Chestnut Ridge: A Preface and a Poem, from a Collection That Might Finally Have Found Its Form

Preface

The Chestnut Ridge region of southwestern Pennsylvania—also known as  the Laurel Highlands or the Connellsville seam—stretches alongside the Allegheny Mountains from Latrobe down to Uniontown, near the West Virginia border. When I was a child visiting there in the 1970s, I thought of it as The Land Where Nothing Has Ever Happened or Ever Will. But in truth, the region has, over a span of 250 years, undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis, shifting from dense wilderness to chaotic industrial hell before collapsing into the exhausted Rust Belt desolation I knew so well.

As a gateway to the Mississippi, the Allegheny region was, for early travelers, a primary river and land route south into the Appalachians and north into Canada. Thus, it has long attracted wanderers, pioneers, missionaries, immigrants, and schemers; and its strategic importance made it a major battlefield during the French and Indian War. Young George Washington, who suffered a spectacular defeat there during the first battle of his career, returned to the ridge as an aging ex-president, hoping to recoup what he’d lost in unprofitable land speculation. In the 1840s, writing in his travel journal, Charles Dickens mused over the cabins he saw clinging to the hillsides, wondering who might live in this lovely, remote, alluring, mysterious place.

Humans have had an incalculable influence on every inch of our planet, but their impact on the Chestnut Ridge has been particularly brutal. The impetus behind the region’s rapid shift from frontier to furnace was coal—not the hard, relatively clean-burning anthracite coal of northeastern Pennsylvania and the western states but the smoky, soft, polluting, bituminous coal that was the fundamental ingredient in coke, fuel of choice for making steel. The coal beneath Chestnut Ridge was key to the wealth not only of Henry Clay Frick, who controlled most of the area’s coking operations, but also of Andrew Carnegie, who built U.S. Steel on the back of Connellsville coke, as well as financiers such as Andrew Mellon and Charles Schwab and transportation magnates such as the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Thomas Scott.

Meanwhile, the coke ovens burned. The miners carried their lunch buckets down the shafts, into darkness. Children were born, and old men died. In Scottdale—my mother’s hometown, and also Frick’s, a hamlet once known as Fountain Mills but renamed in honor of Scott the Railroad King—I whiled away the summer climbing hay bales and pitching bottles into the quarry and listening to my grandfather try to cough up the coal dust trapped in his lungs. Meanwhile, Frick’s coke ovens, cold and empty, crumbled into the roadside weeds. One might say that the land was reasserting its claim to itself. But the scars—in stone, in flesh: even then I knew they would remain.

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The Historian’s Wife Describes the Appalachian Plateau (1930)

Dawn Potter

Imagine a massive dining-room table

spread with a damask cloth whose starched

folds are difficult to climb. Once this table-

land was ironed smooth. Then up lurched

Chestnut Ridge, unruly as a soup stain

or a badly darned tear. In those days the sea

came and went, and came and went. When

the waters left, the table was the property

of trees and humid swamps and ferns as grand

as modern man though now he rules supreme.

Then the sea rushed back, and with it sand;

and again the waves fell back, again they streamed,

spoiling the ferns, rotting the trees and their fruit.

Meanwhile, time applied her bitter tinctures;

the careless sea swept in her dustpans of silt.

It was a vast tedium that contrived our future.

[Versions of these pieces appeared in Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability, vol. 5 (2012)]