the tube mill involving railroad tracks. Robert mentioned the 1940′s, so I am not sure if this is the same engine, but it is the only one I have. If you have a picture, we would love to see it.

A number of these pictures I do not know what exactly we are looking at so any feedback you might have would be appreciated. You can leave your comments below or email me at info@ellwoodcitymemories.com

   The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was one of the oldest railroads in the United States and was created mostly because the city of Baltimore wanted to compete with the newly constructed Erie Canal (which came through Rock Point Park) and another canal being proposed by Pennsylvania which would have connected Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The B&O Rail Road Company became America’s first common carrier when it was chartered on February 28th 1827 by a group of Baltimore businessmen to ensure traffic would not be lost to the aforementioned proposed Chesapeake & Ohio Canal.
The B&O passenger station in Ellwood City off of Fifth Street beside the subway was torn down long ago, however the Baltimore & Ohio Freight Station on the north side of the tracks along Sixth Street was demolished in 1982. That property is now owned by the Ellwood City Forge.

In 1966, the P & LE freight station was converted into a warehouse and offices by Fotia Brothers Sales & Service owners, Sam & Joseph Fotia.
You can leave any memories you may have about the B&O Railroad below or email us at info@ellwoodcitymemories.com

      It was reported back in 1917, if you were wealthy enough, you could order a Maxwell Roadster for $795, or the Town Car for $1,095 FOB Detroit, delivered to Badger Brothers in Ellwood City, PA. The Maxwell Roadster was considered a mechanically sound car as it was reported to average 27.15 to 29.04 miles per gallon.

The Ellwood City Ledger photograph to the right is a picture of James Shallenberger showing off his brand new 1919 Chalmer that he purchased from John Badger. The picture is taken in front of the front gate of the US Steel mill. Today the gate was later remodeled into a pizza shop and today houses Nico Luciano’s.

      I am always very appreciative to all those who have shared pictures with Ellwood City Memories. Sometimes I am unable to get the pictures onto the site right away as I have to make sure they are not copyrighted, but pictures like these that were donated by Scott Mackey make my task very easy.
I would like to thank Scott for these pictures he took of the construction of the current Veterans Memorial Bridge on Fifth Street. It is very easy to forget how much further west the old Fifth Street Bridge was located. I know it is mentioned a lot how the construction of the current bridge drastically changed the landscape to the Hazel Dell business district and also led to the destruction of the oldest building in Ellwood City. However, I for one do not miss driving around that island at the intersection where the end of the bridge ran into Wampum Avenue (west), Todd Avenue, North Street, and Wampum Avenue (east).
      In the one picture you can still see that under portion of the bridge closet to the bank where outside pillars are cement, there used to be a large arch like a road ran under the bridge. Does anyone know if there was a road or walkway that ran under the bridge?
Speaking of under the bridge, that pathway they built to get the cranes and cement trucks to the creek would have been a fantastic addition to Ellwood City. A pathway to the creek and a path wide enough to ride a bicycle to Ewing Park would have been a nice little side effect project. There is still a pathway up from the creek at the Ewing Park Bridge. A smaller foot bridge at the site of the old Harmony Line Bridge connecting the path to Ewing Park would have been nice and maybe someday might happen. You can see that the construction workers built a temporary bridge across the creek in one of these pictures so I guess I can hope.
      Back to the bridge, who remembers the 4′ x 4′ sheets of steel they used to cover up the holes on the sidewalk of the old bridge? I remember walking to school across that bridge and the cement would be crumbling away exposing the steel grid under the cement until one day you are walking to school (freezing) and then all of a sudden there was a hole. After a couple of days, they would just cover the hole with a steel plate and you would start watching the next spot wear away.
Speaking of the sidewalks, do you remember the large cement barriers separating the sidewalks from the roads? Those were not there when the bridge was originally built. The only thing separating the road and sidewalk originally was a normal six inch curb. I remember the way the bridge moved when the Forge trucks or Blanks trucks went across, who ever decided to add the barriers, thank you.

