September 2004, Volume 7, Issue 4
From the President’s Desk
The genealogy research on Alexander L. Irwin had come to a standstill since Old Home Week 2001. That was, until the end of May 2004 when a descendant of A. L. Irwin contacted the museum via email from Omaha, Nebraska.
Persistent research, through census records, obituary notices, and cemetery records produced the following information about Alexander L. Irwin.
Alexander L. Irwin was born September 15, 1811 and died September 22, 1890. He moved to Chambersburg and opened a hardware store. His first wife, Sara J. Montgomery, died in 1848. They had four children - James Montgomery, G. W. (died in infancy), Alfred (a.k.a. Alford) L., and Jane (a.k.a. Jennie) E. G. Irwin.
James M. and Alfred L. are not listed on census records, for this area, past September 8, 1860, when they were last mentioned as living at home in Greencastle. Neither of them is buried in the family plot at Cedar Grove Cemetery, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. We surmised that James and Alfred went west with their sister Jane when she married Scott K. Snively from Shady Grove in January 1868. Jane and Scott Snively moved to Missouri, Wyoming, Iowa, and Arizona. It is their descendants who have supplied the museum with so much amazing information.
Alexander moved to Greencastle in 1855 and established Greencastle's first hardware store. Irwin's business prospered and he amassed a considerable fortune and was able to live retired for a number of years. He was an active Democrat, both locally and in the county. The Irwin family was associated with the local Diagnothian Literary Society.
Alexander's second marriage was to Martha J. Means. They had five children, the last two being fraternal twins. The children were Thomas M., Alexander Fleming (died at age 25), Sarah Annie, Margaret Belle and Josiah Smith, fraternal twin of Margaret died at three years of age. The three surviving children from the second marriage did not marry, leaving no descendants in Greencastle-Antrim, which brought us to a dead end in genealogy research until May of this year.
Ecstatic describes the way I felt when we opened the email from Omaha. The Irwin descendant found the museum by typing in “Scott Snively.” It was Christmas in May for AAMI because he has supplied AAMI with never-before-seen photographs of Alexander; his second wife, Martha; c. 1860 photographs of the three surviving children from his first marriage – James M., Alfred, and Jane; a photograph of Scott K. Snively, who Jane married in 1868; and Scott’s parents – Melchi Snively who founded Shady Grove and his wife, Elizabeth Newcomer! These photographs were shown to the public for the first time during Old Home Week 2004.
Never did I believe that I would have accurate visual images of the man and woman who built the museum house, let alone some of their children. These are the people who built the house on the eve of the Civil War and lived, ate and slept and walked through the rooms and hallways of the house over a period of 73 years. When Alexander and Martha died, their bodies laid in the small parlor while the surviving family members received mourners. This is a miraculous, serendipitous happening.
The bonuses were the Snively photographs of Melchi, founder of Shady Grove, his wife Elizabeth, and a son Scott. To my knowledge, there is no other photograph of Melchi Snively in existence. Melchi was Shady Grove’s first post master and built the original part of the building which now houses Kline’s grocery store.
The Irwin/Snively photographs will continue to be on exhibit at the museum, for the time being. Please stop by to view these amazing images of Greencastle-Antrim's heritage.
Internship and Community Service
 |
This summer AAMI has been blessed with the services of Rebecca Elgin, Antrim Township, and Marty Zimmerman III, Greencastle. Rebecca, a graduate student at Shippensburg University, completed an internship with Allison-Antrim Museum as one of the requirements toward her masters in history education. Among the day-to-day operations at the museum, she has lessened my duties by helping with installation and de-installation of exhibits, writing the visitor notebook, and the tedious job of entering names and memberships into the Past Perfect software program, which is a museum membership and collection-management system. |
| From the left, Rebecca Elgin, Marty Zimmerman, and Diana Stottlemyer peruse one of the George F. Ziegler letters written during the Civil War while he was a member of the 126th Pennsylvania Volunteers. Under Rebecca’s guidance, Diana and Marty learned how to properly handle the letters, while choosing about eight letters from the Ziegler collection that were then displayed during the July and Old Home Week open houses. |
In the membership letter that you received in July, I alluded to taking a different approach this year to reaching out to the teachers and students of the Greencastle-Antrim School District. When I attended the Pennsylvania Federation’s annual state museum conference in Johnstown, I learned about an idea that has been successful for other museums in connecting with local school districts and helps establish long-term relationships with teachers and students. The idea involves providing lesson plans to teachers, which are tailored to each educational level. It makes perfect sense. The teachers have no idea what is in the museum’s collections, but I do. In writing a lesson plan, the Pennsylvania State Education standards need to be met, along with local curriculum requirements, which is something I don’t know how to do. The challenge was merging what’s in the collections with pertinent lesson plans. Rebecca did her student teaching in the GASD and is familiar with the requirements for the district’s lesson plans. She and I have merged our areas of knowledge to provide ready-made lesson plans for the teachers.
Presentations to the social studies departments at the different levels and tours are already scheduled. I am confident that this action plan will help achieve AAMI’s first long-range plan objective, which states that the museum will work with schools, students, and young people to promote active participation in AAMI and promote interest in local history.
Marty Zimmerman III has been a familiar face around the museum since he was in sixth grade. He is now a junior at GAHS. During this busy summer for AAMI, Marty completed his official 30 hours of community service, which is required for graduation. His duties included, among many things, being present for open houses, transcribing primary documents to computer files, helping with the installation of exhibits, directing visitors to the appropriate sessions during the six hours of Reminiscing during Old Home Week, and representing the museum at the first Community Service Fair held during open house at the high school, prior to the opening of school.
