The Heritage Coalition is proud to announce its 1998 Heritage Speakers Series. The topicswill be about places and things in and around the Mid-Mon Valley and presented by local speakers. All meetings will be at the Mon Valley Health Center at 7pm in Board Room A. The public is invited. Admission is free, but there will be a donations basket. Bring your photos and stories. From 7-7:30 we will have a show and tell.
 

    The Westmoreland County Historical Society has been around for a long time serving the entire county. In the Mon Valley there is the Charleroi Historical Society, the Monongahela Historical Society, and the Donora Historical Society. In Monessen, the Heritage Coalition has been serving the role of a historical society for nearly four years. It collects oral histories and artifacts, it has compiled a list of historic buildings and areas in the community, it has offered a lectures series, it has fought to preserve some of Monessen's industrial heritage, and it has done exactly what historical societies do.

    Further, Cassandra Vivian, a member, has put interesting and important facts and essays about Monessen, its people, its places, and its events on her homepage on the internet. This is a historical society operating at its best. This homepage, accessible to all at http://www.telerama.com/~cass features a chronology of Monessen, special insights into critical years like 1919 when labor strikes crippled America and 1936-7, when unionism finally made its way into the city's mills.  It has essays and photographs on Johnson's Restaurant, H. Dallas McCabe, and the Spanish Influenze in Monessen in 1918.  Oral histories, where Monessen citizens can voice their rememberances of events, exist at all sites. There is a major section on ethnic Monessen including hundreds of links to ethnic information on the internet for ethnic groups: Finnish, Irish, Scottish, Polish, Russian, Italian and more. The page will be featured in a genealogy column written for a Florida newspaper by Geneaology Specialist Linda Kleback of the Northwest Regional Library System in Florida. Ms Kleback calls the page, "excellent." This presents a good profile of Monessen to the world, another mission of a historical society.

    Won't you join us. It should be a rewarding evening. The lecture will be in Board Room C of the Mon Valley Health Center. We will have a mixer from 7-7:30 and the speaker will begin then. Additional lectures to be held during the coming year include:

In celebration of Governor Tom Ridge establishing the Rivers of Steel Heritage Area of which the Mid-Mon Valley is a part, the Heritage Coalition is moving forward with its plans to celebrate the historic and cultural diversity of Monessen and the Mid Mon Valley. Over the summer they will be offering a series of interesting lectures by prominent local speakers about places and things in and around the Mid-Mon Valley. All meetings will be at the Mon Valley Health Center at 7pm in Board Room A. The public is invited. Admission is free, but there will be a donations basket.

 If you are interested in a particular topic, let us know and we will try to find a speaker. If you are a person with an interesting story to tell, let us know. If you have been researching your family history, we want to share your life. If you have memorabilia and stories about your family business, we want to share them with you. If you know interesting information about a local historical site, we want you to tell us. If you can speak about your ethnic diversity, be it foods, customs, traditions, chores, fashions, legends, or folklore, we are interested in every nationality and every story.
 We want to share anything that helps us understand the unique way of life that existed in the Mid-Mon Valley during the Industrial Age. It was a time when the peoples of the world gathered together to work and live in a never seen before way of life. It was unique enough that a state heritage park is being developed  to celebrate the way we lived and worked in southwestern Pennsylvania. Contact Cassandra Vivian at 684-6270.
 Governor Ridge's announcement of a Rivers of Steel Heritage Area will bring millions and millions of dollars into southwestern Pennsylvania for infrastructure, tourism development, restoration and renovation of historically significant buildings, river front development, small business development, and on and on and on. It is everything the Heritage Coalition has been heralding for the past year and a half. We have to be ready to join the parade, or we will be left behind. Come support us in our efforts to revitalize the Mid Mon Valley.
 
 

 Pamela Seighman of the The Patch/Work Voices Coal and Coke Heritage Project from the Penn State Fayette Campus will present a slide program called "The Patch." The program focuses on our areas coke and coal communities and how multi-ethnic people came together and blended into a unique Pennsylvania culture.

