Monongahela historical society offers high-tech walking tours
The history of the Edward Goodrich Acheson house at 908 W. Main St. in Monongehela, which is on the National Register of Historic Landmarks, is outlined in a new self-guided walking tour being offered in the city.
The Anawalt-Taylor house at 715 W. Main St. in Monongahela, portions of which date to 1850, is included on the new self-guided tour of the city’s historic district for its association with the Underground Railroad.
Jim and Terrie Steiner have developed a self-guided walking tour of Monongahela’s historic district that uses smartphones to tell the stories along the route.
Edward Goodrich Acheson invented carborundum while living in a Monongahela house, a national landmark and stop on a new self-guided tour of the city's historic district.
MONONGAHELA – A Washington native was bold enough to sell a battery he invented to Thomas Edison before his scientific pursuits took him to Monongahela in the late 19th century.
The battery landed Edward Goodrich Acheson a job at Edison’s scientific laboratory. He later set off on his own to make electricity available for the first time in the small city along the Monongahela River, where he was greeted with animosity.
“He almost brought major industry to Monongahela,” said Monongahela architect Terry Necciai, who consulted on a new self-guided walking tour of the city that takes guests to the house where Acheson lived when he discovered carborundum.
Visitors can use their smartphones to connect to videos explaining the stories about the 23 stops along the tour, a project of Monongahela Area Historical Society.
“It brings up a narrative (about) the people’s lives and how they shaped the history of our town,” said Terrie Steiner, a society volunteer who created the tour with her husband, Jim.
Theater and speech students at California University of Pennsylvania provided the narrative in the videos about local landmarks, which includes the site where statesman Albert Gallatin quelled the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.
The tour brochure also directs visitors to the Anawalt-Taylor house at 715 W. Main St., a confirmed stop on the Underground Railroad and Terrie Steiner’s favorite story on the list.
The story is enlivened by a written account from a descendant of Mary Hart Taylor, who was a conductor at 715 W. Main St. on the railroad established before the Civil War to assist runaway slaves’ escape to Canada.
Fifty-four years after emancipation, the nephew described Taylor as a “violent abolitionist” in a town where the majority of its residents were opposed to slavery, the tour video explains.
The man set the scene when two escaped slaves were secreted into the hayloft behind Taylor’s house, where they waited two nights until the nephew took them across the river in a small boat to meet someone who secreted them to the next safe house. He said his aunt and her accomplice promised him “eternal death” if he told anyone about the incident.
“I fully understood that I was a possessor of a great secret,” the nephew confessed.
The tour, meanwhile, moves on to 908 W. Main St., which Acheson purchased for his family in 1890 as he was toiling in a garage to invent something stronger than a diamond while also attempting to bring electricity to a town that favored natural gas lighting.
Town Hall was dominated by Republicans who lost re-election to Democrats under an attack plan launched by Acheson in order to get his electricity plant running.
The elected officials, however, preventing him from expanding his plant along the river near the present-day aquatorium because they feared it would interfere with the steamboat industry, Necciai said.
“It turned out that electricity became more important than riverboats,” Necciai said.
Acheson relocated his carborundum plant to Niagara Falls, N.Y., where he later established nine major corporations.
The tour brochures include the QR codes that link smartphones to the videos. They can be found for free on the front door of the historical society at 230 W. Main St., and at the nearby C.J.’s Furniture and Autumn Antiquities stores.
The project was funded with a $2,000 marketing grant from the Washington County Tourism Promotion Agency.