Jul 13, 2003 By Glenn Tunney 9 min read

Jack Sabo responded “yes” to a simple request back in 1954, and according to Jack, he has never regretted giving that answer. When the West Brownsville native was asked to serve as borough secretary by then-borough council president Charles Moser, he accepted the job and guaranteed himself a box seat from which he has observed the evolution of West Brownsville borough during the past half-century. In a recent conversation, I asked Jack to talk about the expansion of the borough to include Blainesburg, a community that lies on the hill above the original borough of West Brownsville.

“West Brownsville borough has two precincts today,” I said. “I believe the original portion of the borough that lies along the Monongahela River was founded back in 1850. When and why did Blainesburg join the borough?”

“It happened right after I got the borough secretary’s job in 1954,” Jack explained, “and the decision was not popular with everyone. There were some people here in lower West Brownsville, which is called Precinct No. 1, who did not want to dilute their power by adding the people up on the hill to the borough’s population. Then you had people whom I feel were more forward-thinking.

“They realized that if the town was going to have residential or industrial expansion, it would have to take place somewhere beyond our boundaries down here along the river, because we were too small and we were geographically hemmed in.

“Before Blainesburg became part of the borough, it was part of East Pike Run Township, and its children attended that township’s schools. When it came time for the people of Blainesburg to decide whether to join the borough, most of them wanted to come into the borough, but they did not want to come into the Brownsville school district, because Brownsville’s millage rate was higher than that of East Pike Run Township School District.

“Of course, that’s all turned upside down now. I agree that it was unusual that they only came into the borough government but not into the school district. I don’t know of many places in the state that are divided like that. Blainesburg became Precinct No. 2 in 1954, and eventually, I believe California borough annexed the rest of East Pike Run Township.”

“When West Brownsville borough annexed Blainesburg,” I said, “how did that change the borough council setup?

“It did not change it at all. There were still seven council members, and it was still at-large voting. Of course, there was a bit of a rivalry between the two precincts as to which of them might dominate the council, but it has worked out fine. You rarely hear complaints about more money being spent on one precinct than the other.”

“So West Brownsville borough elections have never been by wards, such as was done in Brownsville borough? Always at-large?”

“That’s right.”

“Let’s talk about borough expenditures. I would imagine that the largest expenditure these days is probably the sewage project, right?”

“It is definitely coming,” Jack replied. “The project has the funding in the form of grant money from Rural Utility Services and bank loans, and it has the organization, the sewage authority. So it is on the way.

“Right now, there is no public sewage treatment in either precinct of the borough. There are two streets in Blainesburg – Jefferson and Madison – that have sewage pipes in the ground. The rest of the streets up there do not even have pipes, just ditches. Everybody is going to have to join the new system, so it should make the place a lot healthier up there.

“Down in Precinct No. 1, there are pipes carrying a combination of untreated sewage and storm water into the river. There are seven or eight outflows into the river between the railroad bridge and the old inter-county bridge.

You can’t see them now, but when the river was lower before they built the Maxwell locks and dam, you could walk along the beaches on this side of the river and see just raw sewage coming out of the pipes. Since they raised the river, it is still going in, but you don’t see it.”

“And what about the frequent disputes with the railroad? Would you consider the railroad to be a positive or a negative for the borough?”

“As [former mayor] Steve Yerant used to say, every time a train went through town hauling coal it meant jobs for coal miners. Over the years train traffic has increased, with most of the trains carrying coal from Greene County and West Virginia to power plants. Some is even going to Germany, for what purpose I do not know.

“Steve thought the trains going through town were a sign of prosperity, but as the coal mines have turned to more and more machinery, there are fewer coal mining jobs. You go through this town today, maybe you’ll find a dozen coal miners. Meanwhile, residents who live along the tracks complain about the dust, the noise, and the shaking of their houses.”

“Why do the tracks keep sinking lower than the rest of the street surface?” I asked.

