Chaneysville Incident (2 page)

America’s train stations are built of granite and brick, smoked and corroded from the pollution in city air. Their dim, cavernous hallways sigh of bygone splendor. They straddle that ancient boundary of social class—the legendary “tracks.” They are reached with equal convenience by private auto and public transport. There is rarely more than the minimum number of facilities for the traveler; rarely, for example, more than one bar, and that one oriented towards the commuter trade—the bar bourbon is of the cheaper sort. The trains are frequently ill-maintained. The operator (“engineer”) wears a flannel or work shirt, in contrast to the airline pilot’s quasi-military uniform, and the attendants, who take tickets rather than provide service, are most often elderly gentlemen; the overall aesthetic effect is somewhat less pleasing than that presented by an airline hostess. There is class-differentiated accommodation, but the actual difference is somewhat questionable; meals and liquor, when available at all, must be purchased in both classes. There is now only one passenger train company, really a gray government agency with a name dreamed up by some bureaucrat’s child, too young or too stupid to know the proper spelling of the word “track.” Before the government took over the passenger trains the names of the companies sang of regionalism; instead of a United or a National there was a New York Central and a Pennsylvania, and in lieu of a Trans World or a Pan American there was a Southern and a Baltimore & Ohio. The average railroad fare is on the close order of sixty dollars, and payment is often made in cash. When credit cards are used they are often bank cards (which allow time payments) as opposed to prestige cards (which do not). The sanitary accommodations associated with rail travel are somewhat less civilized than those associated with travel by air. In the station there is usually only one central rest room for each sex, that one poorly attended. The items freely provided for use are the bare essentials in theory and often less than that in fact—the wise traveler checks for towels before he wets his hands. Perhaps fifty percent of the johns are operable at any one time; the others are clogged with excrement and cigarette butts. Repairs are delayed more often than expedited. Recent environmental concerns have favorably altered the conditions in the on-board sanitary accommodations; the newer trains have flush toilets modeled after those on planes. Still, until quite recently—within the last decade in fact—the accepted mode of getting rid of human waste was to eject it through a pipe at the bottom of the car, where it fell to the ground and lay exposed until natural decomposition could eliminate it.

America’s bus stations tend to lurk in the section of town in which pornographic materials are most easily obtained. Like airports, they are built of plastic, but it is plastic of a decidedly flimsier sort. They are reached most easily by public transportation or “gypsy” cab; except in largest cities and smallest towns, ordinary taxis shun them. The facilities for traveler convenience are virtually nonexistent; in lieu of a bar there is a lunch counter, which (if one can attract the wandering attention of the attendant, who is usually of the gender of an airline hostess and the appearance of a train conductor) will offer up a buffet of
hot dog au grease
and sugar-water on the rocks. The buses are at times in good repair, at times not, but always uncomfortable. The drivers look like retired sparring partners of heavyweights who never have been and never will be ranked contenders. There is a single class of accommodation—fourth.
Nothing
is served on board; a sign in the on-board rest room cautions against drinking the water. The names of the bus companies sing of locality (White River, Hudson Valley), private ownership (Martz, Bollman), and dogs. The average fare is on the close order of twenty-five dollars; the maximum one-way fare to the most distant portion of the United States is only eighty dollars. The preferred mode of payment is cash; if, as with the larger bus lines, credit cards are acceptable, they are bank cards, never prestige cards. The sanitary accommodations are much in keeping with the rest of the scene. Inside the station, the rest rooms are of a most doubtful nature; usually they are wholly or partially closed for repairs that are so long delayed and so temporary in effect that they seem mythical. The on-board accommodation is hardly better. The john, which is not even supposed to flush, is merely a seat atop a square metal holding tank; below it the curious—or perhaps “sick” is a better adjective—traveler may observe the wastes of previous users swimming blissfully about like so many tropical fish.

