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Monument
Centre Daily Times December 29 2002, page C1, C8
Man preserving town's legacy
By Rich Kerstetter; rkerstet@centredaily.com
"Jim Davy pauses in the foot-deep snow along Beech Creek, gazing into the stream at the huge boulder that gave his town a name.
"That's Monument Rock," he says, as the water and the years flow swiftly by. 'That was blasted off that wall up there when they put the dinky (narrow gauge) railroad in."
Davy strides past the concrete remains of the clay bins that once held the raw material his father molded into bricks - thousands of bricks, day after day, week after week - and he pauses as if to listen for the whistle that once regulated his life.
That whistle regulated everyone's life in Monument, a tiny, remote factory town in Liberty Township, where the "crick" marks the boundary of Centre and Clinton counties. But the Harbison-Walker brickyard whistle hasn't called anyone to work in nearly half a century.
The mines - Plane Hill and Twin Run - where townsmen toiled on their knees to extract clay and coal, are long shut down. The brick plant itself no longer stands, only a few derelict structures mark its once overwhelming presence.
"I just noticed," says Davy, who notices everything here, "the big smoke stack is gone. It used to stand right there."
Earlier, while driving through town, Davy pointed out the house in the row of identical buildings along the old railroad bed where he grew up, the church the company built in 1922, the double house he and his wife shared while raising their two children.
"That's where Mr. Grand lived," he says, nodding toward the adjacent half double, now empty. "You can still see the 'G' on the door."
Empty spaces mark homes long torn or burned down.
Not all of the homes are vacant; not all of the occupied houses look their age.
But even a casual visitor, without Davy's love of history, can sense that the town has seen better days.
"The general store stood right here," he says. "Here's where the freight station was."
Davy knows them all, and knew everyone who lived there.
"This was the shower building," he says, pointing to one of the few remnants of the Harbison-Walker plant. "We used to come down here to use the toilet. It was warm in there and ours was outside."
Davy's mind roams freely, as he and his friends once roamed through the town and the factory where everyone's father worked.
"As kids, we wandered throughout the brickyard just like we were employees," he recalls, turning once again toward the nearby water.
"That was our favorite swimming hole - the Deep Hole, we called it," he says. "Any kid that grew up in Monument is going to know where the Deep Hole we called it," he says. "Any kid that grew up in Monument is going to know where the Deep Hole is."
Davy is a spry 64 years old, hut his step slows, not quite faltering, as he treads on what was once a railroad spur between the factory and the creek.
Although he lives in nearby Orviston, another brick company town, and passes through Monument every day, he rarely returns to the site of the old brickyard.
"Never," he says, pointedly. "It's just too painful."
Life in a company town
"The Hollow," the area upstream and into the mountains from the town of Beech Creek, first came to the attention of the outside world due to its vast timber resources. Lumber cut from an early sawmill there was used to build the Clarks Ferry Bridge near Harrisburg.
Later, the rich mineral deposits - clay and coal - brought entrepreneurs to the Hollow. Harbison-Walker built its first firebrick plant around 1901.
Three miles upstream, General Refractories built another brick plant in Orviston. The road - state Route 364 - literally ends at Orviston.
"Monument is almost at the end of the world," Davy jokes during the introduction of his slide-show presentation to the Centre County Historical Society.
But growing up, it was the only world he knew, and now he is dedicated to defending and preserving that world, interviewing many of those who worked there, recording their memories and passing them on.
"Company towns have been given a black eye. The general impression is that (companies) took advantage of the people," he tells his audience. "But Monument wasn't like that. Monument was a good place to live, a good place to work, a good place to grow up."
From the turn of the 20th century until the brick plant closed in May 1953, Harbison-Walker owned Monument "lock, stock and barrel," Davy says.
'They owned the houses, they owned the general store. Everybody had an account at the store that that account was deducted from the men's paychecks. It was a pretty good set-up," Davy explains. "They took care of the streets, painted the houses, fixed the porch steps."
