The long-lost village that refuses to die
The columnist’s initial reaction to viewing the drought at Yough Lake, east of Uniontown on Route 40, was to think of the recent NASA snapshots of the Mars surface: Like Mars, this tiny slice of Somerset County is, for the moment at least, flat, rocky, and reddish.
Then there is the old arched stone bridge. As a writer by the name of Merritt Ierley noted decades ago, every once in a while the bridge, constructed early in the 19th century, reemerges during rainless patches, “dries itself off, and, like some giant frog, stretches out in the sun.”
As for Somerfield, the “ancient small town” described by Thomas Searights in “The Old Pike” which once occupied this piece of land, it is here, too, in the form of tree stumps and the remnants of sidewalks and of one foundation.
All of this in normal times is invisible, covered by acres of water, the better to run small boats over. The unimpeded Youghiogheny River flowed here until government engineers, at the command of Congress, built the dam at Confluence.
The lake was fully operational by 1948 or so. By then, its political architect was dead. J. Buell Snyder represented Fayette and Somerset counties in Congress from 1933 until his death in February 1946.
Snyder, a shrewdly-positioned New Deal Democrat, pictured himself as a colleague of men more powerful than himself. During his 1944 political campaign, Snyder insisted that he “sits in council on War Strategy with Marshall … and Churchill.”
It was kind of hooey, though Snyder wasn’t entirely inconsequential as the chairman of the House subcommittee which approved military appropriations for World War II.
He managed to bring two House Speakers and a Secretary of War to the rostrums in Uniontown. He rode on the airplane from Washington and stood alongside Gen. George C. Marshall when the Uniontown native toured his “old haunts” on an official visit in 1939.
Snyder was an accomplished legislator, a great supporter of the labor union movement, and prescient: Well before Dwight Eisenhower came along, he was pitching the idea of an interconnected system of nationwide four-lane highways.
He bragged on the campaign trail that he was “known in Congress as the ‘father of super-highways.'”
And don’t suppose for a minute that he took a political hit for the forced abandonment of Somerfield. He championed the dam, ran for re-election on it. The Army Corps of Engineer colonel in charge of construction, E.R. Covell, praised Snyder’s “tireless” pursuit of the cash to get the job done.
Give Buell Snyder credit. Blame him, too, if you think deep-sixing Somerfield and the old stone bridge were awful things to do.
If you’re of the latter persuasion, do not overlook the fact that seeing the bridge only so often makes the occasions when it is manifest extra special. Built in 1818 and still standing despite tons of water sloshing over, through, and around it. Wow. WOW!
They don’t build ’em like that anymore.
Before being buried in watery myth, Somerfield was a town like any other town. It had its share of tragedies. Searights takes notice of two incidents of men having their throats slashed. One, John Blocker, the postmaster, was discovered lying in a pool of his own blood.
Blocker survived the ordeal.
It had town heroes. William Wiley was one of these. A shoemaker, Wiley was “one of the most tireless and devoted friends” of slaves trying to escape bondage by fleeing from nearby Maryland into the “free” state of Pennsylvania, according to “The Old Pike.”
Traveling the nation’s first federally-constructed road would have been a harried affair without Somerfield, one of the road’s horse-changing stations. (The equine is not inexhaustible.)
A mainstay of the National Road, Somerfield undoubtedly welcomed its share of 19th century celebrities and curiosities to town. One thinks of Kentucky’s Henry Clay on his way to Washington. Barnstorming circuses. Wondering tramps. Itinerant salesmen. Touring minstrels.
Somerfield kicked up its heels occasionally. Searights recounts “light feet, impelled by lighter hearts, tripp[ing] to the notes of merry music.”
Somerfield has had a remarkable second life – in memory. Thanks, in no small part, to Buell Snyder.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.