The various degrees of civilization represented by the sanitary accommodations inevitably reflect class status that the society at large assigns to the passengers. It is no accident, then, that airline patrons are usually employed, well-dressed, and white, while train passengers (excepting the commuter) are more likely to have lower incomes, cheaper clothing, and darker skin. A randomly selected bus passenger, at least in common belief and easily observable fact, is, far more than the patrons of planes or trains, likely to be: un-, partially, or marginally employed; un-, partially, or cheaply dressed; in- or partially solvent; in- or partially sane; non- or partially white.

The Greyhound bus station that serves Philadelphia sits in the center of town, a prematurely deteriorating, fortunately subterranean structure which cannot escape its surroundings—the skin flicks down the street, the bowling alley on one side, the Burger King on the other. I emerged from the subway a block and a half from the station, ran the gauntlet of improbable offers from gypsy cab drivers, winos, and whores, entered the station, and stood in line to buy a ticket to a town that existed as only a dot—if that—on most maps, a town noted for its wealth of motel rooms.

Originally it was the crossing of two major Indian trails, one running north and south, the other east and west; the Indians, it appears, had not lived in the area, but like later whites, had used it for overnight rest—a sort of redman’s Ramada. One group of these transient Indians, probably Cherokees, who made some kind of permanent residence in the area around the English colony at Jamestown, evidently had rather a malicious sense of humor; they whispered rumors of the lodes of silver to be found near the crossing of the great Indian trails. These whisperings reached the ears of an explorer, one Captain Thomas Powell, who accordingly, and no doubt to the great amusement of the Indians, fitted out an expedition.

And so, sometime in the year of our Lord 1625, Captain Thomas Powell of Virginia became the first white man to set foot in what would later become the County. Navigating by the North Star, he made his way north, discovering a stream of exceptionally sweet water, which is now called Little Sweet Root Creek, and a convergence of three streams, which formed what is now called Town Creek. He found no silver, however, and so turned back before reaching the site of the present Town, and made a report so indifferent as to discourage exploration for some time. However, over a century later, in 1728, his grandson, Joseph, entered the region Captain Thomas had explored, leading a party of twelve men. They settled along the streams Captain Thomas had discovered, and evidently prospered—one man, Joseph Johnson, died in 1731, but the second of the party to die, Richard Iiames, lasted until January 26, 1758, a full thirty years after the first settlement. Powell, later joined by his brother George, did not fancy the farming life, and so, in 1737, became the first of several white men to build a trading post to do business with the Indians. Unfortunately, because Captain Thomas had never really reached the crossing point of the great Indian trails, the Powell trading post was built on Little Sweet Root Creek, which then, as now, was something of a backwater. Had this not been the case, the Town might have been named, originally, Powell. But it was not. The honor fell to a man named Robert Ray, who is believed to have built a post about 1751. The town that grew there originally carried the name Raystown.

There is some doubt about the accuracy of the claim that it was Ray’s trading post that formed the nucleus of the Town. Other local features which bear his name (Ray’s Cove, Ray’s Hill) are located many miles away, and the spelling of the name in some documents is odd (Reas’). One historian reports that the actual nuclear establishment was a tavern, and another claims it was operated by John, not Robert, Ray. Such is history.

In any event, the name was legitimized by 1757, when Governor Denny of Pennsylvania ordered Lieutenant Colonel John Armstrong to encamp three hundred men near “Ray’s Town” and from thence to do battle with the Indians. The matter dropped for lack of funding and, it appears, for lack of Indians. However, in the next year the English General John Forbes, who had been charged with retaking Fort Duquesne (later Fort Pitt) from the French and Indians, used Raystown as a rendezvous point for 5,850 mixed troops and 1,000 wagoneers. The advance elements of this party, which included at least a hundred British troops, eighty “southern Indians”—basically Cherokees—who were allies of the British, and one hundred “Provincial” soldiers (the number a conservative estimate, as one hundred were reported “down with the flux”), built a fort at Raystown, which was completed by August 16, some six weeks after its start. The fort continued as a mustering point of the campaign.

