Johnstown, Cambria County, and the Flight 93 Memorial for 9/11

This past weekend there was a free Brad Paisley concert on the hill at WVU's law school Friday night and a football game Saturday afternoon. It seemed a good time to get out of Morgantown.

My next county to visit was Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Although Johnstown is the largest city, the county seat is at Ebensburg, twenty-three miles northeast of there and one hundred twenty-one miles from Morgantown. It's one of the larger counties I'm visiting, and far enough away to merit an overnight stay. I took a toll-free way to get to Johnstown, winding through southern Pennsylvania's countryside. It took two and a half hours to go eighty-five miles. I didn't stop on the way.

I stayed with a cheaper branch of my customary motel chain, located, for once, near the center of the city. Johnstown has a central square with a fountain and a gazebo, just a few blocks from the hotel. There was also a small farmers' market at the square. The weather was warm and overcast, much the same as in Morgantown. I found a little café on the square, and had a salad for lunch.

According to the U.S. Census, Cambria County is estimated to have 136, 411 people in 2015, down from a peak of 213,459 in 1940. In 2000, the population was ninety-five percent Caucasian. Part of the decline was from heavy industry leaving the area, and part from disastrous floods in 1889, 1936 and 1977. The 1889 flood, the most famous, killed thousands of people when an earthen dam, built to create an artificial lake upstream, failed and sent water crashing into the town. Most of the city had to be completely rebuilt after that flood. The walls along the river were built after the 1936 flood, and were supposed to prevent further flooding. Still, the town flooded again in 1977.

I saw many Catholic churches in the county. There were Trump signs on lawns; not one Hillary sign. and  also signs saying "Push The Pushers Out" with a number to call to report drug transactions. Apparently, this is a big problem. There were blue ribbons on many trees. It is part of a "Teal Campaign" for ovarian cancer.

I had marked out ten of the thirty places on the National Register to visit. As usual, I didn't stick to that, because there were many of them a short walk away in central Johnstown. Here are the places I saw in Johnstown Friday afternoon:

The fountain in Central Square

The former Nathan's Department Store

A food truck at the farmers' market at Central Square

Grand Army of the Republic Hall, built for Union Civil War Veterans

Across the Conemaugh River,

The 1891 Carnegie Library, now the Johnstown Flood Museum

Community building, originally used by Cambria Iron Company

Cambria Iron  Company former offices

Cambria Iron Company factory, now abandoned

Johnstown City Hall

one of the rare streets where the houses appear to be pre-1889

View from the top of the Johnstown Incline Railroad

Johnstown Incline Railroad

The bridge leading to Johnstown's Incline Railroad

I attended synagogue Friday night at Beth Shalom, the only remaining congregation in the area. There was an exhibit in the lobby about the Jewish history of the town, and it is like small-town Jewish stories everywhere. At one time, many of the merchants were Jews, and there were three active synagogues, two of which built new buildings around 1950 in the suburbs west of town, above the incline railroad. With a declining Jewish population, the synagogues merged into one in the 1970s, keeping the newest building and letting the others go.

I headed out to that suburb at six, looking for a restaurant I found on line, and Westmont Historic District, directly atop the Incline. I couldn't find the restaurant and settled for a sandwich at a chain sub shop before heading to services. There were thirteen of us in attendance, counting the rabbi. We used a Reform siddur. Most of the people were elderly. I spoke to a few of them.

Westmont Historic District

Beth Shalom, Southmont

Saturday was to be a short day, heading out to the places in the county away from Johnstown, then leaving for home about one. I left my hotel at 8:15 on a beautiful sunny morning.  I started at the Johnstown Flood Memorial, east of the city. There was a lake, surrounded by resort home, created from the damming of the Little Conemaugh River. After a heavy rain on May 31, 1889, the dam broke and the flooding downstream destroyed most of Johnstown. The valley below the house in the picture was the lake.

