A Henry House history

An early photo of the Henry House. The image predates Ann Ballein’s era in the home.
Young Ann Henry would dangle her legs from a covered bridge bearing her family’s name and drop a fishing line into the deep pool of the cool stream. On land, her father would guide a plow, churning soil to reveal arrowheads left by the first residents of the Mingo Creek Valley. She’d follow and gather the artifacts.
Immigrants from Finland had a group of perhaps a dozen summer cottages nearby and “during the summertime, they would play their music and that was a jumpin’ place. I know they had that big dance hall up on a hill. I have so many good memories of growing up there. It’s foreign to my kids. They used to ask if I went to school with Abe Lincoln,” Ann Henry Ballein, 82, says of her childhood. “Everybody helped one another. It was a great way to grow up, just running through those fields.”
This idyllic spot is now Mingo Creek County Park, and children, adults, their pets and horses cross the same paths where the youngsters of the Henry family played.
The family name lives on in Mingo, in both the Henry covered bridge and the family stone house, which Washington County plans to upgrade so that park-goers can use it as a shelter for picnics and other events.
Family photographs of the Henry House when it was a residence show a much bigger place, with a frame addition and porch that seemingly doubled its size.
Ann’s family, after all, was a big one. She and her brother, Clyde, 92, also had siblings Bertha Arlene, Harry, Mildred, Della and Frank.
“I was 12 when we got electricity. Prior to that, we just had kerosene lamps,” she reminisces.
A hand pump brought well water to the kitchen, which was much easier than having to lug buckets for cooking and bathing. “Never did have a real bathroom, just a shower.”
They depended on fireplaces before their dad, William Anderson Henry, installed a coal furnace, and the sisters kept warm at night under heavy comforters. “We’d get up and use our fingernails to scrape the frost off the inside of the windows to look out,” Ballein says.
It may be hard to believe now, but deer were so rare back then that when one was spotted near their home, everyone thought it had escaped from a herd kept behind fences at Allegheny County’s South Park.

Holly Tonini
Ann Ballein and her brother Clyde Henry are the last of their family who lived inside the Henry House that now sits in Mingo Creek County Park.
Clyde Henry and Ballein, both of whom now live in Somerset Township, remember farmland throughout the Mingo Valley where today one finds picnic areas and playgrounds, a leash-free dog park, a walking trail and the annual Covered Bridge Festival.
The park has steep, wooded slopes that rise from the creek banks. Clyde Henry recalls them as pasture land for horses and cows.
They walked about a quarter of a mile to the one-room Henry School until they finished eighth grade. Clyde Henry went to East Washington High School, then to the U.S. Navy as World War II raged. “I was on the landing craft invasion of Iwo Jima,” he says, but he returned to the family homestead on leave to see his sick mother, so he managed to avoid the Battle of Okinawa, one of the war’s bloodiest. He did end up in U.S.-occupied Japan.
His youngest sister was a student at the time.
“I skipped a grade,” Ballein says. She gives credit to her older siblings, saying, “They taught me.” She graduated from Monongahela High School in 1953.
Their father lived in the Henry House until he died in 1960. James Curry bought the house from W.A. Henry’s estate, and soon afterward, Washington County began purchasing land for a park, amassing 2,200 acres.
“I didn’t feel bad about the park, I just felt bad about tearing the house down,” says Clyde Henry, who had moved away by that time.

Observer-Reporter
Observer-Reporter
The facade of the Henry House in 2018
The stone part of the house remains to this day, but only an old photograph attests to its frame addition and porch. Long gone are the apple trees, two barns, toolshed, springhouse and smokehouse, which produced many a sugar-cured ham and pork shoulder. The foundation of a small stable is still there.
County employees boarded up what remained of the house, but visiting vandals found their way in.
“That part was sad, because it was being ruined,” Ballein says.
“It wasn’t taken care of,” Clyde Henry echoes.
The roof was leaking badly, but the county replaced it.
Ballein researched genealogy and property records back to the 1770s, tracing ownership through the Swart and McDonald families. An ancestor named John Henry built the stone house between 1817 and 1823 on what was then called a plantation. An old will also refers to the dwelling as “the mansion house.”
And, the tradition of serving one’s country in uniform stretches back to long before Clyde Henry’s time.
Ballein found records of two Anderson uncles who enlisted in Monongahela, fought for the Union in the Civil War and died at the Andersonville, Ga., prisoner-of-war camp. The great-uncles were brothers of William Anderson Henry’s mother, Mary Ann Anderson Henry.
“They came from Ireland and joined the Army and they both died,” Ballein says, but others carried on the Anderson family name.
In 1990, a proposal called for the Henry House to contain period furniture and host tours like Washington’s Bradford House, but that never got off the ground.
“Our brother Harry was so interested in trying to get it restored,” Ballein says. “He went to a lot of meetings.”
The family holds their annual reunions at a pavilion near their homestead, and Clyde Henry and Ballein look forward to someday getting together inside the familiar walls.
“We’ve always been interested in the family history,” says Ballein, who was pleased to learn of the county’s interest in preserving her childhood home.