The Tragic Story Behind Black Cross Cemetery in Winfield Twp Butler County Pa.

 In late 1800s into early 1900s many immigrants like my Grandfather Markowitz came to this country to enrich their lives and help their family's back in the old country.

Many came from war torn country's or religious suppression and many other reasons .

My Grandfather the son of a peasant farmer came from Austria which at the time was part of the greater Austro Hungarian Empire.

Now when he came over he had a sponsor family who he lived with in Pittsburgh's South Side where he learned to bake and eventually retired from National Baking Company in East Liberty .

He had a good life and lived the American Dream . Owning a home and raising 2 sons and a daughter. 

But not all Immigrants who came here had the same privilege.There where those who came from Poland and Slovakia  who came without sponsors as  was the case for those who would loose their lives during the Great Flu Pandemic in 1918  and are buried in mass graves at the for many years unmarked cemetery near Winfield Twp Pa.  in a very rural area  you can easily miss .

Luckily it passed over my grandfather but not for these men who came to work in the Lime stone mines  of Yellow Dog  , The salt works   and tile factory's and other industries  in Butler county. 

While my Grandfather lived with a loving family and in sanitary conditions this was not the case for those who ended up in Black cross often it was crowded factory provided  housing  often unsanitary to boot.

The perfect conditions for a Killing spree by influenza.

The epidemic was so bad coffins with bodies where often stacked up outside funeral parlors with so many dying. 12 a day in butler county

In the winter of 1918 it hit Winfield especially hard. 

Hundreds died  and with no one sponsoring them the body's started piling up. 

 

https://www.theclio.com/entry/101394

To make matters worse many of these workers few possessions and personnel effects where not some times not returned to their family's overseas instead being stolen and split up between the workers and others who took advantage of the corpses . 

Many times immigrants came to this country to only get killed in an industrial accident and word never got back to the family's and if it did it was often with no explanation.

With no sponsors and no family's the workers in Winfield ended up in mass graves in a Potters Field donated by a local farmer by the name of McLaughlin  and  5 to 20  or more buried in a grave with no  markers and no one knowing their names. 

A Roman Catholic Priest Father O Callahan  had erected a large wooden cross made of Railroad Ties  which looked black from Creosote used on the ties  which gave the cemetery its name of Black Cross .

because many buried there where catholic. 

A permanent marker and solid white concrete cross where erected on the site in 2002 

I was there recently and the field is overgrown and a total disgrace to those who are buried there 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fhSXdZyUcA

The cemetery is also legend of Paranormal activity they claim they hear young children crying and people speaking Italian .

Its a very quiet solemn and sad place if you go be respectful.

When trying to Verify a Story it is often Very Hard to do so

 As  I write about  The Paranormal , True Crime , Accident's , Explosions and other story's I try to get them as accurate as possible  and try to get 2 forms of verification. Otherwise i present them as speculation.

But there is a big problem some times all I can find is a newspaper article  and that's where the problems start .

Even back in 1800's  Reporters where not always on the up and up and would make up things about story's 

just to sell papers .So only having one source  about an incident that happened is a problem.

to be able to say with 100%  something actually happened you should have at a minimum of 2 sources and 3 or more for best results.

 

Of course this is not always possible even in today's modern 24/7 news world.

Reporters often get story details wrong . Especially KDKA Radio and TV  here in Pittsburgh .

Even national News services as CBS, NBC etc can not be trusted.

So what can you do when you have only one source?  you can say alleged  , not verifiable, Supposedly

an event happened.  and leave it up to the reader to form an opinion which I often have to. 

Which is a shame . But that's the problem when you have people presenting and writing about paranormal incidents that allege they actually happened when there is nothing to it like the Congailier Mansion  on Pittsburgh's North Side which was a totally fabricated story presented as fact. 

Then when you have story's like the Demon House on Brownsville Road  now a B&B and they have presented no proof  what are you the reader to think? 

Plus al the UFO and Big Foot fakers out there it does not help when trying to present good solid story's and evidence and have people believe you.

I will always strive to present and get as accurate I can when writing story's for this blog.  

But when I can not back it up I will let you now so. 

 

A Mysterious Plant at Bottom of Cox Comb Hill in Plum Boro now gone

 Yes when it comes to preserving the past the Pittsburgh area does a horribly miserable job entire neighborhoods are gone as is most of anything from the steel era If you want to get a feel what Pittsburgh was like before the mills went down you have to drive to Johnstown Pa. or Weirton. WV.
 So it was with great sadness while driving along Coxcomb Hill Road in Plum Boro and I saw them ripping into and removing the abandoned and dilapidated  Alcoa Powder Plant
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places the plant at one time produced the powder for Fire works and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logans_Ferry_Powder_Works_Historic_District

 

explosives . Yet after Alcoa abandoned it no one came forward in any way to try and save it at all  and use it as some type of teaching and social center etc.

and Alcoa  has all but left Pittsburgh area and devastated New Kensington when the pulled out of the plant and research center.

