In 1789, a revolutionary war veteran named Andrew Nye, the son of a German immigrant who had left Europe forty years before, bought four hundred acres of land on the banks of the Connoquenessing creek and set up a farm, where he lived with his wife, a dozen or so children, a horse, three or four cows and a yoke of oxen. Later generations of his family spoke of him as the first white settler […]
Ralph Largo’s younger brother, Frank, had spent time in Huntingdon reformatory for larceny and had been arrested in the company of Vincent DeLillo, an incorrigible drug addict and thief, a few years before. He was on trial for living off a prostitute’s earnings—taking bawd money—and adultery. The prosecution’s case relied on the evidence of a young woman named Josephine Coloa, who was perhaps the prostitute in question. Ralph arranged to meet Josephine for a drink […]
The man who crashed into two cars on Hiram way on 8 November 1936 told the other drivers his name was Charles McCombs, then drove a few blocks to Ray street before abandoning the car. At that moment, however, Charles McCombs was at the police station reporting that his car had been stolen. The damaged car was returned to Mr McCombs. The thief was never caught—at least, not in connection with that crime. The only […]
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Waters Hartman founded a new town to the south of New Castle, purchasing acres of farm land to parcel up and sell as sites for factories and housing developments. Isaac Ellwood, an industrialist who had grown rich from barbed wire, supplied the initial investment, as well as a name for the town. Ellwod City’s grand future never materialised. In its early years, Hartman and Ellwood boosted the […]
The night sergeant in police headquarters from 1907 until 1925 was Gene Buckley, who passed his time composing colourful passages about the arrests of the day in the police docket. An entry from 14 April 1910 reads, “Sam Johnson (a pusson of color) was very much at large last night and in a feverish frame of mind. He had stowed away a considerable quantity of fire water and proceeded to give an imitation of a […]
Edward Kozol was seventeen when he was fined for stealing scrap iron from the B&O Railroad yard. It was 1937, and the scrap yards that had been packed with tons of junk for as long as he could remember were suddenly almost empty. Through the ’20s and ’30s, no one had been interested in scrap iron, no matter how low the price; now, foreign countries were willing to buy all that America could supply and […]
Hugh Clements, Samuel’s father, was born in Ireland in 1880. He came to New Castle as a boy and got work in the first tin mill in town when it was opened by the Greer brothers in 1893. Within a year of his marriage to Pearl Toy of Edinburg he had become a father and had appeared in court on charges of assault and desertion that were brought by his wife. The judge ordered him […]
The war in Europe had been over for two months and the war in the Pacific would be over in a few weeks’ time, when atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eugene Russo was just sixteen and, unlike his brothers and his cousins, he had escaped world war two. His life was his to do with as he pleased. He borrowed a .25 Colt automatic from his friend, Paul Logue, telling him he wanted […]
Wick Wood, one of the first reporters on the New Castle News back in the 1880s, was fond of sauerkraut, particularly the sauerkraut that was made by a Bavarian couple called Rentz, who farmed a small plot of land just beyond where the old Butler road crosses Big Run creek. On his visits to the farm, Wood got to know their only child, a boy called Frederick, who had been kept out of school from […]
The depression shut down Homer Chrisner’s Ellwood City sales business and threw him and his employees out of work. He remained a respected figure in the area, served as a borough councilman for a spell and continued to pursue his hobby of poultry breeding, which was something of a passion of his—only a few months before he walked into the state bank in Bessemer with a loaded pistol, he delivered a speech entitled, “My Favorite […]
Small Town Noir 