Old Covenanter Church at 9th St and 7th Avenue Beaver Falls
Return to Milestones Vol. 3, No. 3
Mr. - Downie's writings in the Geneva Alumnus
have entertained Milestones readers
on several occasions. The following, excerpted from a history
of Geneva's old Literary Societies, presents a glimpse of College
Hill in its early years.
Late in the afternoon of a day in mid-September of the year 18BO a small group Of sorrowful, but resolute, young men and women got off a Pittsburgh and Fort Wayne R.R.. train from the west at the Mulberry (Fifth) Street station in Beaver Falls. Having seen their trunks carted across the track to the small wooden station shed, they descended a flight of gritty wooden steps and turned left toward the Bracken hotel, a three-story brick building of depressing architectural style, still standing and possessing even less attractions today than sixty-five years ago.
Inquiry in the hotel office developed the forbidding facts that the college was located in the wooded hills, a mile north of town, that the building was only half finished and that no boarding houses were available in that vicinity.
" In that case we had better head for the Covenanter Church," said a member of the party.
"Beech and Main," volunteered the clerk. "Half way up the hill, at the upper end of town. it's not far--about five blocks."
They found a registrar on duty in the basement of the church and were promptly assigned to boarding houses in the vicinity.
At nine o'clock on the morning of Sept. 15, thirtyfive students assembled in the basement of the church to confront a similar number of Covenanter preachers and local clergy. Dr. H. H. George, President, called upon various notables present for speeches-Prof. David McAllister and Dr. J. R. W. Sloane, (former President, now 1880, head of the R. P. Seminary in Aflegheny), Dr. A. M. Milligan and the local pastor, Rev. Mr. R. J. George. The first chapel service took most of the day.
The transplantation was all but fatal. The college closed at Northwood with over 150 students-high mark there, 178 - and opened in Beaver Falls with 35. This figure was doubled by the end of the school year ... Classes were conducted in the church basement and in a two story frame building on the back of the church lot, while the college building was being completed by Contractor William Pearce, father of Dr. M. M. Peace, now (in 1946) President of the school. The students found lodgings near the church. By Spring, Old Main, which was then "the College," was open for inspection. The class of 1881 orated from a platform in the grove where the gymnasium now stands to a picnic crowd of several hundred citizens and friends from Pittsburgh and elsewhere, seated on benches among the trees. A brass band furnished music.
Drs. George and McCartney had built homes on the Hill. Each had a one-horse surrey in which he travelled down to school each morning. Files of the CABINET disclose that the George horse's name was "Dexter" but are silent regarding the name of the other animal. Dexter led a hard life during the w!nter of 1880-81, but the following year he stayed in his stable and took it easy while the hard pressed student body trudged twice daily over the rocky, un-paved trail between college and town, a good mile and a half each way. The Editor speaks bitterly about this reversal and intimates that he went personally to Dexter's retreat to complain about it.
A half dozen boarding houses were soon under construction. Dr. McAllister built the house at 32nd Street and Fourth Ave. in 1883. The Dunn house-Cassalana Club-third south from 32nd St. on College Ave., was ready in 1882. The Club had thirteen members.
.... The halls were now lighted, but not warm in winter. The hot air system, installed when the college was built had proved a failure. The ducts in the interior walls breathed out nothing but frosty discomfort, even when the two furnaces in the basement were red hot. Steam heaters were installed in the fall of 1883 .... The Editor of the CABINET pleaded for a boardwalk from the College to town. Even a plank a foot wide over the bogs and chuckholes would, he said, be a godsend, a boon and a blessing. Eventually a walk made of planks from an old oil tank was laid up College Ave. In summer the oil-soaked planks would get so hot that a barefoot boy had to stay off them .... In November 1883, the CABINET announced that a bell had arrived and been mounted in the belfry. It weighed about 1850 pounds. it was first mounted to swing east and west and so close to the floor that its voice seemed muffled. This annoyed the editor, who said frankly that in his opinion the Old Girl was doing herself justice. Soon after, the mounting was raised a foot and the bell rocked north and south; it's deep tones could now be heard across the Ohio, when the wind was right. By the same token, when the wind was from the south we could always hear the steamboat whistles .... Two months after the bell was mounted-amid the acclaim of a student body which had yearned clamourously for a bell, as for a crowning and indispensable blessing -somebody stole its clapper. After a short but dismal interval the clapper was returned. Stealing the bell clapper became something of a tradition during ensuing decades, one that has happily fallen in disuse in recent years. Sometimes the janitor had to, order a new clapper. In the early nineties I was mowing weeds in a vacant lot where the Covenanter Church now stands and caught the point of my scythe on a cast steel bell tongue that had been' rusting there for many years .... It is startling to read in the CABINET for Nov. 1883 that "The Bell Telephone Company are extending a branch of their line along College Avenue in front of the college." That was two years before the horsecars began to run from 27th Street to the Fort Wayne Station in New Brighton.
The campus trees were smaller then. There was an iron fence in front. A bob-tail trolley car ran from the car-barns at the foot of ft hill to Morado Park, about once an hour. (Mrs. Slater says she does not remember this, but the CABINET for Nov. 1895, noted that transfers were then being issued by the city line so that it was possible to ride from Junction Park to Morado for a nickel.) If you care for dates, the horse-cars began running from 27th Street to the old Ft. Wayne station in New Brighton, in 1885; the line was electrified in 1891; trolley cars were replaced by busses in August, 1937 .... In 1896 Elmer Brittain's restaurant occupied the flat iron shaped building at 27th Street. He served sandwiches, coffee and oyster soup at all hours to belated collegers and the motormen and other streetcar employees from the carbarns across the street. I have seen, with boyish admiration and amazement, Bob McKnight sit on one of those high stools and consume one quarter section of watermelon after another, to a total that I should not dare to set down exactly, for fear of putting too great a strain on the credulity of a less capacious era.
There were three building on the campus-Old Main, the Dorm, inhabited by girls, and the old wooden Gymnasium. Some professors still owned horses and surreys, although the horsedrawn Faculty of the eighties and early nineties, was adjusting itself to the modern age. Some Faculty and other citizens kept chickens and the Chick Roast was still a favorite nocturnal diversion of undergraduate groups. Many Faculty members kept cows and some Faculty wives were expert milkmaids. Few Faculty wives of this day have ever even seen a cow, let alone milked one.) But I never heard of the students holding an illicit barbecue .... Most of the land west of Fourth Avenue and north of 32nd Street was still in farm acreage and unfenced. The football field of the early nineties was laid out east and west near 33rd Street school, with a row of widespreading oak trees along its southern side. The field west of Sixth Avenue was purchased about 1895; it was partially graded in 1896 but still bore traces of the latest corn planting, Many villagers still pastured cows on the commons and vacant lots and these animals often wandered through open gates to crop the lawns of irritated citizens and tramp down their vegetable gardens. Sometimes they appeared on the campus, to be indignantly driven off by Uncle James McCartney, custodian of building and grounds. Upon one occasion a cow attempted to go up to the belfry, but was compelled to give up the attempt on the narrow stair above the third floor corridor. It was probably not the cow's idea in the first place.
