I Love This Place

I Love this Place

RUTAN, PA

by Colleen Nelson

Taking State Route 21 West from Rogersville to Wind Ridge and beyond to Cameron, West Virginia has its moments of Americana that are hard to beat. As the road winds along the South Fork of Ten Mile Creek there are 19th century farmhouses and fancy old barns to admire and side roads well worth exploring on a bright autumn day. Martha Stewart is right – Greene County’s fall foliage is as good as anything you’ll see in Vermont. The Scott Covered Bridge is a must-see as well. It was erected in 1885 and has been lovingly restored, much to the delight of covered bridge buffs who drive hundreds of miles to take selfies with it.

A mile past the bridge a cluster of houses and old buildings sitting on a sharp curve has another bit of history to share. See that empty building with the square wooden front hiding the peak roof? That used to be E.J. Sanders General Store. Welcome to Rutan, an almost forgotten village that still has a story to tell.

Rutan is a common surname in Greene County, with a genealogy that goes back to French Huguenots coming to America in the 1700s. But Rutan wasn’t named after a French frontiersman. It seems the folks who lived and shopped here after the Civil War had a liking for James S. Rutan (1838-1892), a staunch Republican – read Yankee - from Butler County who served in the 14th Regiment Pennsylvania Militia, then was elected to the state legislature in 1865 and the state senate in 1870. By the time the first post office was set up in William Hendershot’s store on November 8, 1872, the village at the “confluence of the south fork of Ten Mile Creek, Grays Fork, Jacobs Run and Clay Lick Run in Center Township” was known as Rutan. Historian G. Wayne Smith points out it was four miles east of Harveys - now Graysville - and five miles west of Rogersville, had a population of 45 and 270 people received their mail at the store.

Many were farmers who had been working the land since frontier times and now the gas and oil boom was about to begin. Farmers were renting out their teams to haul pipe and supplies, their sons were getting work as drillers and new goods were coming on the market and being sold in general stores. Rutan was a bustling crossroads village with a blacksmith shop, a couple of other stores and rows of houses whose backyards morphed into family farms. Goodwin School was built on a bank just up Jacobs Run and from there farmland and hayfields stretched for miles, to Pettits Ridge, along Clay Lick Run and all the other tributaries that feed into this part of Ten Mile valley on its way to the Monongahela River.

Hendershot sold his store with its post office boxes the next year to W.T. Hayes who built up a good business before selling to brothers William and Daniel Goodwin in 1887. William sold his share to Daniel and in 1896 Daniel sold it to a Dr. Scott of Washington. The next year it burned down and after a new store was built, Emerson J. Sanders bought it, took over the post office and became the postmaster too. He remained in that position through every election cycle until he retired in 1941, making his the longest tenure in Greene County. E.J. might also have been the longest-lived storeowner as well – he was in business from 1898 until he retired in 1970 at age 99.

Written records of day-to-day life in Rutan are scarce, but for those who grew up here there’s plenty of family history to share when a neighbor stops by on a cold morning to sit by the stove and talk. Floyd “Everybody calls me Bill” Pettit has a fleet of trucks with his name on the side sitting in the gravel turnaround beside the Scott farmhouse he bought in 2013 along with its acreage on Jacobs Run Road, just behind Sander’s store. The Pettits moved in and were open for business the next year. What was once a barn yard is now dominated by a warehousesized building next to an original old barn, surrounded by stacks of products, rolls of plastic pipe, pallets of shrink wrapped 200 pound buckets filled with nutritious feed for beef cattle, fence posts, chain link fencing, steel gates, hay rings, and roadways throughout for trucks and fork lifts to load and unload for customers.

Thanks to Pettit Seed Sales, Rutan is back in business, 21st century style, ready to serve the needs of those who do business in rural Greene County – pipe line workers, cattle farmers, fence menders and fix it yourselfers can all be found shopping here.

I’ve known Bill as long as I’ve needed fence posts and hay hoops for my horse pastures. I met him when he ran his business from his farm on Hoge Run near Holbrook.

I’d heard that the coal company bought him out and he had moved his business to Rutan, so here I was, warming myself by the stove, notebook in hand.

For Bill, moving to Rutan is a homecoming and he’s happy to tell me about it.

“I’s born on Pettit Ridge,” he tells me. “I used to walk a mile and a half to Jim Watson’s place on Clay Lick to catch the bus for school.”

He remembers getting penny candy at Sanders store and buying gas there when he graduated in 1961 when it was “33 cents a gallon. He had the old gravity pumps. Lawrence Scott’s store was more modern, had the newer pumps and Ed Wiseman’s store was above the road. A lot of the old buildings are gone. There’s eight houses left now.”

Goodwin School is also gone but Bill told me that Louise Blaker Martin might have a photo of it. Her mom, Helen, was a teacher and Louise still lives in the next house up the road. I gave her a call and made a new friend. The photo she took from her porch shows the one room school almost lost in the big snow of Thanksgiving 1951 when most of Western Pennsylvania was buried under four feet of snow for nearly a week.

“Texas Eastern dug us out,” Louise tells me. “The trucks had to get through to the Applegate station in Bristoria. If you look up the road you can see the bank where the school was.”

From her house you can also see the high wires of the Rutan substation that supplies electricity to the West Virginia line. Louise tells me what life was like living on the farm, riding the hay rake while her dad drove the tractor. “It was hard. You raised what you ate and there wasn’t much money before my mother went back to teaching. Back then you had to quit teaching when you got married. I graduated in 1954 and when I was a freshman she went back to teaching for 21 years. She started in one room schools teaching all grades and ended up teaching fourth grade at Graysville.”

On Pettit Ridge, Bill’s family farm shared a fence line with Byron Hughes, his Vo-Ag teacher at West Greene High School. He remembers working for Byron, learning to judge dairy cattle as a Vo-Ag project, doing farm related trips to town for him after he got his license. He remembers Byron’s son Curt as a three year old. “He couldn’t say my name right. He called me Bolly goat!”

After graduation, Bill continued to work for Byron and married his high school sweetheart Nellie the next year. On Hoge Run, Albert Scott, an 80 year old farmer needing some younger blood on his 270-acre farm, so the Pettits joined forces with him. “The family sold me the farm two years later and I had a dairy farm for 10 years. We sold to Sealtest and Harold Ely’s boy hauled it to Pittsburgh.”

A l o n g the way, Bill began selling feed corn on the farm and by the time I began shopping on Hoge Run, he had a little bit of everything I needed to keep my horses fenced and fed. Now I find I can shop Pettit Seed Company in Rutan and get a load of gravel delivered just by giving Bill a call. Be still my heart!

“Consol bought me out in 2006 and I quit dairy.” Bill tells me. “Now I’m back here in Rutan. I’ve never worked any other job. I’ve always been on the farm.”