The $11-a-month rent was also deducted from Davy's father's check, still leaving enough for him to support his family.
"During the 1940s, my father was bringing home $100 a week, and that was good money." Davy says.
But it didn't last.
With the demise of steam locomotives and coal-fired blast furnaces in the steel industry, the firebricks from Monument and Orvision were no longer needed. Harbison-Walker closed its plant.
The factory whistle was silent.
Preserving history
Davy, who was in his teens when the Monument plant closed, eventually went to work as a draftsman for Corning Glass. After a brief period in New York, he returned to his hometown and worked for Corning's State College-area facility, front which he retired a year ago.
"I knew he wasn't going to be happy anywhere else," Dorothy, his wife of 46 years, says while sitting in the kitchen of their Orviston home. Fittingly, their home was once the home of the superintendent, and later assistant superintendent, of the Orviston brick-yard.
Their son, Steve, 46, lives next door.
Steve, who teaches at the Rock-view state penitentiary, says the Monument-Orviston area stands out in contrast to what lie calls "all the hustle and bustle and the crime and the concern from a security standpoint about modern culture."
He doesn't mind the 32-mile commute to Rockview or the 11-mile drive to the nearest convenience store in Beech Creek.
'This is a great place to raise a family." says Steve, whose wife teaches in the Bellefonte Area School District. They have two children.
"You get a real sense of community you don't find anywhere else," he says.
"As a young boy, I tried to visualize what was the brickyard like,"
Steve says in the locally produced video "Orviston: Little Town in the Mountain." "How loud was it? What did the whistle sound like? What was that path up over the hill for?"
His father has spent the last 35 years or so trying to preserve the answers to those questions.
He started talking to the old-timers, gathering their memories and collecting photographs.
"Here's the Monument baseball team," he says, showing off a late-1940s collection of local heroes.
"Everybody had nicknames: Fitz, Rayme, Scrub, Pont, Cotton, Delt, Hag, Dimp, Rooty, Umz," says Davy. "My real name is Howard Thomas, but I've always been called Jim."
That was started by his father, "Skunk" Davy.
"He used to trap in his younger days and one (lay he caught a skunk," Davy explains, "and it got him."
Davy carefully shows the old photographs and speaks lovingly of the people, most of them now, like the brickyard, long gone.
"Tom Grand - almost everything I know about Monument's history conies from him," Davy says. "He was just a small man, maybe 110 pounds, hut he could load more clay than any other miner in town."
Dorothy, known by everyone as "Dot," chimes in.
"Mr. Grand came from the old country - Italy - when he was 4. He learned to read and write from the Bible," she says. Dot Davy is a late-comer to Monument.
"I never got to hear the whistle blow," she says.
Her family moved there in 1953, after the brickyard closed. Her father was a projectionist for a theater in Lock Haven and, with a large family, had difficulty finding a house to rent anywhere else.
"We came kicking and screaming. We didn't want to live out here in the wilderness,' she recalls.
Her family left a few years later, but the Monument-Orviston area has grown on her, as it has her husband, who followed her - "wouldn't leave me alone." she jokes - and eventually married her.
"I love the people here" she says. 'There is a sense of community here people Jim grew up with, when they see each other, it's hugs and kisses. They share something special, and sometimes I'm really envious of that."
"There were no strangers in town," her husband explains. "Everybody knew everybody's business. It was totally different than any community that I know of today anywhere. They just don't have that closeness.
"We knew every family in that town; the nicknames, every kid, we knew the dog's name. We knew everything there was to know about every family. not just next door, but every one in town,' Davy says, "We knew how many deer they killed that hunting season, we knew who the biggest outlaw was; who was prominent in church,"
And people depended on each other - as isolated as they were, they bad to - Dot says.
"If someone was sick, everyone in town took food," she recalls.
And many of the people who experienced that closeness are coming home.
