Mar 29, 2018 4 min read

Early planners in the Mon Valley wanted to open a new post office in a place they named Dover in Fallowfield Township, but the decision was nixed after they found out there was already a Pennsylvania zip code for a destination with that identity.

So they dropped the D and replaced it with an L in an area that would someday receive an Interstate 70 exit to Lover. And many people would go on to mispronounce the name to sound like a paramour, but Lover was supposed to rhyme with Dover, England, according to Mon Valley historian Terry Necciai.

“They whited out the D and replaced it with an L,” Necciai says, adding that there ended up being a post office in Lover until the 1940s or 50s.

It wasn’t the first name change for the area, which was originally known as Jonestown. However, there was also already a zip code for a Jonestown, when they set about to get a zip code.

Fallowfield was the sixth township to organize when Washington County was born in 1781. It was much larger then, having extended along the Monongahela River from Elrama to the north and Ten Mile Creek in present-day Union and East Bethlehem township, respectively, according to “The History of Washington County Pennsylvania: with biological sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men,” published in 1882 by Boyd Crumrine.

Today, the township has been reduced to 21.3 square miles after the municipalities of Charleroi Borough and the townships of Carroll, Somerset, Pike Run and Allen split off, among others. The population was about 4,300 at the time of the 2010 census.

Fallowfield is home to a number of historic farmhouses, including the John H. Nelson House on Colvin Road, which dates to 1875 and was listed in 2000 on the National Register of Historic Places because of its Queen Anne architectural style.

The Nelson House is the only known Queen Anne style farmhouse built in the township of handmade red bricks, according to the Washington County Historical Society.

Fallowfield also was once home to the beloved Ebenezer Covered Bridge, a prominent feature at Mingo Creek County Park in Nottingham Township. It was moved there in 1977, but it may have been relocated more than once, Necciai says. While its date of construction was unknown, it originally stood near the former Ebenezer Church in Fallowfield, a building that was razed in the 1990s along Interstate 70 to construct the Mon-Fayette Expressway, Necciai says. The covered bridge was removed decades ago during construction of I-70.

Many of the township’s historic assets have disappeared, says Nikki Sheppick, chairman of the Charleroi Area Historical Society, which holds an Olde Fallowfield reunion picnic every year.

Among the assets that still exist are cemeteries with some burials going back to the American Revolution period, she says.

According to Sheppick, Newkirk Church, which was connected to another early Fallowfield family, was demolished during the current reconstruction of the I-70 Bentleyville interchange. “There are still some preserved churches, pioneer settler farmhouses and barns dotting the scenery here and there, but the most important resource that was here long before (Europeans) set foot on it was the Monongahela River, with its villages and towns that still have many or at least some of their original and historic buildings,” Sheppick says.

Necciai notes another interesting Fallowfield story about Cracker Jack Road. The country road takes its name from a group of men who once earned a living exploding flawed iron castings there. The castings were loaded back onto a train and remelted in Pittsburgh.

In the 1783 slave census, Fallowfield had the most with 111, and about half of them were on one plantation, Necciai says.

And the early settlers developed a taste for Monongahela rye whiskey, according to Crumrine – there’s a quote in his book from a farmer discussing the number of stills in his part of Fallowfield. A man named Edward West said “that at one period of his life he could stand on the hill where his father’s farm lay and see the smoke from 19 distilleries in active operation.”