 Founded in 1977, the Patch/Work Voices program is now a Folklife Documentation Center for Coal and Coke and their purpose is to capture and preserve the history of the coal and coke industry and the culture and heritage of the coal miners and coke workers of southwestern Pennsylvania, especially the Connellsville Coke Region. They have archived interviews and mining artifacts and have created a special library collection, developed music, video, and slide presentations, collected art work by local and regional artists, and developed university courses on coal and coke.
 
 

 Covered Bridges of Western Pennsylvania is the topic of the first lecture of the summer lecture series sponsored by the Heritage Coalition. Bill Dickie, a member of the Monongahela Historical Society and the Mon Valley River Buffs and President of the Monongahela AARP will present a program celebrating the famous bridges in our area.
 Pennsylvania has over 200 covered bridges and around 67 of them are in southwestern Pennsylvania: Greene County has about 10 and Washington County has around 26. That's a lot of covered bridges. The only remaining covered bridge in Westmoreland County is the Bell's Mill Bridge near Wyano.

     Did you know that the first known regular keelboat packet service (freight) on the Mon was probably begun in 1786 by John Blair and ran from Pittsburgh to 35 miles upriver?  or that the Enterprise, the first steamboat to make a round trip to New Orleans was launched at Brownsville in 1814? or that river pirates were a persistent problem in the Mon Valley? or that Finleyville was once called Rogue's Alley? or that the Flood Control Act of 1936 was created because of the St. Patrick's Day Flood?
     Come learn about the our river from Kathy Anderson of the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. Ms. Anderson will visits the Heritage Coalition to speak on the Monongahela River from Fayette City to Finleyville on July 11 at 7pm at the Mon Valley Health Center, Board Room A, 4th floor. The public is invited.
 The Monongahela River runs north from Fairmont, West Virginia for 128 miles to meet the Ohio at Pittsburgh. The Tygart and the West rivers join at Fairmont to create the Mon forming a basin that drains 7,384 square miles. Thus the Mon begins in West Virginia and flows through 18 counties on its way north to Pittsburgh, where it merges with the Allegheny to form the Ohio. It is one of hundreds of rivers that flow north and was one of the most worked rivers in the world when the industries along its banks were in full blast. No one captures the atmosphere along the river better than Richard Bissell in his book The Monongahela,

"Oh, it's some wonderful valley, the Monongahela. There's more hell popping and more loud noise in any ten miles at the lower end than there is in five hundred on the Mississippi or the Congo.
 You go into a saloon and they're talking six different languages and the juke box is blasting out a tune in Slovenian by Yankovic. Across the street are the torn green shades of a faded brick building and the third-generation Polish girls tripping lightly along the sidewalk in their blue jeans and costume jewelry. Ragged hillsides with the bare frame houses clinging to the rocky slope, where you dump the dishwater off the back porch and it lands on the roof of the house below. Winter nights so cold the train whistles freeze up, and lovers seek shelter in the motion picture palaces. And always the miners and the steelworkers--raw, rough, and roaring out their protests and their manhood against the smoke and flames.
 And the chimneys of the zinc mills, the glassworks, the chemical plants, the rolling mills and wire and tube and steel mills and coke plants are snorting their poisonous mixtures into the scarred and terrifying hills. . . . The train whistles blow and the Carnegie-Illinois steamboats and the Jones and Laughlin steamboats blow their lock whistles and landing whistles, and the blast of horns as the trucks moving coal and oil and glass and beer add to the uproar--oh, it's gay up the Mon, mighty gay."
 Leading the discussion to recapture those days of yore will be Bill "Wild Willy" Frankfort, a member of the Rangers of the Virginia Frontiers (Washington County Rangers). Wild Willy and his group will be taking a canoe trip down the Mon in October. They will try to re-enact life as it must have been in the 1700s. He has many a good campfire yarn to tell. The discussion will be open to all and hopefully the audience will have interesting tales to share about the Mon.