I Love This Place

Greene County Historical Society Museum

By Colleen Nelson.

History can be full of surprises, unexpected dead ends and sometimes even a mystery or two. Or three. Maybe even a ghost. Greene County Historical Society has its share of all of that. Its museum on Rolling Meadows Road is known for its library and fine collections of furniture, tools and artifacts donated by local families that time travel between the mid 1700s, through the gas and oil rich Victorian Age and beyond. But it’s the thousands of artifacts from arrowheads to clay pots, shards and stone tools that take us back to 1925 when the society was born. By that time, some 5000 years of Native American culture had been gathered from the surrounding hills and valleys – a collection that opened a window into the lives of ancient hunters and gatherers through the centuries to villagers raising corn and squash and burying their dead in mounds. A museum was needed to show their lives to the world and those early history hunters answered the call.

We have Frank B. Jones -1879-1951- of Pine Bank to thank for his 17 years of collecting amazing specimens from nature and man when he roamed “the seven seas” as a Navy Headmaster and avid archaeologist and naturalist. A veteran of the Spanish American War, Jones returned to Greene County in 1906 and joined forces with Muddy Creek native A.J. Waychoff, 1849 – 1927, a professor at Waynesburg College with a formidable thirst for geology anthropology and local history. Waychoff and nephew Paul R. “Prexy” Stewart, who went on to become head of the college geology department, travelled to Ohio to explore the indigenous mounds and dug and documented traces of ancient cultures on farmland all over this area. They identified the first segment of the Warrior Trail near Nettle Hill and as the county’s passion for the past grew, Waychoff and Jones lead the charge to form a society that would be both a library and a museum. It opened in the basement of the newly constructed Long Building in Waynesburg in 1925 with a membership of more than 200. Jones was the co-curator and had on display, along with all those indigenous artifacts, his “18 foot jawbone from a whale killed off Greenland and shipped to Waynesburg by a Norwegian whaler he had met during his travels.”

Curator Eben Williams holding a turtle jawbone and a petrified wolf skull collected by Frank Jones.

Waychoff, sadly, died in 1927, a year before the society made the news for dedicating its first historical plaque on the site of the first court session held in Greene County along State Rt. 21 near Khedive.

As the collections and public interest grew, excess inventory began piling up in the homes of board members. Was it time for a new museum? The tides of history said not yet.

In 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, a lot on Church Street, Waynesburg was willed to the society by Levi Funk to build a “proper library and museum” - but only under certain conditions: that it be two or three stories, built of stone, have enough insurance to replace it in case of fire, be free of debt, never accrue any debt against it at any time and be built by January 1, 1937. Oh, and it could not be used for “plays, loafing or any trivial purpose and the caretaker must be a person of temperate and sober habits.”

Two unknown volunteers in the museums's first home in the basement of the Long Building in Waynesburg.

History notes that the museum Mr. Funk envisioned was never built! - But the lot was eventually sold and the money became a nest egg for the future.

By 1956, another room was added but members kept a weather eye on their community. Somewhere out there, a new home was waiting.

Over on Rolling Meadows Road, the past had another story to tell. In The History of Greene Hills, Richard Zollars reports that in 1789, Barnet Rinehart – 1758-1822 - built the brick farmhouse that is now the oldest part of the museum’s sprawling complex of buildings, additions, sheds and barns. Called Lions Bush, the farm sat on 225 acres and it’s easy to imagine the last of the big cats seen in this area passing through the ravine behind the museum where Civil War battles are now fought during the Harvest Festival.

Zollars tells us the farm stayed in the family until 1861 when Jacob Rinehart sold the house and 127 acres to attorney Robinson Downey, who “immediately sold it to the Directors of the Poor for the County of Greene.” Here, the poor, indigent, mentally and physically challenged and even the occasional unwed mother took up collective country living, raised their own food, sewed their own clothes and worked the farm to supplement what the county paid to manage the facility. As occupancy grew, their cramped, hardscrabble life began drawing criticism from state inspectors that eventually lead to changes in state law concerning institutional living. Spurred to action, the county responded, wings and buildings were added and a boiler house for better heating was constructed in 1886. T.J. Morris supplied the brick, which were “made at 10,000 bricks a day.”

