I Love This Place

I Love this Place

PROSPERITY, PA

by Colleen Nelson

The story of the village of Prosperity, just a few miles north of the Greene County line on State Route 18, begins and ends with the Lindley family. You have to slow down on the south side of town and pull over to see the big stone marker that shows where Fort Lindley once held the high ground and gave first settlers a place of refuge when indigenous raiding parties attacked during the 1770s and 80s. But slowing down for a visit is the only way to hear the story of those days and meet descendants like John Lindley, who is happy to strike a pose for posterity beside the monument his family erected in 1928.

“My five times great grandfather left a trust fund and the family maintains it,” he tells me, pointing to the flat knoll above the road where a seven acre compound once encircled a 12 foot high walled fort built by Demas Lindley in 1773. It could house families for months during the summer raiding season while the men went out in armed groups to tend to their crops. Nothing is left of the fort now except for those who sheltered there and stayed to make Prosperity their home.

John still owns more than 400 acres in and around town and is an eighth generation farmer, ready to meet the changing needs of a health conscious America with Red Devon cattle, an English breed famous for being able to fatten on grass rather than grain. Heritage Trail Farm grass fed beef is marketed locally and you can read all about it online at lindleybeef.org.

From the hill above the Upper Ten Mile Presbyterian Church next door to the monument there is a broad expanse of rolling hills still cleared for farming that are the backyard for many of the old homes in the village that grew up along the road to Catfish Camp, later named Washington. The land would bring prosperity to hard working settlers and their children who would raise cash crops of sheep and cattle on the frontier they were bold enough to claim before the nation was born.

Fort Lindley was one of the outposts between Fort Pitt going south through the wilderness to the fort at Ryerson Station in what would become Greene County. Settlers were the militia as broken treaties drove the indigenous tribes further westward into the Ohio territories as the Revolutionary War was being fought and for the decade that followed. Warriors would cross the Ohio River to attack settlers in their hunting grounds that were being lost and it was guerilla warfare for survival for nearly 20 years. When the frontier was finally won at the battle of Fallen Timbers in 1795, the frontier became farm country and little crossroad stores became villages.

Prosperity was laid out by Robert Wallace in 1848 on “the pike” that would become Rt. 18. A number of roads from the east and west intersected nearby, making it a community hub. According to local lore, Pennsylvania already had a Wallaceville, so Prosperity it was. Crumrine reports that the first house built was still standing in 1883 - John M. Day’s store. Families could also shop at Mary Brownlee’s store, Nathan Daley’s shoe shop, A. L. Hayen’s blacksmith shop and David Dille’s drug store. There were two doctors living there and Matthias Minton was the justice of the peace. When the Odd Fellows built Morris Lodge 936 in 1876 members celebrated the values of friendship, love and truth in farm family living before it closed its doors sometime in the 1890s.

Thanks to John Lindley’s mother Margaret, much of the history of Prosperity has been saved in the columns she wrote about every house and feature of the town for the Claysville Weekly Recorder in the 1980s.

Margaret documented the changes in education as the twentieth century dawned, when the first two-story schoolhouse with a three-year high school upstairs was built and it’s first class graduated in 1906, then graduated again two years later when a fourth year was added. Morris Township High School, a handsome brick structure that was the pride of the town was built next door in 1914. Margaret points out that it offered all the personalized extras of a small school – “literary societies with lively debates, extemporaneous speeches, dramas, plays and musicals, which gave many the chance to develop self confidence in their own abilities.” It was “indeed a sad day” when the doors of the high school closed in 1944 “due to pressure from parents who felt more courses and other advantages were being offered in larger city schools.” It then became the elementary school for the next 34 years. By 1978 “our grade school children went to Joe Walker school and Lagonda and those ready for high school went to Washington High School until we became part of the Mc- Guffy Jointure.” Both schools are gone now but fellow historian Marie Phillips, who lives two doors down from where the schools once stood, remembers them well – her kids went to grade school there.

She and other members of the Morris Township Historical Society have many scrapbooks and plenty of photos and memorabilia saved in hopes of opening a museum in the Archer Schoolhouse that was donated by the Archer family and moved to the intersection of routes 221 and 18 where the Morris Township building is. History is well preserved in this community gathering place - the building that once loaded goods off and on the Waynesburg and Washington Railroad in nearby Dunn Station was also brought here, along with a section of the narrow gauge track that delivered the “Old Waynie” steam engine and all its passengers, goods and services, including delivering the mail, from Waynesburg to Washington and back. Tucked behind the township building is a colorful new playground complete with playing fields and just up the road is Bell’s Lake a popular place to fish. A mile south on 18 is Day Covered Bridge and a woodsy drive on Covered Bridge Road leads up to Parcell Ridge where American artist Malcolm Parcel (1896 – 1987) had his Moon Lorn studio home and helped influence a generation of local artists to paint historically.

Parcell’s work documents the landscapes and farms rich with the details of 18th and 19th century living, including the battles that played out on the Western Frontier, from Fort Necessity to the Whisky Rebellion.

Go online and google “paintings of Malcolm Parcell” and see the past through an artist’s eye. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Malcolm’s are worth millions.