The Town grew in importance through peacetime as well. In 1771 there was sufficient political power to have the entire area split off as a separate county, with Raystown as its seat. The name of the County was chosen in acknowledgment of political realities in England. The Town changed its name to match. Some sixteen years later, the political power of the Town and the County was such as to cause the construction of a road into the western reaches of the state. The surveys for the “Great Western Road” established that the Town was located “19 miles and 290 perches north of Mason and Dixon’s Line.”

The importance of the Town and the County to the early development of America was acknowledged by no less a historian than Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the controversial “Frontier Hypothesis,” who pronounced it a watermark of westward expansion. However, both Town and County were of relatively minor importance during the War of Independence. Some three hundred men were mustered locally, but the local gunsmith was charged with providing only twenty-five muskets, and the commissioner’s clerk reported that he was running behind schedule. In light of this and the fact that the fort had fallen into ruin, it is probably fortunate that the locale saw little rebellious activity.

However, during the Whiskey Rebellion (c. 1791-94), such activity was much the norm. For although the locals were not as involved with whiskey production as were farmers further west (who were farther from market and therefore more cognizant of the fact that a horse can carry only four bushels of grain but twenty-four bushels’ worth of distilled grain products, and who were as a result far more sensitive to the limitation of commercial freedom implied by a federal tax on spirits), the County register of 1792 listed forty-two still-owners operating fifty-five stills; while they were perhaps not involved with the tarring and feathering of government revenue collectors, they were certainly sympathetic to the rebels and antipathetic to the federal troops, commanded by General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee (father of Robert E.) who came to put down the rebellion. It is possibly for this reason that President Washington chose to come into the field and take personal command of the troops, making his headquarters in the Town, thereby guarding the rear of the army with his personal prestige. Evidently the stratagem worked—the locals did not harry the flanks of the army, and a hotel, which later became a bakery, was named after Washington. He did not, however, sleep there, but made his headquarters at the home of Colonel Espy, a prominent local, a few doors away. In later years, the Espy House housed the local draft board.

In other national conflicts, the County and the Town did their part, sending several companies to the War of 1812, and a full company of eighty volunteers, along with many regular recruits, to the Mexican War in 1846. The volunteer company, the “Independent Greys,” was mustered in the regiment that stormed Chapultepec, but the implied gallantry is somewhat misleading, as thirty of the eighty were “detailed, temporarily, on some other duty.” Since “nearly half” of the thirty died (two of them from “diarrhea”), the fifty are to be congratulated on their discretion.

The County’s participation in the Civil War is somewhat ambiguous. Without a doubt, many men served gallantly on the Union side. Equally undoubtedly, a large number, many from the southern part of the County, where the descendants of Powell and his party of Virginia settlers peopled a section now known as Southampton Township, served the Confederacy with equal gallantry.

Through the early and middle nineteenth century, the County knew some prominence due to a group of mineral springs which formed the basis for a resort industry attracting some of the richest and most powerful men in America. In the later portion of the century, however, both Town and County fell from grace. The decline of roads as principal means of transport injured the economy greatly. The Pennsylvania Railroad built its line thirty-nine miles to the north, through Altoona. The Baltimore & Ohio built its line thirty-five miles to the south, through Cumberland, Maryland. The South Penn Railroad, brainchild of William H. Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie, would have passed through the Town, but due to political and economical maneuverings, and the intervention of J. P. Morgan, work on the South Penn Railroad—otherwise known as “Vanderbilt’s Folly”—ended on September 12, 1885. Even though some revival was occasioned by the use of the South Penn route for the building of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which began half a century later, this was offset by the connection of a southern highway, Interstate Route 70, with the Turnpike at a point sixteen miles east of the Town.

Now the county seat and watermark of westward expansion is a town served by only two local buses a day. If you’re in too much of a hurry to wait for one, you can buy a ticket and take your chances on begging or bribing the driver of an express bus to make a brief unscheduled stop on the ’pike, and walk four miles from there. I was in a hurry. I took my chances. The ticket cost eighteen bucks and change.