Read on Twitter
On the shortest and darkest day of the year we drove up the river into Armstrong county to a place called
A hundred+ years ago workers there promised the local limestone mining company that if the company built them a town they would never strike or unionize. The term "Yellow Dog" refers to that kind of agreement. The name stuck for the town itself.
The company obliged, and built a town where it owned everything. A few different building layouts, some identical duplexes. The boss lived up the hill. Starting in the great depression the company ran into trouble and by 1950s the mine was gone.
Because the town originally had one owner that's how it went on, passing from company to company, owner to owner. Went on for decades as the place slowly declined.
In the final decades most people in town were employed in the mushroom picking business in the tunnels dug out beneath the mountain. Mushrooms are a big thing in parts of Pennsylvania. I almost took a job doing that with a nearby staffing agency when I was 19 and looking for work
In the aughts era real estate boom a speculator bought the town and sold it for a profit. Then the collapse hit. The new landlord raised everyone's rent. At the same time the mushroom company cut everyone's wages. Plenty of these were older people. Generations had lived here.
This led to escalating tensions both between the tenants and the landlord. Around that time people began getting sick and nobody knew why at first. Turns out that the water from the springs up the hill now had ecoli in it.
The water was shut off and people left in a hurry. The last left around 2012. In 2014 a guy named Joe bought it with plans for turning it into a sort of living history village where you can learn folkways and experience life in a completely intact company town.
If you are in the area you can head up there and for a fee Joe will tell you all about it and let you wander and explore the houses. Which is what we did today.
Joe maintains that the reason this place still exists in such an intact form is because it was all only owned by one entity at a time throughout it's history. People who lived here never owned their own houses, and thus it all remained one whole, never parceled up.
Between the weight of the years and seasons and the occasional vandalism of local teens these houses have been open to the elements for the better part of a decade. And the other thing is that many haven't been cleaned up and are as they were hurriedly left years ago.
Lots of kids lived here.
This dude surprised me in a dark attic.
Several of the houses look like the family just walked out, leaving everything. Photo albums, letters, yearbooks, stuff I won't to post here bc it's too recent to be sorted through dispassionately like it's ancient history. That said check out this cool middle schooler's room.
place had a definite vibe to it
As soon as weather has regular access to the inside of a building that shit is not long for this world.
This tough dude was squatting in the back corner room on the second floor of one of the houses, enjoying the views of open sky at night.
Found remaining residents all over the place.
Details
The people here, like all of us, were at the mercy of capitalism. Always a new boss, always a new landlord, failing infrastructure, bad water. You can see the violence of it in what all had quickly been left behind, how the end of these houses marked the end of families and lives
I don't know how you un-haunt this place. Any of these places where this happens.
Side note: check out these ducks
cat
Who knows what would have been if this place wasn't a company town passed from owner to owner. Maybe nothing would be here. Maybe there would be some houses owned by residents over the past 100 years. Maybe it'd be woods or pastures. I don't know.
Anyway.
If you google Yellow Dog village you'll find all the info for if you want to go visit, and you'll find loads of photos others have taken over the years. People who are actual photographers go there and take really nice pics of the same plastic duck I posted in this thread.
Sometimes I feel like Bethany and I just take pictures of capitalism's sprawling crime scene. Chalk outlines of abandoned pianos that are slowly losing their notes to the weather.
upside: plenty of seating
My allergies are going to be going off for days.
oh also i greatly condensed the Yellow Dog history and there's tons of other detail about Joe and his background and the town etc etc but this is a twitter thread and even i have limits
