Victor Fay Wimer’s dairy farm was four miles east of New Castle. If he wanted to go to a bar he had to drive home, which is why, in 1946, he was sentenced to a month in jail (or three days, if he paid a $100 fine) for drunk driving (learn more related details). The previous years had been hard. Just after the depression hit Lawrence County, Victor’s house burned down, which wiped out his […]
An empty car parked near the McKissock service station at Wilmington avenue and North Jefferson street attracted the attention of two cruiser patrolmen in the early hours of 15th August 1946. A flashlight search of the forecourt revealed a scared young man hiding under the brush at the north end of the lot. He ran off but was caught and dragged back to the cruiser. He told the policemen he was LeRoy Munson, from Neshannock […]
The third annual outing of the merchants of New Castle was held on 26th August 1931 at Cascade park. Twenty-five thousand people attended the event, though there was heavy rain all day, from the races and athletics competitions in the morning to the prize waltzing contest at night. For a reason that no one could determine, the mood of the young men of New Castle was particularly rowdy. The distribution of free hot dogs at […]
John Carlysle Stewart, a civil engineer from New Castle, Delaware, travelled to western Pennsylvania in 1798. He was a large raw-bodied man of Scotch-Irish descent, quite well educated, somewhat aristocratic, and not particularly inclined to hard labor, and he had been given the job of resurveying the plots of land that the government had granted to veterans of the revolutionary war. He discovered that around fifty acres of land had been overlooked by the previous […]
James Hall was arrested for distributing literature in the street without a permit. He had travelled eighty miles from his home town of Corry to be in New Castle that Saturday. On Monday, minus the $10 that he was fined by the mayor and however many pamphlets he had managed to hand out before the police took him away, he travelled the eighty miles back again. There is no record of the cause he was […]
The attendant at the William Watters service station on North Jefferson street returned to the office after dealing with a customer and found that the till had been robbed of $55. He told the police that the only person around when the cash had gone missing had been Preston Litz, a nineteen-year-old ex-army airman who lived in an apartment behind the station. Preston was arrested and held in jail for a week in default of […]
Guy Bailey was drafted into the US navy in 1943, at the age of seventeen, and spent two years operating teletype apparatus, climbing masts to maintain shipboard antennae and rendering sacks of classified messages into a slurry of ash and water, which he dumped over the side of the boat. By the time he came home from the war, not yet twenty, he had become a radioman, first class. New Castle had little use for […]
Mary Elizabeth Weaver had Edward Weaver arrested in April 1949. The charge, “complaint of wife”, was used to cover offences from desertion and drunkenness to assault. The marriage lasted a few more years. They were divorced in October 1953. Sources: New Castle News, 15 Oct 1953, “Divorces Are Granted Nine”.
Nick Flueras came from Warren, just over the Ohio border. He was driving through New Castle on a Sunday night in 1948 when he crashed his car into another car that was waiting for the lights to change at the junction of Atlantic avenue and West Washington street. A city physician determined that Nick was under the influence of liquor but another physician, engaged by Nick himself, said that the symptoms that had been attributed […]
Morgan Fobes, the young man who would become the father of Martin Fobes, grew up on the old plank road to the north of New Castle, in a log cabin that his grandfather had built when he arrived from Württemberg in 1868. He ran away from home in 1908 when Katy Blews, the crippled girl next door, fell pregnant. The police were ordered to find him, but he eluded detection for almost the entirety of […]
Small Town Noir 