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We live in a historically significant county, and I am personally grateful for the emerging interest in that history. The founding of historical societies, the renewed interest in museums, the preservation of historic buildings, the digs at Indian sites and at Fort McIntosh, the locating and cataloguing of old cemeteries, the concern for Beaver County genealogy, the republication of the atlas and of the Bausman history--all these and more are signs of awareness of the significance of our distant past.
I say this, because I want to urge a further concern. History did not stop with the romance of the frontier. Williamsburg, for instance, (and other communities scattered along the eastern seaboard) remained a rural backwater, waiting to be restored in the nostalgic days of the late twentieth century. Not so Beaver County. HISTORY HAS GONE THUNDERING ON.
Beaver County is an excellent microcosm of the history of the United States, not only for the days of the frontier and the early settlers, but also for the major changes that have come to American society in the twentieth century.
The rivers that brought the first settlers continued to bring commerce and transportation routes through the county. Transportation and the coal in our hills brought the steel industry. The steel industry set
many ot the patterns for the organization of big business in America and for labor-management relations. And it brought people to the county. There are few spots outside our major cities where so many nationalities have gathered. There are. almost none where the layers of settlement are -still so visible: the descendants of the Scotch-Irish Mill Creek pioneers farming on the South Side and working at J & L alongside the descendants of the Italian and Polish pioneers of 1900.
The changes that have come to Beaver County have a far more than local significance. The county is a laboratory in which one can examine on a manageable scale many significant aspects of American history; we are responsible to help preserve the materials that make such an examination possible.
This is a strategic time to become concerned both with the study of such changes and also with the preservation of data and information that will be invaluable to later students of American history. It is almost but (I think) not quite too late to capture, perhaps on tape, personal memories of the great immigration at the turn of the century, of the growth of big industry and of big labor, of the planned and unplanned urban growth that accompanied industrialization, of the melting pot.
With all that in mind, let me suggest some projects that I would consider valuable.
1. Is anyone thinking of an oral history project, interviewing 'survivors of the generation that came from Europe to the mines and mills of the county in the flood of migration after 1890? Why did they leave Europe? How did they choose Beaver County? What did they find when they got here? What were their emotional reactions? (Such interviews would be a tremendous resource for future generations in understanding the people who came.)
2. When I first came to Beaver County, I heard a good bit of talk about Aliquippa as a planned community, and about some of the principles on which it was planned. Is it too late to capture from older residents some of the emotions of a new mill town?
3. What about the "melting pot?" Did it melt here? Should it have melted? What were the chief means by which it operated? And conversely, by what means have ethnic communities managed to retain their sense of identity? There is a related question: what about social mobility, up and down, in the county?
4. The Wagner Act, which has set so much of the pattern of labor-management relations in our time, was declared constitutional by the Supreme Court in a case centering on Jones and Laughlin. Are any of the participants in that case still available to reminisce about it?
These possibilities will suggest others to You, I know. In addition to their value in themselves, they may help broaden, the interest in our local historical societies and to attract to the field of history students who are not interested in the primitive days of the frontier but who are excited by the industrial growth of Beaver County.