Allison-Antrim Museum is now officially on both the Shippensburg University’s list for internships and Greencastle-Antrim High School’s community service list. The museum appreciates the fact that Rebecca and Marty chose AAMI to fulfill their graduation requirements.
September Exhibit
This
cast iron room-heating stove was made in the foundry
of Crowell and Davison, Greencastle, Pennsylvania.
The company name and town is "embossed" into the
casting. The stove dates from 1862 to sometime in the late
1860s, the time period during which the business was known
as Crowell and Davison. Courtesy of Allison-Antrim Museum.
“Heavy Metal… Franklin County Cast Iron” will be the focus of the September exhibit. Iron ore + limestone + trees + water power + manual labor = iron. Did you know that Franklin County’s eastern and western areas of the valley held the richest iron ore deposits in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and perhaps in the nation? In the era of the iron industry, this fact led to the largest industrial employment in Franklin County. At the Mont Alto Furnace alone, 500 workmen were employed. In 1840, Franklin County had eight operating furnaces, 11 forges, bloomeries, and rolling mills.
Baranabus Hughes, an Ulster Scot from County Donegal, was granted over 20,000 acres of land from Lord Baltimore in the mid-eighteenth century. The land was mostly in Frederick County, Maryland but extended northward to the Mont Alto area in Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Barnabus was one of the first settlers to mine the ore and establish three iron furnaces, just south of the Mason-Dixon Line, prior to the Revolutionary War.
The Mont Alto Furnace, located on land owned today by Penn State Mont Alto, was built by Barnabus’ sons Daniel and Samuel Hughes in 1807-1808. The ironworks complex included eight ore mines, charcoal pits, furnaces, foundry, forge (Old Forge), rolling mill, and nail factory.
William, Benjamin, and George Chambers (sons of Benjamin Chambers Sr.) built Franklin County’s first iron furnace in 1783 at Mount Pleasant. This furnace was closed in 1834 and the forge, which was nearby, closed in 1843. In 1865, a second furnace, called Richmond Furnace, was built on the original site.
Other well-known furnaces in Franklin County included Caledonia (owned and operated by Thaddeus Stevens), Falling Spring, Franklin, Mount Pleasant (Southern Pennsylvania Iron and Railroad Co.), and Roxberry. Foundries included the Crowell Foundry in Greencastle, which was later used by the Geiser Manufacturing Company.
You can learn more about cast iron and how it impacted daily living when you visit the September exhibit. Photographs, stoves, firebacks, a bell, and a snow bird from several of the area’s well-known iron works will be on exhibit from the collections of Sean Guy, Becky Dietrich, , and from the collections of Allison-Antrim Museum. Other everyday items on display will include cooking vessels and utensils, andirons, and hitching posts that are on loan from Roy and Ada Leckron, James H. Craig Sr., Bonnie A. Shockey. Visitors will also be treated to a sampling of cornbread that was baked in a cast iron cornbread pan.
See Calendar of Events for dates and times.
September General Meeting
Roger Swartz is returning to Greencastle to speak to AAMI members and the public about Indian Trails and Early Roads of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Swartz, a history professor at the Hagerstown Community College, lectures and frequently serves as a tour guide for groups, such as the Smithsonian. He is a recognized authority on the Colonial period in this region of the country. Swartz’s presentation will examine early Indian trails through our area, like the Warriors’ Path, and early roads that traverse the Cumberland Valley, southern Pennsylvania, and Maryland, including Forbes Road. See Calendar of Events for date and time.
October Annual Membership Meeting
The speaker for the annual dinner meeting will be retired East Philadelphia Police Department Sergeant Walt Coughlin, who will talk about organized crime in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, with emphasis on the mafia. Couglin, a 30-year veteran of the police department, was a member of the crime unit and is an expert on the mafia. He has appeared as a “talking head” on A & E and public television, sharing his wealth of knowledge on organized crime in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Please be forewarned that the oral presentation may be somewhat graphic by times. See Calendar of Events for date and time.
Annual Membership
The board of directors of Allison-Antrim Museum welcomes our new members and thanks you, the general membership, for renewal of your annual dues. If you haven’t yet renewed, a membership application has been included with this newsletter for your convenience. Your 2004 – 2005 membership card will be included with the November newsletter.
What’s Been Happening
- There were over 600 visitors who toured the museum during the 24 hours that the museum was open for Old Home Week.
- Attendance was phenomenal for the Reminiscing series during Old Home Week with over 150 people in attendance for just one of the sessions.
- We have now sold a little more than half of the 1,500 pictorial history books, which the museum purchased as a fund-raiser for the barn project. Autographed copies of the books are available at the museum (717.597.9010) or at the Chamber of Commerce (717.597.4610). The Chamber is open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. When all the books are sold, AAMI will make about $8,000.
The books make great gifts for birthdays and other special occasions, and don’t forget Christmas is coming.
- Sue Stoner of Antrim Township was the lucky winner of the beautiful community signature quilt that was raffled off during Old Home Week. She was ecstatic when she received the phone call.
Allison-Antrim Museum especially thanks Joanne Thomas, a museum member, for the many hours that she spent doing appliqué work, assembling, and quilting the heirloom quilt. Thanks also to the other ladies of Greencastle and Antrim Township for hand-stitching the blocks and to AAMI member Becky Sucky for applying the binding.
- The outside woodwork and doors of the museum house were painted in preparation for Old Home Week.
- The barn project is progressing. Excavation for the foundation will begin in September and then the reconstruction of the limestone foundation will follow. Please stop by and look at the magnificent limestones in the back yard.