Indiana Progress, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Extracts 5 February 1874 Recollections of Indiana County from 1814. By an Old Inhabitant. It has been the appreciated privilege of your correspondent under the merciful care and protection of a kind Providence, to live to see his native wilderness so metamorphosed that if a full grown boy at day of 1814 had left his native cabin hearth and heard nothing of the changes taking place during his absence, should now return in full vigor of manhood, he could not find the location of his nativity, and in many instances could not point out the tract of land on which he had spent his youth. The first incentive to this great change was the erection of charcoal furnaces for smelting the rich ores in our hills and converting them into pig-metal and hollow ware and tilt-hammer forges to convert the pig-metal into bar iron. This opened up a market for cord wood, which, if it only paid the expense of taking it off the ground, was of great advantage to land owners in the immediate neighborhood of these furnaces and forges, as it greatly assisted in bringing the waste wilderness into productive farms, and all their productions found a ready home market, and the operation of these iron works gave profitable employment to industrious young men of my acquaintance, who earned their first dollar by chopping cord wood or coaling the wood after it was chopped. Many of these earned every dollar of the hand money of valuable lands which they bought and after years of toil converted into fields and meadows, from this products of which many of them were able to educate their sons and daughters in the best institutions of learning; and even before a turnpike road was inaugurated. Ligonier Valley had furnished sheriff, assemblymen, senators, congressmen, governors, and United States senators to sister states, besides retaining a sufficient number of men of talent and piety to carry the gospel of their Lord and Master to the opposite ends of the earth, may of whom never saw the walls of any other than a round log and clapboard roofed schoolhouse until they had acquired a more thorough knowledge of Historia Sacra, Virgil, and the Greek Lexicon than most of the graduates from our "highfaluten" colleges of the present day. Sixty years ago your correspondent was large enough to sit astride the kidneys of a broad-backed sorrel mare and hang on to his father¹s buckskin suspenders or the waistband of his tow-check trowsers [sic], his pedestals pointing towards opposite points of the compass accasioned [sic] by the breadth of old Dover¹s back, and the shortness of the hind rider¹s legs, which were necessarily held in a horizontal position; --if a fair day, to be carried to some shady spot where old logs were of sufficient number to seat a congregation of all inhabitants for many miles circumference, --but if an unfavorable day, to the most convenient barn, to the first place designated, there to hear the Rev. John Jameson or Rev. Mungo Dick, the only divines within the circle of our juvenile acquaintance. It is to be inferred that we were not very capable of correctly criticizing as to the merits of the sermon; but after growing some years older, myself and a younger brother having heard an American born preaching a sermon in a neighbor¹s barn, on our way home had been spending our opinions alternately to each other respecting the new minister, and upon arriving at home my brother said to mother, "Mamma, that man didn¹t preach a bit; he just talked like other people." We had never heard any others than the two previously named, both of whom spoke the broad Scotch dialect, which we had so long been accustomed to, that we had come to the conclusion that no other style of languages could possibly be preached at all. But to leave the subject of the eclesiastics [sic] and return to temporal matters. Within my recollection, my father got a farm wagon made at six miles distance, and when finished ready for hitching his horses to it, he was obliged to take it all apart and haul it home on a sled, and until it was worn out on the farm it could never be taken off it for want of a road wide enough for a wagon to pass. But better times were in store for the future. The old Frankstown road passed six miles north of us, and the old Pennsylvania road passed twelve miles south of us. Armagh and New Port were the children of the Frankstown road. Mollie Demsie kept the only store, and Margaret Grimes the only tavern in Armagh. James Moorhead kept the only store, and Fullerton Woods kept the only tavern in New Pot. Andrew Brown kept tavern almost on the identical spot of Smith¹s station on the Indiana branch railroad, and had perhaps the largest show of patronage of any stand in Indiana county ever had, so far as wagoners were concerned‹sometimes being compelled to open his fences so that the wagons could be driven into fields to find room to stand over night. The road kept its eye direct for Pittsburg, and would scarcely deviate in the least for any hill that a goat could climb, and went as straight up the hill west of Daniel Smith¹s dwelling as the compass could carry it. In the spring of the year the bottom always appeared to fall out of that part of the road. At any rate, if it did not fall out entirely, it went that far under that the wheels could not find it, and the consequence was that double teaming had to be resorted to to get up the hill, and sometimes three six-horse teams were necessary to haul a wagon with 20 gross hundreds, equal to 2,240 pounds, up that hill, and often times by the time all wagons were got up the hill the day would be so far spent that they could only reach New Port, a distance of scarcely two miles. About the close of the war of 1812, which was in 1814, the most gigantic enterprise at the time ever inaugurated in Pennsylvania, was the project of a turnpike road from Philadelphia to Pittsburg by the way of Harrisburg, Carlisle, Chambersburg, Bedford and Greensburg. This passed across Ligonier Valley almost parallel with the Pennsylvania road, not more than a mile south of that road. The counties of Mifflin, Huntingdon, Cambria, Indiana, and the north part of Westmoreland, not to be outdone by their competitors for the great Pennsylvania thoroughfare, followed and got a charter for a turnpike company, and the road was built, and Blairsville was its first village born of that enterprise. It was nourished on the life¹s blood of New Port, and that ancient town died long since of starvation. And now there is not one stone to be found upon another to show that a flourishing village had ever stood upon that groundŠ. About this date of our southern history, salt water was found on the Conemaugh river (a short distance above where Saltsburg now stands,) by old Father Johnston, the great grandfather of all the salt works west of the Allegheny mountains. This discovery, together with the facilities for obtaining iron, dispensed with the pack-horse business. But all these great improvements were destined to be of short lived duration; for James Clark, on the Westmoreland side, and David Reid, on the Indiana side, --both within the valley‹were, in 1814, elected to the Legislature‹both democrats of the old Jeffersonian school, intimate friends, and pulled together in the same harness. Reid proposed the matter, and we believe Clark framed the bill, authorizing the State of Pennsylvania to construct a canal or water communication from Philadelphia to PittsburgŠ. The canal brought into existence in Indiana County, Saltsburg and Slabtown, then crossing into Westmoreland, gave birth to Livermore, Bairdstown, Bolivar and Lockport, then crossing back into Indiana, a year afterwards, brought forth India, Centreville, Abnerville, Ninevah and Wallopsburg, and terminated in the basin at JohnstownŠ. -- Rosemary Miller Johnstown, PA