History of the Isaac C. Woodward house continues
The 1965 taking of the Isaac C. Woodward house by the Luzerne Township School Board brought a controversial end to that century-old historic home. In today’s article, as we learn more about the background to that story, we will trace the dispersal of the Woodward farm property following Isaac’s death. Created from that property were several residential areas, one of which is now known as the Woodward Plan. Following Captain Woodward’s death in 1898, his will directed that his property be divided between his two married daughters, Mrs. Mary Woodward Reichard and Mrs. Anna Maria Woodward Parks.
“Mary Reichard’s portion of the property was eventually sold,” explained Ann Frondorf of Brownsville, who is Isaac C. Woodward’s great-granddaughter. “Mary sold some of it to her sister, who was my grandmother Anna Parks, but much of Mary’s part of the farm was apportioned into lots and sold to individuals who built homes on them.”
David Gratz of Brownsville lent me two maps that show the layout of the streets and lots in “Woodward Place” and “Woodward Place – Second Addition,” two plans of lots that were created at different times from some of Mary Reichard’s property. Mary’s inherited portion of the Woodward farm extended about 850 feet inside Brownsville Borough, all the way to Broad Street (the street next to the A Plus Mini Mart).
The first group of lots that Mary created was called Woodward Place. Woodward Place was bordered on the west by High Street, on the north by Broad Street, on the east by a row of lots along the east side of York Street, and on the south by an uneven line that ran west along Reichard Avenue until it reached Greene Street, went one block north to Woodward Street, then west again to High Street. The north-south running streets in the plan were Woodward Street, named for Mary’s father Isaac, and Reichard Avenue, named for Dr. Cyrus Reichard, Mary Woodward Reichard’s husband.
In November 1922, a second development of lots was created from Mary Reichard’s inherited portion of the Isaac C. Woodward farm. It was called “Woodward Place – Second Addition.” This new plan abutted the southern edge of the first Woodward Place and extended further southward to Fayette Avenue in Luzerne Township. Brashear Avenue, the street on which the Brownsville Area High School is located, is included within Woodward Place – Second Addition.
That street’s namesake is uncertain, either being derived from Maria C. Brashear, Isaac Woodward’s wife who died at age 34, or from a later member of the same extended family, astronomer John A. Brashear.
The other half of Isaac C. Woodward’s farm was inherited by Mary’s sister, Anna Maria Woodward. She had married a Blairsville teacher named J. Jewett Parks several decades before Isaac’s 1898 death. When Mr. Parks found his teaching income to be inadequate for him to properly raise his growing family, the couple had moved west, where Parks worked for the railroad in Oklahoma and Texas. In 1902, four years after Isaac died, they returned to Luzerne Township and moved into the Woodward house. The couple’s three children were Ann, Isaac and Josephine. Josephine Parks was Ann Frondorf’s mother.
In 1915 J. Jewett Parks died, leaving his widow and their unmarried daughter, Ann Parks, as the only occupants of the Woodward house. Their other daughter, Josephine, had married a West Brownsville man named Boyd Axton Wells. After the U. S. entered World War I, Boyd Wells, who was nearly 30, joined the army and went to France, and his pregnant wife Josephine moved into the Woodward house to live with her mother and sister. While Boyd was still overseas recovering from a war-related lung infection, the couple’s daughter, Ann Wells, was born.
“My father did not see me until I was 2 years old,” Ann Wells Frondorf told me. “We lived with my grandmother and my aunt in that house until Dad came back from the war. Then we continued to live there until I was about five, because it took my dad a while to get established. He had been in an army hospital with that terrible lung infection and with complications from it.”
It turned out that the complications were caused by an undetected piece of broken rubber tubing that had accidentally been left inside Boyd Wells during wartime surgery. When it was finally discovered and removed after several years of recurring illnesses, he recovered fully and moved the family to Ohio, where he became a successful businessman.
“Ann,” I said, “when did you, your father and mother move out of that house?”
