Flow Through History Connoquenessing boasts industrial, recreational history
You'd never know it by the scores of kayaks and canoes that can be seen floating along on a balmy summer day, but the Connoquenessing Creek has seen its share of history since Native Americans bestowed upon it their word for “a long way straight.”
The name's spelling has no doubt vexed second-grade students at Connoquenessing Elementary School in the Butler Area School District and Connoquenessing Valley Elementary School in the Seneca Valley School District, but the 40-mile waterway's history demonstrates its importance to Butler County over the years.
Beginning just above the Oneida Dam in Oakland Township and snaking wildly to its terminus, the Beaver River in Ellwood City, Lawrence County, the Connoquenessing Creek has been both famous and infamous over the millennia.
Undoubtedly, the most notorious incident near the banks of the Connoquenessing occurred in Forward Township on Dec. 27, 1753, and could have changed the course of U.S. history.
A Native American who had volunteered to lead a young George Washington and Christopher Gist to the Allegheny River while the two were on a return trip from Erie suddenly and inexplicably turned and fired a round from his musket at Washington.
The future president, then known as Major Washington, was unharmed.
Washington and Gist captured the Native American and Gist wanted to kill him on the spot, according to historians.
Washington insisted on releasing the man, who said his village was “two yelps away.”
The Major Washington canoe launch, installed by the Allegheny Aquatic Alliance a few years ago on Ash Stop Road, commemorates the attempted shooting that nearly eliminated the young country's most ardent supporter of democracy.
Washington's Trail sees locals take the same trek as Washington and Gist at an annual event.
Farming on the frontier land along the Connoquenessing was a major endeavor in the county's early days.
According to the book “The Life and Times of Connoquenessing,” one early farmer in the township was John Welsh, who came to America in 1770 and was wounded in the Revolutionary War.
Welsh “made his way to the frontier country of Connoquenessing and settled on 250 acres along the Connoquenessing Creek,” the book states.All four of Welsh's sons served in the War of 1812, according to the book.In the county's early days, the creek provided the energy that allowed early entrepreneurs to saw trees into lumber, grind corn into meal, wheat into flour and grain into animal feed for the farmers along the creek's banks.A yellowed map from Historic Harmony shows tiny sunburst symbols that represent mills that once stood along the creek's banks in Harmony.The Harmony Museum boasts a display on the Eidenau Mill that includes the business' 1811 keystone.The Eidenau Mill was a grist, saw and seed-oil mill erected by the industrious Harmony Society. The mill sat across from the Porter's Cove canoe launch in the Harmony Junction area.Rodney Gasch, president of Historic Harmony, thinks the large stone wall across from the launch on a bend in the creek could have been erected by the Harmonists or the Harmony Light Rail that appeared later at the advent of railroad travel.The Harmonists dammed the Connoquenessing at Porter's Cove to power the mill, then Harmony Light Rail later placed another, more modern dam to provide the water that powered the company's steam engines.In 2009, Wild Waterways Conservancy removed an obsolete, early 20th-century dam in an effort to return the creek to its natural state.“The work revealed a Harmonist-built wood and stone dam that had been submerged for two centuries,” according to Harmony Museum's display.One stanchion from the Harmonist dam, a handful of pieces of the Eidenau Mill's grinding stone and the 1811 keystone from the Mill, along with a photo album containing pictures from the area of the creek over the years, make up the Harmony Museum's display on the Eidenau Mill.Further downstream on the scenic Connoquenessing, Baron Detmar Basse, a German nobleman, founded the borough of Zelienople in 1802, which he named for his daughter, Zelie.Basse immediately set to work constructing Bassenheim Mansion on the banks of the Connoquenessing near what is now West New Castle Street, said Tom Nesbitt of the
Zelienople Historical Society.The mansion eventually burned, but a painting depicts the impressive house presiding over the hillside as well as a couple rowing in the scenic Connoquenessing Creek below.Bassenheim Iron Furnace, which was built in 1813 along the creek near the current site of the Zelienople Municipal Airport, employed many early Zelienople men.The 1889 Harper's Mill stood where the current Wild Waterways Canoe Launch now allows kayaks and canoes to enter and exit the creek off Halstead Boulevard in Zelienople.Nesbitt said a dam was created for that mill, but the creek's many floods destroyed the structure.“There are still remnants of it,” he said.Harper's Mill was destroyed by fire in 1912.Once railroad tracks were laid along the creek in 1879, many businesses began to locate along the creek.“They probably drew water out of it for certain things and probably dumped things into it, unfortunately,” Nesbitt said.The area of Zelienople along the Connoquenessing remains the industrial hub of the borough, but must adhere to modern clean-water standards as neighbors of the creek.Nesbitt said in the 1920s children from the area enjoyed the huge Lutheran Summer Camp along the creek's north shore near the current location of Creekside Commons shopping center.In the 1930s, boaters utilized the creek at the Brashear Camp near the current Hartmann's Deep Valley Golf Course, Nesbitt said.The bridge over the Connoquenessing that carries Zelienople motorists north on Route 19 to Northgate Plaza was officially opened in 1936, Nesbitt said.“That was a big day,” Nesbitt said of the festive bridge opening ceremonies. “There was no bridge over the Connoquenessing before that.”The area of Zelienople north of the creek could only be accessed by ferry or through Harmony before the two-lane bridge was installed.In the 1950s, borough officials allowed water from the Connoquenessing to be pumped onto a large open space just south of the bridge, so residents could ice skate.Kathy Luek, administrator at the Harmony Museum, summed up the importance of the creek to Harmony, and likely to all of Butler County during its early history.“The history of Harmony would likely be very different if it were not on the Connoquenessing Creek,” Luek said. “The Harmonists would not have settled here without a good water source for power, crops and drinking.”Gasch agreed.“It certainly attracted settlement and, of course, it's easy to see why because it provided water and power,” he said. “(A reliable waterway) really was the central draw to a location for settlers.”
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