      I might be a little weird but I enjoy pictures like this; more of a scene than a picture of something specific. I look at a picture like this and find all kind of things and notice things that are not there anymore.
        For example I did not know that there was a Mobil Service Station on the corner of Fifth Street and Spring Avenue where the old trolley station once stood. I know a lot of you remember that station, but if it wasn’t for this one picture, I may have never known that. It took a magnifying glass, but when this picture was taken, a sign for Smith Drug Store is on the corner diagonal from St. Agatha.
      When you look at the zoomed in picture of the former Veterans Memorial Bridge, it looks like you can make out the “dummy” at the far end of the bridge but I believe that was long gone by the time this picture was taken. Speaking of that particular zoomed in portion, it is still strange to not see McDonald’s and now Rite-Aid. Its funny how quickly we become accustomed to something.
      I have faith that many of you will be able to date this picture. There are one or two of you that might be able to look at the business that were open at this time and say, something like: “Abbaticchio and the hardware store two doors down were both open between 1962-71″ and “the price of gas at Sinclair, makes this picture 1967″. But more likely, there are a few of you that can very easily give us a date of the picture by looking at the vehicles on the road.
      Speaking of vehicles on the road, I need a little help with the blurry delivery truck on the left hand side. Are my eyes deceiving me or does that say Winky’s on the side or is that the old Park Pharmacy delivery van? The letters inside the circle on the front of the van are just blurry enough that I can not make it out. I know someone knows if this was a delivery van or if it was owned by the radio station that broadcasted from Ellwood City. If you know the answer to these questions, or notice something else I missed, please share below or email me at info@ellwoodcitymemories.com

      When the Shortline was being built on the plateau that would become Ellwood City, the railroad company brought in many Italian immigrants to do the heavy labor. To get the railway to the flatter southern part of Hazel Dell, a three hundred foot tunnel would need to be dug through the limestone hillside along the Connoquenessing Creek.
There were between seventy-five and one hundred Italian workmen employed on this railroad tunnel project and they were all housed in an old workshop on the banks of the creek. There is a story floating around that the wife of Merit Green sneaked a look into one of the men’s lunchbox to discover that all he really had was only a piece of bread and a half of a boiled cabbage for his lunch. She had heard that but found it hard to believe.
Having nothing to eat wasn’t the biggest concern of the men, but rather staying alive. There were two factions among these men and they refused to eat together. When circumstances were unavoidable and the two groups were together during break time or any down time, it would almost always result in the two groups fighting each other. There was a true disdain for each other in all aspects of their lives and they did nothing together except the code of silence. If one of the workers were killed during a fight, neither side would claim him. Instead, the typical response was that his body would show up one morning on the town dump along Wampum Avenue and Lawrence County would have to pay for his burial.
In 1892 there was a railroad deadly accident by the tunnel killing the engineer of the train along with six Italian men. The train collided into the back end of a slower moving railroad vehicle and by all accounts appeared to be an accident. However the accident was not quickly discarded as when news of the six Italians workers that lost their lives reached Italy, that country sent their own men to Ellwood City to investigate the accident.
We all have a memory of walking through the tunnel and not being able to see your own hand right in front of your face. But now when you think back to walking through there and the noise you heard that nobody else heard or the sudden flash of cold air that would blow past you. Was it the spirit of one of those workers or was it just your imagination?
Of course, once you’re through the tunnel you still have to cross the railroad trestle. It seems a lot to just go swimming in the creek.

      There are seven bridges across the Connoquenessing Creek in the Ellwood City area but none closer to the creek itself than the Country Club Bridge. Before Stonewall Golf Course was built, it did not take much for this bridge to be forced closed due to flooding. Of course this picture was taken before then; in fact it was taken January of 1976.
There are a lot of little details that make this a very interesting picture. If you look at the pillar of the old bridge on the opposite shore, notice that the stone is still there from the original wooden bridge. It looks like there was a steel or cement bridge that used the same pillars when the wooden bridge was replaced. Guess those guys knew how to build things to last back then. For the thousands of times I have personally driven across this bridge, I do not remember it being this wide.
Of the four houses that are standing on the opposite shore along Route Sixty Five, only one still stands today. I do not know if they were torn down before or after the land was purchased for the golf course, but they have been replaced by a large grounds keeping garage for the golf course. Along the creek, on this side of the garage and barn, you can still see the dirt lane that lead to the popular Hubers Beach (later called the Nedda Lake Park).

      Driving through Ellport you might notice Deemer Avenue which got its name from the Deemer Farm, which was one of the three original farms in Ellport. You might also notice Golf Avenue which believe it or not got its name from the golf course in Ellport. The Ellwood City Country Club (later to be known as the Connoquenessing Country Club) was originally located on the west edge of Ellport along the Connoquenessing Creek. The Country Club was home to its very own nine hole golf course that ran deep into Ellport with the road running along its outside edge until 1917. The post card picture here shows the very flat and wide open first hole on the club’s course.
      That is how Golf Avenue got its name.