This is from the visitor's center at the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, run by The National Park Service.

This was the clubhouse that once sat on South Fork Lake. It is being restored

 I headed north through small towns along State Road 53.

Historic District in the borough of Portage

Portage

 

 Another National Park Service site is Allegheny Portage National Historic Site. The eastern border of Cambria County is at the peak of the Appalachians. There were steam-powered engines that pulled trains and boats over the mountains on rail lines. At the visitor center, I met a couple from Georgia. We commiserated about the election, and she told me about a senior visitors' pass for only ten dollars that gets one into National Park Service sites for free. The ranger, a young man whose last name is Rager, didn't think I was 62, bless his heart. We talked some about parks. He likes Shenandoah, which Joe and I visited. I said I liked it, but I was spoiled by Yosemite, the most beautiful place I have ever been. He said he wanted to go there, but San Francisco was high on his list because he wants to go to Amoeba Records. Small world. I asked him what artists he likes, and I, to my embarrassment, didn't recognize any of the names.

At Appalachian Portage National Historic site. This is an engine house.

 Ebensburg, the county seat, is much smaller than Johnstown, and appears to be more prosperous.

Cambria County Jail, Ebensburg

A.W. Buck House, now Cambria County Historical Society, Ebensburg, 1889 and 1903

Cambria County Courthouse, Ebensburg

Beach at Prince Gallitzin State Park

Prince Gallitzin Park, according to Wikipedia, "is named for Demetrius Gallitzin, a Russian nobleman turned Catholic priest who was instrumental in the settlement of Cambria County." The park is at the northern end of the county.

By 1 P.M. Saturday, I was just finishing up in Ebensburg. I still wanted to see the mall east of Johnstown, and the campus of University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown. And there was a car show at a church near the college campus and a "town center" development, all on the way home.

I went to the mall, called "The Galleria." It's like Morgantown's mall, only many of the stores have closed. I had a dish of chicken teriyaki served by a Vietnamese women who called me "darling" and "sweetie." I took a few minutes to check out the college campus, and, yes, the car show. The car owners, as at other shows, are all crazy men my age.

On the campus of The University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

1961 Plymouth painted in honor of those killed on Flight 93 on 9/11

1968 Plymouth Fury

1965 Plymouth convertible

1959 Ford Skyliner Hardtop-Convertible

I had read in the paper in Johnstown about ceremonies at the site where Flight 93 crashed on 9/11 near Shanksville, in Somerset County, just south of Cambria County. It was almost on the way home. The paper said there would be a candle ceremony Saturday. That, as it turns out, was private, and after dark. Still there were many people there that day to remember and commemorate.

The field where the plane crashed was a surface coal mine, "reclaimed," meaning covered with dirt. Nothing was growing there. The monument, by architecture firm Paul Murdoch Architects, sits at the top of a low hill. The landscape design, a field of wildflowers on the old mining site and forty groves of forty trees (still incomplete) is by Nelson Byrd Woltz. There is parking at the bottom of the hill, then a walkway leading to a white wall, with marble slabs commemorating each of the forty people on the plane. There is a low wall left of the walkway, with only a boulder marking where the plane crashed, creating a fifteen foot deep crater, now covered. The visitor center is up the hill, on a winding path from the memorial.

The visitor center across the field of wildflowers

The memorial wall

Mark Bingham was the gay rugby player from San Francisco who helped organize the passengers to fight the terrorists

A closer look at the visitor center

The walkway to the visitor's center

I didn't stay long at the top. It was hot out, and I wanted to get home. I looked at some of the exhibits. Much of it was old television news shows with the planes flying into the World Trade Center and the newscasters obvious horror. It was hard enough to watch fifteen years ago; I didn't really want to see it again. 9/11 is not something I dwell on, and had I not been so close, I might never have gone to that memorial. I left there at 5 P.M. and was home, eighty-two miles away by 7. Traffic in Morgantown was still backed up from the football game.