The boiler house with its big chimney is now the museum library and has been modernized, with climate control to protect the many books, family photographs and manuscripts that are housed there.

Life on Greene Hills Farm, as it became known, continued to depend on whatever charity the community could afford, through the 1920s and beyond.

A view of Greene Hills Farms for the indigent in the 1920s.

When former Greene County resident Francis Marion Curry died in 1921 in Hollywood California, he bequeathed a hefty $37,000 to build a home for the infirm and elderly over age 60. The county was able to invest the money, make a profit despite the depression and build the Curry Home across the road in 1931. Greene Hills Farm continued caring for the rest of the poor for another 35 years. When a second wing was added to the Curry Home in 1965, the farm closed up shop and sat empty for four years. The county was faced with a dilemma. What to do? Tear down this historic place or lease it and a couple of acres for a dollar a year for 50 years to the Greene County Historical Society?

The historical society took its nest egg and its $1500 a year allowance from the county and made the big move in 1969.

After months of volunteer elbow grease and determination, the library opened in 1970 and by 1971 the museum threw its first open house, with rooms designed and decorated by members and with a number of showcase pieces to brag about, including Waynesburg College’s first piano, dated 1867, thanks to a student who carved his initials and date inside the piano. It still sits in Josephine Denny’s eloquently decorated parlor on the first floor. The public paid a small fee to browse, members got in for free and the slow slog of repair, restoration, grant writing and countless hours of volunteer commitment became a history that continues today.

By 1973 another co-curator, Mary Childs had the great idea of a fall festival to celebrate the past by reliving some of it for a crisp October weekend of spinning, weaving, butter churning, apple pressing, blacksmithing, Civil War reenactors and Indian encampments. It was a hit and continues to be a major yearly fundraiser.

A sellout crowd at a 1970s Harvest Festival at the Museum.

The upcoming 1976 Bicentennial was a notto-be-missed historical deadline and members got busy getting their own history in order.

Waychoff ’s 252 weekly articles for the Democrat Messenger in the early 1920s were compiled in book form as Local History of Greene County and Southwest Pennsylvania. That and other local family stories and collections were printed and available for sale in time for the Bicentennial.

My own memories of the museum are tied up in those bright fall days on the grassy grounds, starting in the late 1970s, cranking a collectively owned apple press with friends, selling cups of cider and gingersnaps to raise money for the Warrior Trail School. We back-to-the-landers were having children and we noticed there were no preschools for our first frisky batch of three year olds. And like the pioneers before us, we got together and did something about it.

Steam-punker's posing by the "Old Wyanie.". One of the many Victoria artifacts at the museum.

It’s fun to go through the files at Cornerstone Genealogical Society and find my own newspaper articles introducing decades of festivals, historical projects and new museum directors to the community. When Eben Williams came onboard in 2011, he brought his preservationist smarts from historic Massachusetts to Greene County and is happy to promote the heritage he finds here. “This museum has the best Mid Victorian collection in Pennsylvania.”

Those Victorian artifacts have helped introduce a new generation of history hunters to the wonderful world of the past, who come to “steam punk” against a backdrop of steam engines, elaborate ironworks, salvaged cornices and chandeliered rooms. Ghost busters pilgrimage through the corridors, old rooms and deep basements where so many lost souls from the poorhouse days are said to wander. Reenactors sleep over, camp out and even skin bears in the ravine, all to better appreciate the lives of the generations that have come before.

The Harvest Festival is October 13-14. By all means go! Eat some beans and corn bread. Learn to spin. See if you can find the oak tree that was planted the year John F Kennedy died. Ask Eben Williams what he thinks happened to the whale jawbone.

The past is full of questions waiting for you to find answers. Put your hands on some history and have fun!