Laid Back History - Grave Markers in Washington Cemetery, Washington, Pa

[Music] all right i want to welcome you to another laid-back history so we're here uh at the washington cemetery when i asked everybody last week uh to vote on what they wanted to see for the topic of this episode uh the the interesting gravestones of of cemeteries was overwhelmingly uh the winner so that's what we're we're going with right now uh so i am here with uh with rich a friend of mine who's just kind of a fan of of cemeteries so we're gonna travel around a little bit and see some of the interesting graves and just tell some stories so uh it might be uh there's some some i'll say humor stories that go with it some sad stories and just some some interesting stories that kind of go with with the people that are here and and really if you look around everybody has a story everybody here had a family you know had had friends family and they all have a story about them uh but we're just gonna pick pick a few and then maybe come back again some other time and do another episode but uh as always i want to thank everybody for tuning in i'm constantly blown away by how many people are are watching and and you know every week coming back you know getting thousands of views every week just just blows me away it really does so uh hopefully uh you know we continue on you know hopefully it's interesting for you guys and you you like what we have for you as always got to thank the washington county tourism promotion agency for the uh for the wonderful t-shirts uh that they give me so uh so uh we're gonna go ahead and get started now i will say uh this episode is not live uh to be able to get around to all the the ones we wanted to go to we thought you know it's probably not gonna work trying to go live uh there's gonna be a lot of times where you're just gonna see probably have a close-up of uh my face and rich's face as we you know jump in his jeep and drive around and no one really wants to get that close to our faces so uh so we're uh we're not live today um uh it has been pre-recorded but we're just going around and filming some of these and hopefully you'll enjoy it uh if you have any comments please leave them uh you know if there's anybody there or any uh headstones uh that you might see uh that were in the background that you wanna know more about leave a comment maybe we'll come back again and do those so uh i think we're going to start with um what do we want to start want to start with boone sure we'll start with uh with a congressional medal of honor recipient um hugh boone hugh patterson boone uh so we're just gonna skip down there we'll be back in just one minute so we just got caught in a little bit of rain heading to uh to hugh boone's uh uh grave marker uh but on our way uh i decided to stop here first um this is the burial site of thomas hannah and sarah foster hannah now sarah foster hannah is she's really one of the reasons we're standing here today she was the principal of the washington female seminary which i talked about when uh when talking about washington jefferson college she became principal there in 1840 and would serve until 1874 and then uh she retired uh continued to stay here in washington uh did a lot of community service up until she passed away in 1886. now why is she the reason that we're standing here today well in 1852 while serving as uh as uh principal of the uh of the seminary she called on some of the more prominent families of washington to meet at the female seminary so families like the lemoyne family the beard family the atchisons um the mckinnon's called on these families to come in and sit down and talk and what she wanted to talk about was the formation of a new cemetery washington had a smaller cemetery in town but she saw a need to have a larger grander cemetery and so it was that meeting that the that the cemetery was chartered out of so we could really trace this this cemetery back to 1852 because of sarah foster hannah seeing a need for this greater grander cemetery and so this is where she uh was laid the rest in 1886 after having done so much for the town not just the cemetery not just the the female seminary she did work with washington college she did work with the with the local hospitals uh and she did a lot of work with orphan children she is a very important person when you look at the history of washington pennsylvania and washington county okay so here we are at the second gravesite we're going to be doing today uh this is the gravesite of captain you patterson boone and his claim to fame notoriety is he was a recipient of the congressional medal of honor and as most everybody knows that's the highest award you can receive as a soldier in the military he received this citation during the civil war captain boone had a very distinguished career during his term in the service uh he received a neck wound at a battle in wytheville virginia and it was this wound which the the bullet passed through his neck barely missing his spinal cord and that wound was probably the major contributing cause to his illness later in life which brought about his death in 1908. captain boone lived his life in washington pennsylvania after his term of service his address was 217 jefferson avenue and if you look that up now that is the present site of the subway restaurant on jefferson avenue across from wash high school and for those of you older people like me you will remember that as winkies back in the 70s um he was awarded the congressional medal of honor for personal bravery gallantry in battle during the battle of sailors creek virginia he rode through the rebel lines on his horse killed the flag bearer and captured the flag so not only did he capture the flag but he actually touched an enemy in battle uh pretty much one of the bravest most gallant things you can do during a battle and later life he was employed as a clerk at some mercantile