Posts Tagged tube

This picture simply has the words “Amish Funeral, Ellwood City, PA”. After looking at the picture, the cemetery appears to be the North Sewickley cemetery but I can not confirm.

    When Ellwood City was founded, there were three private cemeteries in Ellwood City. Old Methany on Wampum Road (became first catholic cemetery), The Nye cemetery just off of Fountain Avenue across from Loccisano’s Golden Dawn where the Tube Mill used to be until they built the Casey Industrial Park, and the third was the McGregor cemetery on Ninth Street between Crescent and Park Avenue. When they tore up the ground at both the McGregor & Nye cemetery to build upon, the bodies were moved to Locust Grove cemetery. Also the Methany cemetery, beside Aiken Refuse, had most of the bodies moved as the hillside slowly corroded away and talk of a “strip mall” was going to go in at the site. There are still some graves at the Methany Cemetery but most are unmarked or the headstones are too weathered to read. One of the headstones in the old Methany cemetery listed the person as being born 1776.

There is also the famous missing gravesite of the mystery Native American that was shot and killed on land behind what is today known as the old hospital.

    Loccisano’s Golden Dawn first started in 1916 in Burnstown, Pennsylvania where Nick and Bettina Loccisano lived while Nick worked for US Steel. It was Bettina who got the idea to make a little money by selling penny candy and chewing tobacco in the front window of their house for the men that walked past on their way to work at the tube mill each morning. Eventually she added fresh produce and Loccisano’s Market was born. The Loccisano’s built a small store next to their home in Burnstown and stayed at that location until 1926.

From there, they moved their small enterprise to the corner of Fountain Avenue and Pittsburgh Circle what is today T&M Hardware, across from the current Loccisano’s store. The family lived in the apartment above the store. In the early years of the store, Nick utilized the Pittsburgh, Harmony, Butler, and New Castle Railway (more commonly known as the Harmony Line), a trolley service that ran from Ellwood to the strip District of Pittsburgh, for fresh produce.

     A second location (pictured above) was opened at 840 Lawrence Avenue today the site of the McElwain Bros. Paint and Collision Center. The pictures here were taken for the Ellwood City Ledger in July of 1963. Today, the store is located across the street from the location they moved to in 1926. Sitting at the end of the Ewing Park Bridge, Loccisano’s remains in family hands and is now operated by third and fourth generation Loccisano’s.

    Driving up Spring Avenue to the intersection on First Street you see one of the few remaining relics of the US Steel Tube Mill; the former main gate, or the “old guard shack” as many refer to it as. At one time there was this building and as you can see from the picture below another small building on the opposite side of the drive that is no longer standing. Also gone are the fancy lights that sat on top of the gate posts and the office buildings you can see in the background (and the jobs, but I regress). One more thing missing is actually not pictured but the large whistle that blew only a minute or two before this picture was taken at the three o’clock shift change.

    I have been told the building that is still standing today served as the company post office, the nurse’s station, time clock, and many other things over the years. Since then it has served as a pizza shop, Italian restaurant, the Elwood City Area Historical Society considered it for their permanent residence, as have  many other businesses since the Tube Mill closed its doors.

I am sure many of you remember the former Tube Mill office building on First Street across from the Shelby Clubhouse. This picture of the demolition was taken on May 16th, 1975. I grew up a block away from this and never knew it existed. For those that may be like me, to give you some perspective, this picture was taken from the intersection of First Street and Spring Avenue.

Excitement was in the air among those that called Ellwood City home towards the end of 1959 as it was announced that a new Loblaw’s food store would be opening in town. It was announced on the front page of the Ellwood City Ledger that Costa H. Spoa would be leasing his proposed new store on Wampum Avenue to the chain store.
Construction had been held up a number of times but was well under way on the 100 by 140 foot building. The house that originally occupied the property had a rich history in Hazel Dell and rather than being torn down, was moved east along Wampum Avenue to 111 Wampum Avenue.
Mr. Spoa already operated a grocery store on Spring Avenue near the Tube Mill and would continue to operate that store (today the site of Pizza Joes). He would also continue to own the property on Wampum Avenue as Loblaw’s was only leasing the property.
At the time of the front page Ledger article, Loblaw’s operated 240 stores in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and New York including one in New Castle and a second Loblaw’s was expected to open November 19th of that year in New Castle.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