      All along the Ellwood Short-line large crowds gathered to see the funeral train of President William McKinley as it passed through Ellwood City on its way from Washington DC to Ohio.
      The event was well documented with several pictures taken from the viaduct where Second Street crosses the railroad tracks. However this picture was taken of the crowd gathered at the overpass from the grounds of the United Steel Tube Mill. This unique picture shows the wooden bridge as it looked in 1901. There are a number of other things beside the bridge that stands out from this picture including the large locomotive engine on the right and all the tube mill workers sitting upon the eight foot wooden fence on the left. Something else we noticed were the houses in the far right.
      The viaduct over the tracks as it is today was completed towards the end of 1931. At that time, there was an effort to name it “Columbus Bridge” but the motion failed to generate much interest.

      As we mentioned in one of our most popular posts “Ellwood City 100 Years Ago“, Ellwood City owes its birth to the railroad. Ellwood’s founder H.W. Hartman heard the railroad was planning to build the tunnel to bypass the slower railroad line through Hazel Dell and put his plan for an industrial resort town into action.
      The railroad did indeed play a vital role in the growth of Ellwood City and at one time ran four main lines wide through town. There were places it looked like the tracks ran eight wide as there were a number of side tracks owned by the various industries in town. We have heard from a number of people that recall the freight yard from Sixth Street to Blanks Cement that ran six to eight lines wide.
      There are numerous pictures from many different angles of the Union station that was used by both the P&LE Railroad and the B&O Railroad as a passenger station. The beautifully ornate building that sat so prominently beside the subway on Fifth Street is no longer there. The P&LE Freight Station is still standing today, however the B&O Freight Station was torn down in the 80′s. As you can see from the 1908 map of Ellwood City, The B&O freight house and the Union Station are not the only buildings associated with the railroad that are long gone. The first P&L freight and Passenger station used to stand in front of “Mill B” of the tube mill on Sixth Street. Another structure that many people did not even know existed was the engine turn table behind the old B&O Freight Station. Unfortunately, there are no traces of any of these buildings today.
      The trains came through town so often and so fast, a number of people were severely injured or even killed just trying to cross the tracks. Mrs. Kathy Blank shared a memory… “It was during one of those days (when the circus came to town), that I broke away from my Mom and wondered toward the railroad tracks. I can still hear my Mother screaming for me to “stand still”-”stand very still” as she lay on the ground and I was in between two moving trains. I can still feel the wind blowing my hair, as those trains moved. My dad was at work at the “Little Tube mill” and someone must have gotten him ’cause when those trains ended and left town there stood my Dad on one side and Mom on the other crying. That was when I started to cry, never realizing the danger I was in, but crying because my parents were crying. I received many hugs and kisses and a scolding and a BIG smack across, you know where!!!”
      Today there is only one main line running through Ellwood City. A train might come through two times a day with no stops, or anywhere to stop. There are only two side tracks but they rarely, if ever get used. Only shadows remain of what was once there along what is now the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Rail line.

      The Ewing Park Bridge originally opened as a toll bridge connecting the tube mill to the houses the mill built for it’s employees in what would become Ewing Park. “Old Big Blue” stood until 1998 when it was torn down and the current Ewing Park Bridge was built in the same location.

      Growing up in Ellwood City, we always heard the story of Mr. Foley jumping off the bridge as a bet for a case of beer. For some reason though, the person telling the story always would leave out the part about the dam still being in use at the time and it was not quite the drop it is today.

      We have heard a lot of different memories that involve the old Ewing Park Bridge. Wheter it be riding your bike across to baseball practice, how nervous you felt driving across it with the narrow lanes, or even dropping things on the old steel roof of the abandoned building below the bridge. We would like to hear your memories of the old blue bridge with the tunnel under the northeast end. Please email us at info@ellwoodcitymemories.com or leave your comment below.

      The Ellwood City East Side Switcher Crew switched cars from the B&O Railroad to the P&LE Railroad and vise versa from 1917 to 1920. The engineer at the throttle was known as Con Missouri, and the fireman on the platform was William Goodwin. The rest of the crew on the ground consisted of, from left to right, Doggie Wallace, brakeman; Charles Mincer, conductor; and Lonnie Dunbar, brakeman.
     The original picture belongs to Holt Conner.