Our Town: Rostraver
The expansive Bill’s Golfland as you know it today was born in the 1940s as just a shack in Rostraver Township.
“It’s grown,” says Bill Ruozzi, the second-generation owner of what has been expanded from an ice cream stand to include a miniature golf course, dek hockey rink, restaurant and other attractions.
The landmark along Route 51 south helps to define the location of Rostraver, a municipality often confused with Belle Vernon because both towns share the same ZIP code and school district.
Rostraver Ice Garden is another landmark here that is widely recognized because it’s where people from many areas have come for decades to play ice hockey.
“We’re lacking that downtown, a main street,” says Gina C. Lynn, executive director of Greater Rostraver Chamber of Commerce.
She says residents and former residents of the township still feel connected, and that the popular annual Rostraver Gathering in Cedar Creek Park is an indication of that sense of belonging.
Each year since 2002 in either August or September, as many as 400 Rostraver High School graduates and former teachers hold a reunion at Westmoreland County Park. The party is open to anyone who attended the school through 1968, when Rostraver underwent a merger to form Belle Vernon Area School District. Many of the guests wear Kelly green clothing, the old school’s color, which also paid tributes to the township’s Irish name.
It’s been long believed the township was named by some of the first pioneers after their hometown of Rostrevor in County Down, Ireland.
Settlers were believed to have trickled into the area in the 1750s to set up camps and settle farmland, says Terry Necciai, a historian and preservation architect from Monongahela.
By 1801, the farms were producing whiskey, wheat and pelts, Necciai says.
“That’s what was coming off the farms,” he says, adding that George Weddell and his family were among the first settlers.
Today, Rostraver has gone from a mostly-farming community in the 1960s to the retail center in the mid-Mon Valley with sprawling strip malls that are home to such stores and Walmart, K-mart and Speedy Furniture. Many of the farms also have been replaced by housing plans and modern hotels.
“Right now, we’re probably the only place that is developing,” Lynn says.
The township had a population of 11,363 in the 2010 census, making it the only municipality in the area to have an increase of residents.
The population here has increased by 17.5 percent since 1960, according to the township’s website.
The large township stretches from the Youghiogheny River west to the Monongahela River and it borders Fayette County to the south and Allegheny County to the north.
“It’s got all of those focal points,” Necciai says.