“We moved out of Pinecroft when I was about 6,” Ann replied. “In 1923, the house’s owner, my grandmother Anna Maria, died, and we moved out after that. My unmarried Aunt Ann, who had cared for my grandmother in her later years, did not wish to live there alone, so she moved in with relatives. When she died in 1937, that left my mother, Josephine Parks Wells, as the sole surviving owner of the house and property. My father died at age 58 in 1947, and when mother died in 1958, my sister Jo Hess and I inherited the Woodward estate from her.”
“So that is how you and Jo Hess came to be the owners of the place at the time the school district came calling in 1963,” I said. “I noticed you called the place ‘Pinecroft’ when you were describing it just now.”
“Yes,” Ann said, “that is what the homestead was called when my mother and father were married there early in the twentieth century. We called the house the ‘manor house,’ and the entire homestead was called Pinecroft.”
“Do you think Isaac C. Woodward gave it that name?”
“That I do not know.”
After the 1923 death of Anna Maria Parks and the exodus from the house by the remaining family members who had lived there, the Woodward homestead had no Woodward family member living in it until the late 1950s. Over the next few decades, the property was rented to various tenants, some of whom farmed the property or raised dairy cows.
Shortly after an 1882 drawing of the Isaac C. Woodward homestead appeared in the Herald-Standard next to my Nov. 24, 2002 column, I received a letter from Marianne Stuart Schuhle of Chesterfield, Virginia.. She was one of the tenants who lived at the Woodward homestead.
“The picture of the Woodward Farm brought back some fond memories for me,” wrote Marianne. “I was born in that house, as were several of my cousins. My grandparents rented it from the Parks family and lived there for at least 10 years during the Great Depression. With jobs so scarce, my parents and all my aunts and uncles lived there too. It was wonderful for me being surrounded with so many doting relatives. We moved when I was 5 years old, and I was devastated. My grandmother and I never got over it.”
What does Marianne remember about the house?
“It was brick, and all the rooms were huge with high ceilings and a beautiful central staircase,” Marianne recalled. “I remember the big barn with the stone foundation, and there was a small two-story house behind the main house, where an aunt and uncle lived. The driveway leading to the front of the house formed a huge heart, and my grandmother always planted petunias in there.”
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Former area resident Bill Johnson, now of Olean, N.Y., remembers the homestead in the forties. “When I was in third grade at the old Hiller grade school,” Bill wrote to me, “I became a friend of Donnie McGrady and remained his friend until he passed away in 1990. Donnie’s parents, Henry and Grace McGrady, lived on the old Woodward farm for around 20 years and farmed it. I used to help them with the farm work during the 1940s.”
As time passed, the farm’s appearance changed. By 1963, when the struggle with the school district began, the large barn that Marianne Schuhle remembered was no longer there.
“It burned down a number of years before the house was taken by the school district,” confirmed David Gratz, who lives on Lewis Street across from the spot where the Woodward house once stood.
There had also been two small houses behind the main house, but by 1963, there was only one.
“One of them was used by the hired hand,” remembers Ann Frondorf, “and the other could be used by the fellow who helped with the farming. By the mid-1960s, only one of the small houses remained, because the other had fallen down.”
The 1882 drawing of the Woodward farm shows a lane to the right of the house, leading back toward the large barn. As a boy, Harry Hackney, now of Tampa, Fla.,lived near the Woodward farm, and after studying the 1882 picture of the farm, Harry concluded that the lane that once led to the barn has become Hiller Avenue, the road leading up to the Hiller elementary school.
In the late 1950s, the house experienced a rebirth. Ann Frondorf devoted a tremendous amount of time and expense to restoring and refurnishing the venerable house, taking it back to its nineteenth century appearance. For seven years Ann trekked north from her Florida home, returning to the house where she was born to spend each summer at the restored Woodward homestead.
Next week we will explore what the house’s interior was like after Ann’s careful work to return it to its former grandeur. Yet even as she enjoyed the fruits of her labors, trouble was on the horizon. The coming storm would bring a clash of legal notices and attorneys, letters to the governor and letters to the editor, community protests and curious decisions, all played out against the threatening backdrop of the Power of Eminent Domain.
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Glenn Tunney may be contacted at 724-785-3201, 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/