Only one week remaining to get your answers in for the scavenger hunt! I'm starting to worry I made it too difficult, but I really just wanted everyone to have fun trying to find the answers. Here's a fresh clue for my readers: The Fulton Opera House is not the answer to any of the questions, but it's mentioned in the blog posts about the men who are the answers to questions #6 and #10. Remember, answers must be submitted by midnight next Wednesday! Even if you don't have them all, you can still enter, because the winners will be determined by who has the most correct answers. Feel free to guess if you get stumped!
This past weekend I made a trip to Bethlehem for their fine arts festival, with one particular goal in mind - I wanted to meet up with Jim Cheney, the owner of the marvelous Uncovering PA website. We had a very nice chat; not only are we familiar with and admirers of one another's work, but we also have a mutual acquaintance in one of the members of my Sherlock Holmes club. I also got a signed copy of his wonderful book, Waterfalls of Pennsylvania, which I heartily recommend to nature lovers and hiking enthusiasts. Thanks again, Jim, it was great to meet you!
By complete coincidence (no, really), Jim is one of my sources for today's blog post, which is the first one ever for Lackawanna County. My bff Andrea and I took advantage of a mutual day off and went up to the southernmost corner to collect a few markers; I was a little torn about which one to cover today, to inaugurate the county, but here's the one I chose.
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| The marker stands on South Main Street, just before the bridge over the Lackawanna River |
As a young man the good doctor was married to a Sarah Brown, or Browne, in 1743. They had several children together, but sadly, Sarah passed away in 1778 just a few weeks before her husband served in the Battle of Wyoming. She is actually buried inside Forty Fort, in what today is Luzerne County, which will be the subject of a later post. A year later, William took widow Margery Kellogg Smith as his second wife, and she was the mother of his youngest child. (Fun fact: her first husband's name was also William Smith!)
William's eldest daughter, named Sarah after her mother, married a gentleman by the name of James Sutton, a merchant from New York. When British imports became a source of contention with the colonists, James sold his property and moved with his in-laws to the Wyoming Valley. He and his wife settled along the banks of what came to be known as Sutton's Creek in the community of Exeter, where they established a saw and grist mill and raised their own family. However, like his father-in-law, he too enlisted in the American Revolution despite being a Quaker, and on at least one occasion was charged with guarding Forty Fort.
I've told you all of that to tell you this: after the war, both William and James needed something new to do. In 1789, they jointly acquired some land on the southern bank of the Lackawanna River, where they built an iron forge. The community which grew up around this prosperous industry came to be known as Old Forge. The funny thing is, it's not named for what it seems to be - if my source is correct, that is. It was indeed the oldest iron forge in the region, and so calling it "Old Forge" does make sense. But from what I've read, "Old Forge" was in fact the nickname given to its owner William Smith, and then the name was transferred from him to the actual forge.
William passed away in 1815 at the age of 90 and is buried in Tunkhannock, Wyoming County, where Margery joined him a year later. James died in 1824 at age 80, and Sarah in 1834 at the age of 87, although there's no record of where either of them are buried. In 1836, a special act of Congress granted $2,400 to the surviving heirs of Rev. Dr. William Smith in gratitude for his surgical services during the war.
As for the community which also took the name of Old Forge, it's actually one of two in Pennsylvania. The other one is in Franklin County, and doesn't seem to have a historical marker. The one in Lackawanna County was home for a time to the only stagecoach to operate between Wilkes-Barre and Carbondale, and received a post office in 1848. In 1871 it became designated as Old Forge Township, and in 1899 it was finally incorporated as the borough of Old Forge, which it remains to this day.
Oddly, Old Forge has a claim to fame completely unrelated to the historical marker or the iron forge. Beginning in the early 20th century, the borough received a heavy influx of Italian immigrants, who came to the area to work in the coal mines. Pizza was their most common lunch food, because they could take it into the mines with them and eat it cold. (Everyone knows that cold pizza is delicious!) Today, Old Forge has so many pizzerias that it calls itself the Pizza Capital of the World. You'd think that would be in Italy, but apparently it's in Pennsylvania.
Much like Altoona in Blair County, Old Forge even has its own trademark pizza known as Old Forge Pizza. The Ghigiarelli family owned a bar in the 1920s, and the pizza style became popular with their patrons. It's rectangular, not round, because according to the local apocrypha, Mrs. Ghigiarelli didn't have any round pans in which to make the pizza. As Jim explains at Uncovering PA, there's red Old Forge pizza and white Old Forge pizza. The red has a light amount of sauce, a combination of cheeses, and a crisp, airy crust; the white, in his words, "is like a calzone and garlic bread got together and stuffed themselves with cheese." Be sure that you use the right terminology when ordering pizza in Old Forge, too - it's sold by the cut, not the slice, and by the tray, not the pie.
I was only in Old Forge long enough to get my photographs. But I guess I'm going to have to get back up that way and enjoy a cut of pizza.
Sources and Further Reading:
Official website of the Borough of Old Forge
Rev. Dr. William Smith and James Sutton at FindAGrave.com
Cheney, Jim. "Pizza Crawling Through the Pizza Capital of the World: Old Forge, PA." Uncovering PA, November 26, 2022.
Old Forge at the Historical Marker Database
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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