123►

Industry was such a big part of Ellwood City’s History that I had a difficult time putting all the pictures in one album. There  are numerous other photo albums on this website including…

    Snapshots from Mathews Conveyer

Pictures from inside Aetna-Standard

    Tube Mill Tracks

A lot of very nice people have shared their memories with me either by phone, in person, by email or through this web site; however one gentleman went one step further. Leonard Chapman and I had conversed previously on the location of the Jockey Moore One Room Schoolhouse on the old Clark farm that I just could not seem to find. I got a call from Mr. Chapman two years ago to inform me that he was in town visiting family and wanted to know if I had some time to talk. I agreed to meet him and was in for a treat.

Most meetings I attend usually are sit down, sip coffee, mention one memory and let the other memories build from there similar to a snow ball rolling down a hill of snow, all the while I try to write as fast as I can. This meeting was a little different. As soon as I showed up, Mr. Chapman said, “Okay, hop in” pointing to his mini-van. We drove through the North side and the memories started. Instead of someone sitting in a comfortable chair recollecting, Mr. Chapman was pointing to things and sharing his memories.

At the end of the Veterans Bridge (or Fifth Street Bridge) he pointed to the B&O empty lot and shared that he remembered the little shop that used to sell garden plants by the big billboard at the end of the bridge. I looked at him, looked at the sign, grabbed my notebook and started writing as fast as I could trying to keep up. Someone was outside washing their car which reminded Leonard there used to be cement slabs with hoses on First Street by Spring Avenue. The area was owned by the tube mill and it was available to the mill workers so they could go and wash their car.

We drove past Merrit Brooke and he recalled the ice rinks that I have been looking for pictures of for quite a while. He shared that there were actually two rinks there at the end of Todd Avenue when they would damn up the small little creek that runs through today. The upper ice skating pond was run by the city and Buccelli’s ran the lower rink out of their house. The basement of the Buccelli house had ice skates you could rent and a place to put them on.

I had been trying to find information on the ice rink(s) for some time and was writing as fast as I could but Mr. Chapman was onto his next memory as we drove past the Ben Parker Farm. Today you would have a hard time guessing it was once a farm except the old rusty combine sitting in the field. Mr. Chapman assured me that it was once a farm, in fact a dairy farm. Ben Parker owned the dairy farm, processed his own milk and delivered in his old 1933 Ford like John Dillinger used to drive and made famous. He also shared that the Parker farm is where the circus would set up for a number of years when it would come to Ellwood City.

As we continued on down Wampum Avenue a number of other topics were discussed the old abandoned Matheny House that belonged to Joe Methany, the Matheny graveyard, who built the Spanish style home by Jockey Moore, the empty garage that was once Strabellas Garage, which foreman played Santa at the Shelby Clubhouse Christmas parties, and of course the day the earth moved. Oh by the way, inside the Matheny graveyard, according to the headstone, was a person born during the Revolutionary War.

We did eventually make it to Jockey Moore and right where he told me was the old schoolhouse. Right in the middle of the room is the hole in the ceiling where the old stove pipe chimney once exited the room. Old slate chalkboards still hung from the walls. It was a step back in time.

On the way back into town, Mr. Chapman pointed to the left and said this used to be McQuiston’s farm, then he’d point to the right, this was Phelner’s farm, point to the left Koser and so on. To read more about the farms, click here.

If my little drive down Chapman’s memory lane sparked any memories in your mind, please share below or email me at info@ellwoodcitymemories.com. If you have any pictures, especially of the ice rinks, I would love to use those as well. Please email them to info@ellwoodwoodcitymemories.com

Thank you Mr. Chapman and I apologize it took so long to post a lot of these stories as I was hoping to get pictures to go with most of them. I apologize for not giving credit to the person who donated the picture of the old McCandless farm that was located on West Line Avenue Extension but I did not write down who it was. I believe it was Jim Spielvogel, but not positive. Whomever it was, thank you.

