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Beaver Falls In Old Days

Milestones Vol 27. No. 3

By J. Vale Downie
The Geneva Alumnus--1946

The town stopped at Eleventh Street, then known as Harmony Street. Cedar Street (Eighth Avenue) was a rocky county road through a forest strewn with boulders and outcroppings of sandstone. The railroad embankment... did not exist, and the river washed the base of the hill. The City Water Works was located about where the Round House now stands, and from this point the old County Road climbed the hill reaching College Avenue Extension about where the tennis courts are now located - at Captain Partington!s Tavern, called the Halfway House, because it was half way from Pittsburgh to Youngstown on the stage road. The course of this road is still traceable below the heating plant. The Lake Erie Canal had long since ceased operation, but Captain Boyle's famous picnic boat ... still lay docked in her basin near the bend ... The County Road once crossed the Beaver at this point, by ford and ferry - successor to an Indian crossing of the eighteenth century, at which time an extension of the Kittanning Path came down Bennett's Run, crossed the Beaver and struck west toward the Western Reserve along the course of Wallace's Run.