Jesse Coldren’s tragedy
Editor’s note: This is the final article in a three-part series originally published in 1999.Today, we conclude the story of Jesse Coldren by learning of the true tragedy of his life — the fate of his lifelong ambition to write a “new” history of Brownsville. Jesse’s longtime acquaintance, whom I will identify here as “John” and with whom I spoke in an audio-taped interview, remembers the senior history class taught by his one-time mentor, Jesse Coldren.
“I can remember during my last year of high school, when I was a senior, and he was my home room teacher. I can remember so much, that he would walk and be at the high school as soon as the custodian opened the door in the morning, usually at least an hour, maybe an hour and a half before classes were due to begin. He would begin each day with the same routine. He would take the day’s current events, and he would write them out longhand on the blackboard. Whenever you came to school in the morning, the current events were all written out, ready for you to read and digest and understand.”
“Well, then, there was quite a span of years between your age and Mr. Coldren’s age.”
“Oh yes. He was at least on the upper end of middle age when I was 18 years old in senior high school.”
It was a friendship that evolved between a man who loved to teach and an enthusiastic student who loved to learn. The bond forged by mutual academic respect was intact when Jesse was forced to retire at the age of 70.
“I know that he was very upset about it,” John said of Jesse’s retirement, “because he reminded me that he was still able to walk without assistance. He’d had a lot of practice, he’d walked so many years to teach.”
“So it’s your impression that if he would have been permitted to continue working, he would have?” I asked.
“He would have continued to the day he died. He was that dedicated. He was a very unique person. You had to understand, he had certain traits that were very difficult for someone who didn’t know him to understand.”
John stopped speaking for quite a while. I did not say anything. I could see he was formulating his thoughts. Then, in a pensive way, he continued.
“The tragedy of Jesse Coldren’s life, as far as he was concerned, in the many conversations that we had . . . because we had a rather unusual friendship . . . was the fact that the Brownsville Telegraph, along with its files and its morgue, went up in flames. The entire record of what was preserved in the newspaper files was lost during that fire. The only access that he had to go back to for information about the local inhabitants and residents and the buildings and so on was what was in existence in other locations. Primarily, cemeteries were a source of information, which included Bridgeport Cemetery and Woodlawn Cemetery on the south side of town, Redstone Cemetery for Brownsville itself, the various cemeteries provided by the local churches such as the Methodist Church, the Episcopal church and others.”
“The other place that he had access to was the Uniontown Library and the files of the Morning Herald and the Evening Standard, because if I remember correctly, both were in existence and publishing at that particular time. He also made arrangements to gain access to a collection of newspapers that were owned by Hayden Robinson. He was the owner of Robinson’s Drug Store. Hayden had a rather extensive collection of Monitor and Clipper-Monitor newspapers that predated the beginning of the Civil War.”
The awful implications of the destruction of the Telegraph files were instantly clear to Jesse Coldren. The would-be author of the history of Brownsville intensified his efforts to assemble as much historical information as he could about Brownsville.
In the summers, Jesse paid John, still a student, to visit church and community cemeteries in Brownsville with a notebook and pencil. John’s task was to record the information on all of the tombstones in the cemeteries. The intention of this project was to assemble data on the birth, death and other tombstone information about the founding citizens and early residents of Brownsville and Bridgeport.
John spent several summers in this endeavor. Jesse also paid John to go to the home of Hayden and Marge Robinson on Front Street in Brownsville, where he would sit and hand copy articles from Mr. Robinson’s historic collection of Monitor and Clipper-Monitor newspapers. While Mr. Robinson would not let the newspapers leave the premises, he would allow John to come to the house to copy from them. One article in particular that John remembers copying dealt with the capture of a runaway slave. At the time, the story of the runaway slave made such an impression on John that he remembers it more than half a century later.
I asked John what eventually happened to Mr. Robinson’s rare newspaper collection, but he did not know what had become of it. John also spent summer days at the offices of the Morning Herald and the Evening Standard newspapers in Uniontown, copying articles relevant to the story of Brownsville’s day-to-day existence.
According to John, Jesse had also acquired some original historic documents related to Brownsville, some possibly dating back as far as the Revolution. But perhaps most astonishing of all was Jesse’s amazing newspaper collection. After the 1927 fire at the Telegraph, Jesse saved every newspaper he got his hands on over the next 40 years. He subscribed to several daily newspapers. He bought many others at newsstands, at the railroad stations and elsewhere. He saved them all. Newspapers were stacked in towering piles in his Brashear House apartment. He was determined to have all of the information he needed to compile his history of Brownsville.
On Friday, June 8, 1951, he walked out of the Brownsville High School building on High Street for the last time. A teaching career that had begun in 1900 in a one-room school building and spanned two world wars and half a century was over.
“What will you do now?” he was asked.
Jesse told Pittsburgh Press reporter William A. White that he “hoped to complete a book he is doing on presidential campaign songs. It will cover everything from Washington and “Yankee Doodle” to President Truman and “I’m Just Wild About Harry.”
“No,” Jesse said, “I couldn’t quit work. I have too much to do.”
An eager Telegraph reporter wrote, “He has compiled huge piles of historical information about Brownsville and Fayette County and hopes to write the first complete history of Brownsville.”
Jesse had believed that the great tragedy of his life had been the destruction of the records of his hometown newspaper. He was wrong. Jesse was never aware of the true tragedy of his life.
In 1958, at the age of 78, Jesse died unexpectedly. Upon his death, the Brashear House became the scene of a drama to rival an Agatha Christie mystery. The Dickensian maze of newspaper stacks and piles of historical research and documents, Jesse’s world, was transformed in a few days and nights to a sterile apartment devoid of any evidence that Jesse Coldren had ever lived there.
When the mysterious packing and carrying were finished, the dark hallway of the Brashear House, which had been congested with antique furniture during Jesse’s lifetime, echoed in its emptiness. The stacks of newspapers were gone. The handwritten records of inscriptions on the tombstones of Brownsville’s church cemeteries had disappeared. The historic documents related to Brownsville had been taken away. The irreplaceable hand-copied articles from Mr. Robinson’s historic newspaper collection were nowhere to be found.
In the 1940 yearbook dedication to Mr. Coldren, published 18 years before, his students had written, “We have all known him as one of the outstanding historians of the region, having for several years worked on a new history of Brownsville . . .”
Where was Jesse’s manuscript? Where was this new “History of Brownsville,” his life’s work? Gone without a trace. In 41 years since, it has never surfaced.
Perhaps there are readers of this column who can enlighten us on the events of those days that followed Jesse’s death. It may be that everything that took place can be simply explained. If so, I invite anyone who possesses such information to end our bewilderment. For the past 41 years, the residents of Brownsville who knew and respected Jesse Coldren have been left in the dark about the fate of his records, his possessions and his beloved history of Brownsville.
So there is no Jesse Coldren’s “History of Brownsville” for us to read. We will continue to rely on crumbling copies of Hart’s 1904 “History of the Three Towns” and other more ancient books for our historical research about Brownsville. A history of the twentieth century in Brownsville? We are still waiting for that history to be written. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, we are waiting for it to be written again. Or found.
This is the mystery and the tragedy of the life of Jesse Coldren. A man who seemed to have been born for a purpose. A lifelong student. A dedicated teacher. A devoted son. A relentless researcher. A valued mentor.
And, perhaps, the author of the “History of Brownsville.”
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Comments about these articles may be sent to Editor Mark O’Keefe, 8-18 East Church Street, Uniontown, PA or e-mailed to mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com .