A young man and woman with a baby in her arms stand on West State street in 1910. They are waiting for a trolley to take them to dinner across town at the young man's parents house. His father will likely bring up stories about his boyhood, when folks walked or rode in wagons to travel across town. Progress has made them soft. The baby will live to see men on the moon.
Inter-urban rail traffic experienced a heyday in this time frame, peaking sometime in the early 1920s. The early formation of what was to become the Penn-Ohio (or earlier the Mahoning and Shenango Railway and Light Co.) was very much like businesses grow today. A company that is decent in size dominates the best ground, and smaller groups that see the potential start their own shorter lines, only to be absorbed by the decent sized company until a large company unfolds. There are two exceptional books that get down and dirty into this process, so we will leave that to more focused historians than I. I would just like to share a few stories of interest about the line. I will mention these two detailed works at the end.
For our purposes I propose that we imagine ourselves in a private trolley car taking a joyride. When our trolley stops we will be transported together to a specific time at that stop, only to move on and play with time again at the next stop. We will start in Masury and see where our tour takes us from there. I chose Masury because that is where one of the major “car barns” that housed cars that were not being used was located, near the Sewage treatment plant. We can find a lot to park in nearby. Another reason is that Idlewild Park was there, set up by the trolley system when it closed Deweyville Park. More on Deweyville later. Idlewild (also called Rose) operated successfully until the flood of 1913 and never quite made it back. From Masury we zip over the PA line on South Irvine. These cars were amazingly quick if they needed to be and quieter than you would imagine, maybe just bells to warn you off of the track. We pass stately homes on Irvine and approach the Y&S junction. Here at Irvine and State you can chose to go toward Sharon or transfer to the Y-town and Sharon Line up the hill to Ohio. If we arrive at this point after 1899 we could have taken a day trip to Idora Park by making that transfer. Great distances could be traveled by using just inter-urban streetcars back then if you knew the routes, and streetcar companies loved setting up amusement parks to draw more riders. Maybe we will go to Idora another day, we will take the right down E. State St., and carefully cross the Erie RR tracks.
Let’s view this section of our tour in the mid-1920s, a time of prosperity and calm. We roll by the Erie RR Passenger station on our left at Main, then get a breathtaking view of the new Columbia Theater nuzzled next to the Morgan Grand Opera House. As we cross the metal bridge, the Protected Home Circle Temple dominates on our right and in the blink of an eye McDowell Bank. The 1913 flood that ended Idlewild made this area rise stronger than ever, and the trolleys were a part of that resurgence. Never mind the flash in the pan motor car craze that drove motormen on the line crazy with their foolishness; it will pass.
As we approach Railroad Street our car grinds to a halt. It is February 19, 1910, and what we see ahead is a pile of wreckage that nearly obscures the first two floors of the Shenango House Hotel. Apparently a missed or misunderstood signal allowed one of our trolley cars to be struck and crushed by a backing Erie RR Freight train. An often seen photograph of this incident shows a mob of people around the site, some heroes among them. Everyone was pulled from the wreckage. Some drama ensued,and pressure being put on the investigators led to a memorable Sharon Herald headline on February 22nd. “”PUBLIC BE DAMNED” SAYS TROLLEY MAN”.
If it is true that “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”, then Invention is a colicky spoiled child who demands more invention before she is old enough to be a Mother herself. As the 19th passed into the 20th century, no Mother has been more prolific with invention. Whether we take a left or a right at State and Sharpsville, she has been insanely busy in both directions. Industries and rail yards sprung up quickly, consuming both raw materials and labor. We should understand that the driving force behind the development of the trolley system in the Valley was not park visiting or making life easier for the women of the area, it was to move this huge labor force where they needed to be when they needed to be there. All of the niceties were to entice people to the lines between shift changes. It was necessity, and Mother delivered.
At East State and Sharpsville Avenue, the right rail would take us past the steel mills in South Sharon and eventually on to West Middlesex. Going straight up the East Hill, the oppulent homes may cause one to believe that a large amount of money defies gravity and flows uphill, and the trolley coming back down was a teeth clenching, closed eyes experience, a very slow but unpredictable roller coaster. For our purposes here we will take the left rail.
The very first thing we will pass on our left is the main power generating station for our electric railway. It sat near the spot taken up by the library and its parking lot. We speed onward in the late 1920s and enter the strip that would drive Sharon's success for many years to come. The Savage Arms Plant manufactured gun barrels and Lewis machine guns during WWI, but in 1922 the plant was given over to the Westinghouse Electric Company in exchange for forgiveness on a debt. This accelerated the industrial growth that was already brisk on Sharpsville Ave. On the left hand of our track, a nearly uninterrupted line of factories with massive rail yards in the rear in support. To the right we see bars and clubs and small shops, with employee housing climbing up the hill behind. We see grime and smoke, and farmers' sons from all around saw a livable steady wage. The growth continued all around.
Our lungs and eyes feel a bit of relief as we reach the S bend up Thornton and left on to Hall St. Before we get to 18th St. in Sharpsville we have to cross the Thornton Hollow Bridge, just as we do today. The trestle was built in 1904 to facilitate the streetcar system's expansion into Sharpsville. Near the bridge the company built the short lived Deweyville Park, also known as Thornton Hollow Park. Not familiar with the viaduct? The creation of the State Highway System in 1911 provided maintenance on all state highways except bridges. Tired of maintaining the bridge on its own dollar, Mercer County decided to use ground excavated from Westinghouse's latest expansion to fill in that part of the hollow. The bridge was not removed, simply buried. We are still using that old bridge in a way. As we glide into Sharpsville, the Great Depression has taken over. We pass by a power station on Ridge Ave. around 11th St., zig-zag a block over to Main to a streetcar barn at Walnut. A left on Mercer takes us to the end of the line. It is October 12th, 1939. Truly the end of the line. Our imaginary private trolley car rusts away to nothing as we watch. We decide to wander over to a nearby sandwich shop and discuss what we have seen.
How could the company that ran over 30 streetcars over the system daily die out so suddenly? Easy answer, the company morphed into Shenango Valley Transit, a local bus line with connections to the up and coming Greyhound systems. And there was also the advent of the personal automobile, which hurt all types of public transit. In time the track was paved over in a move toward smooth roads. Would there still be much of a demand for this type of fixed route transportation in the valley in 2017? We all shake our heads no, probably not. Well, all but myself. It never occurred to me that our trolley car would vanish. It would be quite convenient to ride the rail back to Masury where our cars are parked. Guess we get a walking tour as well.
The two books that I mentioned earlier are “The Penn Ohio Rail System Story” by Robert Korach and “Ghost Rails Volume XI-Shenango Valley Steel” by Wayne Cole. Information on the Thornton Hollow bridge was found online courtesy of the Sharpsville Historical Society.
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