"Some from Florida, Las Vegas, Nevada and closer - Beech Creek, the Lock Haven area - people who moved away to find work and raise their families are moving hack," Davy says.
But still, the town of Monument is a pale imitation of what it was in the heyday of the brick industry, when it was home to nearly 6t) families in addition to single workers in the town boardinghouse and the "shanties" where the single miners lived.
And it's the memory of that Monument that Davy is doing all he can to preserve.
"I could see that what I knew, that culture, was disappearing and no one would know that it had ever existed," he explains.
"The general impression of company towns is that they were terrible, hut Monument was a great place to live."
An appreciation
"He's really quite a historian," says Bob Anderson, chairman of the Liberty Township supervisors, who also appreciates the town's legacy and Davy's work in preserving it.
"In '95 or '96, I videorecorded every slide the man has," Anderson recalls of Davy's presentation. "And down in front of the group, I took photos of all the elderly people from the town who were there. I believe they're all deceased now.
Census figures indicate that about 130 people currently live in the Monument area, down considerably from when the brick-yard was at its peak. But, Anderson notes, not all the buildings are ramshackle.
"When the plant shut down and sold the properties, they were going for a nickel and a handshake," Anderson says. "A lot of families are still there from the old days. And Liberty Township has a lenient tax structure, so people are willing to drive the extra miles from Monument to where they work and some of them try to outdo each other in keeping their houses up."
But some properties in Monument - like the brickyard itself - are not exactly neighborhood showpieces, and, Anderson admits, "the road out there is snaky"
"It was in danger of becoming an abandoned town," Davy says, explaining one of the motivating factors in his preservation work.
The word "abandoned" carries a heavy emotional weight for Davy, who wrote "Death of a Legacy," reflecting on the brick-yard's demise. During the close of November's presentation at Centre Furnace Mansion, Davy was unable to read that passage, in which the word "abandoned" figures prominently. Neither was his son, who also struggled to choke back his emotions.
"Steve and I have to be careful when we get into this because we feel so close to it - so strong," Davy explains. "It's kind of like you're losing part of your past."
So it was left to Davy's daughter-in-law to read Davy's elegy to a way of life in the Hollow.
"I want to put it all down into a formal presentation," Davy says.
"I'm reluctant to use the word 'book,' but I want to put it down," he says. "When you speak, the words are gone right after you're done, hut written words last."
Even if a way of life in a company town, and the whistle that regulated everyone's life, do not.
Rich Kerstetter can be reached at 235-3928.
Man's elegy mourns for town's loss
Jim Davy wrote this elegy to the company town of Monument and closes his slide-show presentation with it.
'Death of a Legacy'
The dead silence of these remaining old walls seem to reek of that awful ugly word - "abandoned."
When we read Webster's meaning of the word: To leave completely and finally, to forsake; to give up all concern; to cast away or leave with no intention of return. How painfully accurate and fitting they are in this instance.
To be abandoned is to he forgotten, overlooked, ignored. The word, like this old building, carries a heavy empty ring. It does not represent merely death, but death on the installment plan. Peeling paint, rusting steel, rotting and falling roofs, tall weeds unhindered by busy traffic grow where men once scurried about at a feverish pace to earn a living. Tall towers with their elevators, massive pan wheels with rusting steel tires stand like orphans amid these quiet surroundings.
There's a strange hollow feeling you get when you stand within this atmosphere of broken glass and motionless wheels. In years to come, someone may ask, "What were these men like who worked in this place? Were they content in their work? How many Christmases did they celebrate while working here? Was it painful for them to leave?" And a host of other intimate little details that will be lost in the passing of time.
Will there he a legacy handed down to their children? Or their children's children? Doubtful. in answer the question, "Why have things come to this state?" One can only offer the lame excuse - "progress."
But we must be careful, for to measure the quality of life with something called progress is not only deceptive, but destructive."
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