Trip down memory lane: Manifold Road once led to mines, coal town
Construction was underway in June 2011 on Route 19 north of Washington beginning at Manifold and Cameron roads in South Strabane Township to Racetrack Road.
Exit 40 of Interstate 79 north at Manifold Road and Pike Street is seen in April 2010.
The Cameron Road and Route 19 intersection in South Strabane Township
Courtesy of Karol Jacobs
These homes once stood in Manifold.
Courtesy of Karol Jacobs
This facility once stood in Manifold.
In South Strabane Township, the name “Manifold” lives on as a road, but many who travel it daily may not realize its namesake comes from two coal mines their large company town built to house workers and their families.
Karol Jacobs, 84, a retired accountant, grew up on the hillside opposite the patch.
He estimated the coal town had 200 homes. A post office for what was then known as “Manifold, Penna.” – long before the post office standardized two-letter abbreviations for states – was inside the company store.
Jacobs also recalls a miners hall for union meetings, social events and the Miraculous Medal Church satellite Sunday school; Manifold Elementary School and red-dog roads crossing a hillside dotted with white frame houses.
“No paving back there,” he said of the scenes depicted in his historic photographs.
“People don’t believe there were that many houses in little Manifold.”
A few remain along Manifold Road, which runs between Route 19 and Meadow Lands.
The website coalcampusa.com depicts a white frame house in 2005, noting “detail of original slate roof on a patch house in Manifold, Pa. This coal patch… was once operated by the Youghiogheny and Ohio Coal Co. The mine has been closed for years and the patch is now surrounded by sleek modern suburbs.”
What was once a “gob pile” – waste rock, mostly slate dug from the mine shaft and coal “face” – sprouts green vegetation in summer, not a sight people in the mine’s heyday enjoyed.
“For years, those gob piles were on fire. You never seen the sun. When the fires burned out, we went and played baseball up there,” Jacobs said.
His elementary school is gone, but Jacobs pointed out the steps he and fellow pupils climbed daily to the former Manifold school.
As part of his trip down memory lane, Jacobs stood by a guardrail atop the precipice that is the Old Mill shopping complex and spoke of points of interest that once stood on the landscape.
The SMS Millcraft LLC machine shop stands on the site of the mine buildings. Railroad tracks ran along the creek bed, and freight trains hauling coal from elsewhere outlasted the Manifold Mine.
“We used to pick up coal that fell off the cars,” Jacobs said. “We were a poor family and we did that to survive.
“The mine went and no more coal,” he said, unsure of the date it closed because he was so young. “The houses, they either tore ’em down or burned ’em down. They were nice duplex houses.”
Also in the vicinity was the Wojcuich farm. Phone calls to various agencies, shoe-leather journalism and internet searches turned up very little about the history of mining in Manifold.
But a trip to Washington County Courthouse Law Library, produced a mother lode of information.
Suzanne McCord, assistant law librarian, dug into the Manifold Mine mystery and shed light on the dark subject of now-closed mines.
The librarian sleuth was able to find obscure online records for the Manifold No. 1 and No. 2 mines as opening in 1903 and closing in 1939, but it lists the latter date with a question mark.
A geologic survey at the time they were dug lists the shafts as 236- and 231-feet deep.
The mines were opened as part of Patterson and Robbins Coal Co., which transferred ownership to Youghiogheny and Ohio of Pittsburgh in 1905. The company later moved its headquarters to Cleveland.
It does not list when the homes disappeared, but the July 2, 1943, World War II-era edition of The Washington Reporter had an item that mentions the town as a then-current address: “Andrew Anesetti, son of Catherine Anesetti of Manifold, has been promoted to corporal at the Army Airfield at Camp Douglas, Wis.”
After the town ceased to exist and the Manifold post office closed, mail was delivered to the area known as Washington R.D.3, according to Jacobs.
At a law library, McCord doesn’t field many inquiries dealing with long-closed mines, but she said, “I’ve always been interested in history and local history can become the forgotten history.”