There is not as much as a memorial marker for the men who lost their lives at this plant after several small explosions  in fact its hard to find anything on this plant due to its sensitive nature  Below is an Excerpt from a local paper

 

FOUR BLOWN TO ATOMSTen Thousand Pounds of Dynamite Exploded In a Flash.A GIRL KILLED 100 YARDS AWAY.The Acme Powder Works In a Ravine Near Hilton, Pa., Wiped Out of Existence In anInstant - Matches In the Mill the Probable Cause.

Pittsburg, March 24.Ten Thousand pounds of dynamite blew up at Black’s Run, near Hulton, and the only four  people who knew anything about it are scattered in fragments over a quarter of a mile of territory.The dead are William Arthur, aged 28; Mrs. Bell Arthur, aged 17, wife of William Arthur;Sadie Remalye, aged 21, sister of Mrs. Arthur and Charles Robbins, aged 19 years, of AlleghenyCity, who was empoyed as a puncher. Nellie Remalye, aged 19, sister of the other women, wasfatally injured and taken to Pittsburg, where she died in the West Pennsylvania hospital.Foreman William Mooney of the dynamite house was hurt by a flying splinter. Mat Feintzel,engineer, and Simon Bradley, packer, although near the scene, escaped uninjured.Had Just Begun Work.The Acme Powder Works, the scene of the disaster, were located in a revine about one mileabove Hulton. There were four houses down near the creek bottom. The employees had just begun work. Twenty minutes later the first explosion occurred, blowing the two women and twomen into eternity. About 100 yards away from the packing house, where the explosion occurred,was the boarding house where the victims lived. Nellie Remalye, the injured girl, was housekeeper for the rest. The boarding house was blowndown and resembles a heap of broken lumber, and from the debris the young woman wasrescued, being the only survivor. She died two hours later at the hospital without havingrecovered consciousness.The scene of the disaster resembles a battlefield, debris and cartridge wrappers being scatteredall over the hillside. The ground was torn into a bowl shaped depression, trees were stripped of 31

  their branches, and buildings were blown into splinters. The warehouse of the company, 500yards away beside the railroad track, was crushed in, and the roof was blown off.The remains of the four victims were picked up on the hillside in pieces. Part of the leg of aman, torn and stripped of all clothing, was found on the top of a bluff nearly a quarter of a mileaway. It is supposed that a match had been carried into the works, contrary to orders, and insome way caused the explosion. The loss is estimated at $15,000. The work of rebuilding willcommence as soon as the debris is cleared away.The roar of the explosion was heard for miles up and down the river. Immediately afterwardscame a swaying earthquake motion that shook houses and furniture. At Springdale, across theriver, and at Parnassus, five miles up the road, windows were broken. Rocks, ties and solidlumps of earth were blown 600 yards into the river by the explosion.Some One Had Matches.Mr. McAfee, one of the proprietors of the firm, was on the scene soon after the explosion andmade the following statement: “The cause of the explosion was fire. Only one conclusion can be reached, and that is that some of the dead had matches in their possession, and one wasdropped and ignited. The living positively declare that they jad no matches. One of the strictestrules of the company is against carrying matches except in the engine house. We had 10,000 pounds of dynamite on the premises. This is an unusually large stock, but we were working on a

There is also the almost unknown and now almost all gone coal mining town of Barking which sits a short way down a dead end road next to the plant

https://www.academia.edu/54716332/BARKING_Oakmont_No_1_Mine_Barking_Mine_Barking_Plum_Township_Allegheny_County_Pennsylvania_U_S_A

So gone is another piece of history which when historians do give its history they will not get it right as usual just like many other historic exhibits you go to see in the area they often get fact and figures wrong because no one bothered to properly document sites before they where destroyed  , and now you can add the Alcoa Powder Plant to the list.

Developers would rather have a clean pad to develop than work with existing structures they claim cost too much and are impossible to renovate which each and every contractor knows is bull shit if you really want to save a property it can be done Carlow University proved it when they rescued a house everyone said had to go. it all comes down to one word GREED  and that's what it is all about nothing else when it comes time to renovate or destroy a historic structure .

Now that the buildings have all been leveled the yard is being used by Allegheny Valley Railroad as a 

unloading area for sand used for fracking  at local gas wells