I decided to repost one of my favorite articles on the web site. The post features a priceless snapshot in time of Ellwood City taken from 196 feet above the town sometime between 1909 and 1915. It is amazing how much has changed from then to today. There is so much in the picture it is easy to miss some of the more interesting things. I have added yellow numbers to some of the points I would like to draw your attention to in this picture, of course there is more than the twelve things I mention here and would love to hear about something I missed.
    The first point of interest I see when I look at this picture is the grand Hotel Lawrence surrounded by the majestic Oliver Park. Though it is difficult to get your bearings with this picture, we are actually looking at the side of the Hotel. The front of the Hotel formally called Hotel Oliver is the side with the large white peaks and faces down Fifth Street.
Secondly, in almost the center of the page we see the Central School building built in 1902 on the corner of Lawrence Avenue and Sixth Street. Today the Ellwood City Municipal Building is located on that lot of land with a number of memorials displayed in the front lawn. The large World War II memorial in front of the Municipal building was purchased through multiple fundraisers including donations and with the extra money that was raised for Ellwood City’s anniversary.
Number three in the picture is the Park Hotel, built 1895 and located on the North side of the Ellwood City Short Line. Today, most people don’t remember the Park Hotel and I have had a difficult time uncovering the fate of the old Hotel. Did it catch on fire from the sparks of a passing train, or was it simply torn down due to dilapidation? The fact remains that the building is no longer there but if you look the next time you drive past, one of the walls from its foundation is still standing today.
Four and Five go together, almost. Point number four is the old train station that is no longer there today and number five points to something that is actually missing from the picture, the Fifth Street Subway. The railroad you see in the picture beside the train station was the Pennsylvania Railroad, who owned Rock Point Park. The railroad through Ellwood City was known more as the Ellwood Short Line and replaced the B&O railroad that was built along the Northern bank of the Connoquenessing Creek in 1876. After the Ellwood Tunnel was completed in 1892 the railroad connecting North Sewickley & Rock Point ran through the natural plain which Ellwood City was built upon and the hilly B&O railroad was abandoned.
Ellwood City owes its birth more to the Ellwood City railroad tunnel and Beaver Falls then the more common misconception of New Castle. Ellwood’s founder H.W. Hartman was dissatisfied with the conditions in Beaver Falls where he was the head of the Beaver Falls Water Company and Hartman Steel Company.  He heard the railroad was planning to build the tunnel to bypass the slower line through Hazel Dell and put his plan for an industrial resort town into action.
The passenger station in the picture, known as the Union Station, served Ellwood City until the mid 1950’s. One text says the station was torn down as late as 1957, while another says it was torn down as early as 1955. Today, a parking lot is all that remains beside what is now the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Rail line.
Just west of the Union Station is number Six, the freight yards of Ellwood City. The large structure on the Northern side of the tracks is the B.O. Freight Station. The station was located just West of Sixth Street which was a main road at the time of the picture as the bridge connecting Ellwood City to Hazel Dell was the Sixth Street Bridge, not the Fifth as it is today. The “Hazel Dell Bridge” as it was known then connected Sixth Street and College Street. The original Fifth Street Bridge was not erected until 1915.
The B.O. Freight Station was demolished in 1982 and the property was sold to the Ellwood City Forge Group.
Our number seven point of interest is one of the few things in the picture still standing today. Point seven is the Stiefel Building on the corner of Lawrence Avenue and Fifth Street. I have yet to discover if the building was named after one of Ellwood City’s most prominent citizens, Mr. R.C. Stiefel, if he actually had the building built, or maybe he even had his offices there.
Number eight is the old tube mill more commonly known to the folks of Ellwood as “Mill B”. Originally the mill was the home of the Ellwood Shafting & Tubing Company, the first manufacturing institution to establish itself in Ellwood City as early as 1891. “Mill B” was dismantled in 1923 and the property was sold to Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad for a freight station and yard. It is hard to see it today but from Sixth Street to Blanks Concrete and Supply was nothing but P&LE spurs. Five or six lines of empty railroad lines loading and unloading freight coming into and out of Ellwood City all day long. August 25th 1981 marked the last day P&LE took a loaded boxcar, cargo from Airway Industries out of Ellwood City.
Nine is less of a specific point as it is a general area. As you can see from the picture, the West End of town was the direction of the growth in the early days of the town. The mills and businesses were more congregated at that end and most Ellwoodians thought that the town would continue to grow in that direction. In fact the first school built in Ellwood City after its founding was the West End School and the first hospitals were all located in that direction of town. It wasn’t until Ralph C. Stiefel and J.H. Nicholson left the Shelby Seamless Tube Company in 1899 and erected the Standard Seamless Tube Company (later called “Mill A”) that the town began spreading east also.
Ten is the beautiful picnic grounds of Oliver Park and the site of Ellwood City’s first murder. According to “A History of Ellwood City, Pennsylvania” James Bell was found in the park next to a tree, murdered. The victim, who had carried the mail from Ellwood City to the Belton Post Office, was also robbed as his pockets were all turned inside out. The park was a popular picnic destination (if you got permission from the Hotel) and how Park Avenue got its name.
Eleven simply points out the large farms and spread out residences that still existed in Hazel Dell. Hazel Dell originally was on both sides of the Connoquenessing until Merrit Green and Henry Hartman purchased all the farms on the South side of the creek to build Ellwood City. The roads through Hazel Dell were the old Indian trading paths from when the Shawnee & Delaware Indian tribes occupied the area. It was these tribes that actually named the Connoquenessing, which means “can’t canoe”. Hazel Dell was cut in half by the Connoquenessing and connected by the covered bridge known as the Jones Mill Bridge or White Bridge (built 1858 and razed 1898) located at the present site of the Fifth Street Bridge.
Hazel Dell did not become a borough until 1901, almost ten years after Ellwood City. The borough of Hazel Dell officially consolidated with the borough of Ellwood City in 1914.
Finally, point number twelve reminds you of the time period that the picture was taken. The buildings with no windows behind the houses are not garages, but barns. Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 but didn’t begin the moving assembly lines in his factory until 1913, so there were not very many cars in the town when this picture was taken. Some of the buildings are barns, other smaller buildings are outhouses. My grandmother’s house inside Pittsburgh Circle was originally built as a boarding house for tube mill workers before indoor plumbing was the big craze on HGTV. Four bedrooms, BIG bedrooms, and no bathroom.

