Meadville's Other Major College

The Unitarian College, 1908

From the mid 1800’s up through the early 1900’s Meadville had not just one college in the city, but two--Allegheny College and the Meadville Theological School. This was unique as most other cities in Pennsylvania at the time were lucky to boast one school of higher learning if any. While Allegheny College still exists and is flourishing within the community the same cannot be said about the Meadville Theological School it was closed here in 1926, but it lives on as part of the Meadville-Lombard Theological School of the University of Chicago.

Healing and Luxury: A History of the Saegertown Inn

Front view of the Saegertown Inn with French Creek along left side.

With the overwhelming interest in photographs of the Saegertown Inn recently posted on the Crawford County Historical Society's social media pages, what better time to "get away from it all" for a while and discuss the history of this grand hotel and vacation venue.

Revisiting Oakwood Park

Oakwood Park, Meadville PA

In the late 1890’s, after acquiring a parcel of approximately 35 acres, the Meadville Traction Company established Oakwood Park as a destination resort. Located in what is now West Mead Township, the park was located on lands between Oakgrove Avenue and Springs Road and could be reached by riding the trolley lines out Alden Street past the Pierson School. On a big holiday, as many as 20,000 people paid their trolley fair of 5 cents, each way, to enjoy the resort facility and all its attractions at no additional cost.

Mapping History: How Chasing Sanborn's Show What Once Existed

The Sanborn Map Company 

Those interested in the past often obsess over the "when" of things. The first person settled in 1822. The first brick home was built in 1845. The first train arrived in 1888. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in…

But the "where" is important, too, because things exist in both time, and space. There's a reason your home, your town, or the road you travel is where it is. Hardly anything, in fact maybe nothing, ends up where it is purely by chance.

How the Trolley Arrived at Conneaut Lake Park

Allegheny students wait at the Exposition Park trolley station - 1913

On May 30, 1906, the Meadville and Conneaut Lake Traction (M&CLT) Company formed with a goal of bringing trolley service to Exposition Park (Conneaut Lake Park today).  A suitable route was agreed upon that would continue from where the tracks left off in Fredricksburg and then follow the general course of the Cussewago Road to Harmonsburg (vicinity of Routes 102 and 3016) before turning south, crossing the lake’s inlet, and entering the park along Comstock Street. 100 immigrant laborers, primarily Italians, along with two freight cars full of work horses were assembled and brought in later that summer to begin the arduous task of grading an earthen avenue, laying the 85 pound rails, and stringing the overhead electric wire.

How Crawford County Forever Changed Women's Undergarments

Lady Mary Crawley's corset in an early episode

Change stands prominent as the obvious theme depicted in TV’s historical drama, Downton Abbey. The show begins famously with news of the Titanic’s sinking in 1912 and spans to 1925 where it will close out its sixth and final season. Most familiar with this period recognize the breadth of change that took place between those years and the lasting impact yet to come in the decades that followed. While there are almost innumerable aspects of this that could be analyzed through the story of the Crawley family and their house staff, the increasing freedom for women is consistently at the forefront of a larger majority of plot lines.

The topic of women’s growing independence could alone be scrutinized through varied contexts, and in fact, has already been visited in an earlier Crawford Messenger post dealing with women’s right to vote and to hold public office. Another representation of change for women can be seen, quite literally, in the evolving fashions highlighted throughout each season. Fashion offers one of the clearest expressions of women's growing freedom, and no item of apparel better represents this than the corset.

Alice Bentley: Crawford County's Champion for Women's Rights in the Downton Abbey Era

Among the many themes centered around the changing times in the popular PBS television series, Downton Abbey, women's growing independence has remained a constant, if not a central focus. Such independence was not a circumstance experienced within a vacuum behind the walls of Downton, but rather, life at Downton provides context to the growing freedoms gained by women of all classes on both sides of the Atlantic.

Among these many freedoms was the suffrage movement, a cause championed the Suffragettes. Suffragettes were members of women's organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century which advocated the extension of the "franchise", or the right to vote in public elections, to women. British suffragettes were mostly women from upper- and middle-class backgrounds, frustrated by their social and economic situation much like the Crawley women at Downton. 

Crawford County Estates in the Downton Abbey Era

Baldwin Reynolds Home & Estate

The "Downton" Era (1910s and 1920s) was a time or expansion of ideas, but for a tightening of funds in large manors, or, in the case in America, smaller landed estates. "The Terrace," as it was called in Meadville, was the undisputed millionaire's row of the city which, along with upper Chestnut Street and a few smaller neighborhoods interspersed throughout town, boasted the Huidekoper, Reynolds, Magaw, Boileau, and Shryock families.

Many of these homes were estates in their own right, the Reynolds family (of the Baldwin-Reynolds House) owned land adjoining Bentley Hall at Allegheny College down to French Creek and the Huidekoper family once claimed ownership of much of the upper Chestnut area, Grove Street being named after a large orchard and forest in that location connected to their properties.