MINA DARLAND PINE HOLLOW SKIN
MINA DARLAND PINE HOLLOW SERIES

Or potatoes we coated with mud and buried under the firewood until done.īeside the tent, in the tiny pool of an icy spring, Mother submerged bottles of milk, jars of butter, eggs and other perishable food.

MINA DARLAND PINE HOLLOW SKIN

I ate a lot of hot dogs speared on sharpened sticks and cooked until the blackened skin burst and juice sizzled in the flames. Mom would set her coffee pot or frying pan on a steel rack laid atop the rocks and turn out great bacon and eggs or hamburgers. For two months we lived in a large brown canvas surplus army tent and slept on folding GI cots.Įvery night we cooked over an open fire, ringed with big white rocks. In the summer of 1947, my family camped in those woods. My last visit to number 10 was in 1957 with D_ M_, innocently holding hands as we looked down from the tree-shaded path.Ī tributary of the Shenango River flowed through an area called Pine Hollow, where thick green woods grew along sloping hills. The river had once been part of the Erie Canal system and the crumbling walls of lock number 10 are an easy walk from the edge of town. In each town, tall black furnace towers spewed dark smoke in long plumes that stretched for miles across the valley.

MINA DARLAND PINE HOLLOW SERIES

The Shenango flowed gently most of the time, curving here and there through lush farmlands and isolated forests until the series of small steel towns appeared, beginning with Greenville in the north and ending with Farrell, Sharpsville being in the middle.

The PCB level had yet to be measured, so locals swam in the water and ate the fish they caught without worry. In the 1950s the river didn’t look as polluted as it certainly must have been. Starting in the mid-1800s a steel industry flourished along the banks, bringing jobs to the area but also polluting the air and river water. The Shenango River was always a method of transportation and the reason several towns had grown along it.

Irene Caldwell O’Neill, the originator of this series of Sharpsville memories, shares similar recollections of Pine Hollow during the 1940s and 1950s in the following essay. We did so either by walking for about a mile along the Erie Railroad tracks or backtracking to the main road (Route 518) until we returned to our small-town lives in Sharpsville, Pennsylvania.įorest view. Fond memories of that place for all of us.”Īs the sun lowered in the sky and a towering railroad trestle came into view, we sensed that we should start back home. My brother Pat recalls that he “accompanied Mom to Pine Hollow once on an excursion to hunt mushrooms. Carrying our knapsacks filled with snacks, pencils and sketching pads, and other “emergency supplies”, we would follow the narrow creek that wandered through the woods, teetering over the flowing water as we crossed on a huge decaying log, occasionally stopping to search for crawdads, minnows, interesting stones, and frogs. We unofficially called the area “Pine Hollow” although it may have actually been a part of Pine Hollow Run, which is located in one of several watershed basins that supply Sharpsville with tap water.

Mina darland pine hollow