If you noticed something I missed or if you feel that I got something wrong, please leave a comment below or email me at info@ellwoodcitymemories.com

Originally Posted February 5, 2010

    No this is not what Fountain Avenue looked like every day twenty minutes before the second shift at the Tube Mill started; well I don’t think it did, I could be wrong. Rather, this picture is believed to have been taken when the Fifth Street (Veterans Bridge) was closed for one reason or another on March 10, 1967. You are looking East down Fountain Avenue in front of what was Ralph Stiefel’s house.

Behind the cars that I know some of you could identify year and make, is an interesting view of the houses. Through the trees you can make out the southern mansion of John Gelbach on the corner of Fountain Avenue and Third Street. To the west it looks like there is only one house separating the Gelbach house and Circle School. Today, what remains of Circle playground sits on the ground of the former Circle School and there are two houses between the playground and the Gelbach home (that is currently being restored due to a large fire).

Across Third Street from the Gelbach house is the equally massive “brown house”. The house that was split into several apartments has since been torn down and this is the only picture I can find of the house.

Standard Engineering began operations in Ellwood City in 1902 at the corner of Second Street and Park Avenue. A Subsidiary of the Standard Steel Car Company from Butler, PA the Ellwood works had previously been the Baker Forge-Hardware Company.
     Built 1894, the Baker Forge-Hardware Company was located east of Second Street and stretched from Franklin Avenue to the railroad tracks. The company that had been originally a partnership between J.H. Baker and H.W. Hartman manufactured wagon hardware until being replaced with the manufacturing of railroad steel car forgings. When Standard Steel Car Company took over, the name was changed to the Steel Car Forge Company until 1929 when the name was changed again to the Standard Steel Car Company, Steel Car Forge Division.

It was reported in a 1916 Pittsburgh Gazette that the Steel Car Forge Company was the largest plant of its kind on the North American continent. They manufactured rolling and tube mill machinery, pipe threading machines, sand rolls and high grade gray iron castings. The black and white picture was taken from the Peerless Lead Glass Company at the eastern end of Park Avenue while the color picture appears to have been taken from the former ground of the Ellwood Brick Company.