“They have never been able to get enough ballast underneath the tracks to keep them from settling under those heavy coal cars. On the other hand, if it weren’t for the railroad, it would be pretty expensive for the borough to keep Main Street paved, because every time the railroad repairs the tracks, they pave the street for us.”

“When you first started as borough secretary in 1954, were all of the borough streets paved?”

“No. The lower part of the borough was paved, but Blainesburg was mostly ‘red dog’ streets. One problem we have up there is that they were resurfaced over the red dog, and heavy garbage trucks and other vehicles continue to be hard on them.”

“Red dog is created when . . .?”

“. . . when coal and whatever slate there is in these slate dumps catches fire through spontaneous combustion,” Jack explained. “When it is all burned out, what is left is this reddish rock. For the longest time, people and the borough were using the red dog dump near Lilley, just north of West Brownsville. When California Gun Club took over that property, they stopped us from going down there and tried to keep people out of the place because they were trashing it. But there is still a lot of red dog down there. The borough doesn’t use red dog any more.”

“If the future of the town depends in part upon taking advantage of the borough’s proximity to the river,” I commented, “do you feel West Brownsville has ever fully done that?”

“If you go back into the past,” Jack said, “there were many boatyards in West Brownsville that built steamboats. This was the place where pioneers going westward would often transfer to boats to go to Pittsburgh and on down the Ohio River. Nowadays the American Legion has been storing some big boats down there on their property, and a lot of people put their boats and jet skis into the river there at their docking facility. But there is no marina here as there is, for example, at Denbo.”

“If West Brownsville ever had a legitimate business district,” I said, “would it have been located in the buildings that were demolished when the four-lane highway was built in the late 1960s? I’m referring to businesses that were along Railroad (Main) Street opposite the entrance to the bridge.”

“That’s right,” Jack agreed. “Hine’s Tavern, pronounced ‘hine eeze,’ was in those buildings.” Jack laughed as he added, “He had a clock in there that ran backwards.

“Then there was Potter-McCune, and beyond that to the southwest, Bakewell-Hartmann, Herbertson’s Ford, a radiator shop, and a service station. Also on that end of town was the Swift Packing Company, whose building is still there along the railroad siding. Chunk’s, formerly called Louie’s Restaurant, was also in that vicinity. All of those businesses are defunct.”

“With many small towns constantly battling budget shortfalls, do you think a merger would ever happen between Brownsville and West Brownsville boroughs?”

“It would have to be driven by economics,” Jack reasoned. “If municipalities could not survive on their own, then they would have to get together.

I’ve noticed that as long as individual municipalities have their own police departments, they are afraid that if they join together, somehow the majority area will get more police protection. I don’t know if that is true or not, but it seems to be a concern.”

“It would be a tough political decision for the respective councils,” I observed. “It seems more difficult these days to convince qualified candidates to run for school board or town council and make those controversial decisions.”

“That’s true, although being on a school board is a lot simpler than being on a town council,” Jack stated.

“You think so?” I asked.

“Oh, I know it is,” Jack nodded his head. “The school board is pretty much hemmed in by the state so far as the types of decisions it can make. The board members’ responsibility is to maintain the school system. They don’t have to worry about roads, sewage, surface water problems, flooding, the police department – every facet of a resident’s daily life. I recall an occasion when we had someone come on to the council who had been on the school board, thinking it was going to be like the school board, and soon found out that it wasn’t.”

Public service, once considered an honor and a high-minded duty, has struggled in recent decades to attract individuals willing to take on the often-thankless burden of guiding their communities into the future. Jack Sabo is one of a rare breed of citizen who has spent his life teaching youngsters about civic responsibility, not only in the classroom, but also through the actions of his life outside the classroom. We commend him for his willingness over the past 50 years to invest so much of himself in an effort to keep West Brownsville borough growing and improving.

Glenn Tunney may be contacted at glenatun@hhs.net or 6068 National Pike East, Grindstone, PA 15442. Comments about these weekly articles may be sent to Mark O’Keefe (Managing Editor – Day), 8 – 18 East Church Street, Uniontown, Pa. or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com . All past articles are on the Web at http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~glenntunneycolumn/