In the first fourteen years of business, the Steel Car Forge reportedly knew no bad times and continually employed six hundred men. This time even included a strike at the Butler facility of the Standard Steel Car Company where one man was fatally shot when police opened fire into the hostile protestors. On July 19, 1909, an estimated 500 Employees of Standard Wheel Company joined the Standard Steel Car Companies 2,500 Strikers in Butler and things got violent. As mentioned, police fired into the crowd killing one, wounding two and ten others were hurt. Even during all this, the Ellwood works continued to produce.

     Standard Engineering considered Ellwood City an ideal place for great manufacturing with an unlimited supply of working people and free from labor trouble. The town’s water and electricity were considered very cheap and it also had what they regarded as a first class fire protection. Ellwood also had the freight service of four great railroad systems with Pittsburgh rates and the additional advantages of no extra charges for transfer.

When times were difficult for other industries, it seemed to have no effect upon the Steel Car Forge Co. Its product, if nothing else had already made Ellwood City famous, would have attracted the eyes of the world to our community because of its being at the very top of the world’s industries. The Steel Car Forge was often referred to as a “mechanical blacksmith shop” operating on a tremendously larger scale. It performed blacksmith work but entirely by machinery. In the early part of the century, the Steel Car Forge Works produced forgings for freight cars and also a general line of forgings for all railroad and for special purposes. Standard typified, as perhaps no other industry could, the progress that had been made by the beginning of the twentieth century.
In May 1934 the Pullman Company ceased operations in Ellwood City and moved all the machinery worth keeping to the Butler facility of the Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Company and the property sat empty until 1939 when the property was purchased by a company you might have heard of, the National Tube Company.

    The first picture of the tube mill was believed to have been taken late summer/ early fall of 1916 from the area that was formerly Tunnel Field. For the younger generations, it is easy to forget how big the National Tube Company (a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation) was.

    The second picture with a close-up of “the smoke stacks” was only a portion of the tube mill that ran from the railroad tracks by the Second Street overpass to the Ewing Park Bridge. The Ellwood City Works of the National Tube Company later expanded to 127 total acres with 23 acres under a roof. Employment reached its highest point during World War II when 4,000 people were employed.

1. George Buck, 2. Logan Benninghoff, 3. Billy Williams, 4. Bion E. Leech, 5. Luthar P. Shaffer, 6. Bob Gillespie, 7 Ray Leech, 8 Alex Orr, 9 Fred Foxall, 10 Mike Curran, 11 Edward Hildebrand, 12 Frank “Indian” Craig, 13 Harry Y. McCool, 14 Dave Carson, 15 Rex Piersol, 16 Herman Buck, 17 LeRoy Beatty, 18 Edwin “Shaggy” Logan, 19 Charles Keefer, 20 Charles Carson.

I have posted a number of pictures from older football teams from Ellwood City  and heard many stories of the great Shelby baseball teams and Shelby basketball teams but no one mentioned the 1906 Shelby Tube Mill Football Team (oops Foot Ball Team, in 1906 that was two words.)

    I have to thank Ms. Miriam Filer for taking the time to send me all of these pictures along with the story of the 1906 Shelby team that was another great team that before now, seems to have been forgotten and to be honest, great is not a strong enough superlative. The 1906 team beat teams such as Youngstown, Sharon and Butler by scores of 10-0, 27-0, 23-0, 21-0, 44-0. Franklin was the only team all season to score a point against our boys in a 5-5 tie; touchdowns then were only worth five points.

    The more recent photographs are from 1949 when ten members of the 1906 Shelby Team held a reunion dinner at The Fireplace but got together at Robert W. Gillespie Sr.’s home to share stories and catch up. Those attending the reunion included 1. Bion E. Leech, 2. Harry Y. McCool, 3. Logan Benninghoff, 4. Mr. Gillespie, 5. Luthar P. Shaffer, 6. Edwin Logan, 7. W.R. Williams, 8. Fred Foxall (manager), and 9. M. J. Curran. George G. Buck was also at the reunion but was not pictured. He must be the one taking the picture (?). Only four other members of the 1906 undefeated team were still living in 1949 but were unable to attend the reunion including Frank Craig, Herman Buck, Charles Carson, and Edward Hildebrand.

    I would like to thank Ms. Filer again and apologize at the same time. She had sent me these pictures in April of 2011 and I am just now (January 2012) putting these onto the site. I was very excited when I received these pictures especially since I had never heard of them and do not know how they were skipped.