stores in washington a couple of different ones he passed away in 1908 and from what we've been able to ascertain he had quite a few people at his funeral because he was a very well respected man very successful and just an all-around good guy and the fact that he received the congressional medal of honor is just the highest testament to what an amazing wonderful and brave man that he was so we're standing um next to basically the morgan circle i guess is what it's called um it's a fenced in area that is basically all the morgan family so you have the morgans the watsons that are you know that married into the yeah married into the morgan family uh but the two right here the i want to talk about first and that's mary bain baton uh morgan and colonel george morgan uh so colonel george morgan if you've been up towards um south point you've seen morganza or organza road yeah morganza road uh actually the building i guess is gone now uh but it was you know it was the the care said it was a boys school when a care center but it was named after morgan's farm called morganza uh it was actually a farm that was bought by morgan's brother who had planned out here he planned on moving out here and settling down but when he died he left the farm to colonel george morgan uh who was a red war veteran um trader uh part of a trading company uh but his what uh let's let's do the trading company first and then i'll talk about it well the the trading company was called the bayton wharton and morgan company um they were based out of fort pitt present-day pittsburgh at the forks of the ohio in the mid to late 1760s and it was everybody thinks of fur traders as the mountain man era the 1840s and stuff but it actually started much earlier than that um so they would go out this was the infamous or the famous long hunter era where groups of men would go out into what was known as the middle ground across the ohio river and such and bring back deerskins for the leather and fur trade and everything and the bayton wharton morgan company was one of the largest uh fur trading outfits back then they had a place in again fort pitt and also one out in kokowski at present day kokowski illinois so it was a pretty big corporation and then of course mary bayton morgan you know that's that's undoubtedly how george met mary was through one of the what's the word i want to use associates of the company or officers of the company and that's probably i don't know if it would have been a marriage of convenience um but you know irregardless that's more than likely how they met so and so um you know like i said you've heard of morganza even if you didn't know what it meant or why it was called that you've probably heard of it but probably the thing that i find most interesting about colonel george morgan uh actually is tied to his son thomas morgan uh so hamilton is real big right now alexander hamilton still big you know just just came out on uh disney plus or whatever it is and so people are watching it again uh and you know you get to hear about aaron burr yeah and and actually i've never seen the music so i have no idea i've never seen a musical either so i don't know if they go into the burke conspiracy or not if there's anything about that but basically it was a whole conspiracy by aaron burr to almost form his own state maybe his own country out here and what's interesting is the whole um conspiracy was broke because of colonel george morgan aaron burr came to morganza to meet with uh thomas morgan and so they all have dinner together after dinner thomas and aaron burr go for a walk when they come back you know burr kind of says his goodbyes and heads off and colonel george morgan says all right what was that about and kind of presses thomas to find out that burr was trying to recruit thomas into into this whole conspiracy and so morgan writes a letter to thomas jefferson and says listen you maybe need to know what's going on and kind of lays everything out that is what gives um jefferson cause to really start looking into it and that's what breaks the conspiracy is because of colonel george morgan writing uh that letter so so it's just of you know right here in western pennsylvania as you say and that's the beauty of this little county that we live in is until you really start investigating and coming up to the cemeteries like this and looking at the names you don't really realize how much fascinating history we have in this county yeah i mean we've got so many famous people and you know we're going to talk about a few of them today and you know in the future and everything but washington county is a really cool place to live yeah it really is a lot of great history now the one thing i will i you know i don't know the history behind them uh but in here there are two or three infant graves um which are probably more of the uh more ornate infant graves you're going to see normally what you would see a lot of times um is a infant would be buried um either in the same plot as you know there's a headstone right there with two names on it for brownlee and it says also an infant son yeah so they they wouldn't have paid for their own own plot you know for an infant uh you know because so many so many children died at childbirth or you know within the first year cholera epidemic smallpox everything so it was a rough life too but yeah there's the the three neat uh infant graves here uh here in the morgan uh circles so um all right well we'll move on to the next one maybe we'll do we'll try something a little more lighthearted after ending with infant death so yeah probably a good idea so uh we're standing here at another uh another headstone why are we here this is one of those headstones when you see the name and and my fellow 80s children and for that matter 70s children will get this immediately the headstone we were at right now is of james t kirk space a final frontier [Music] not the james t kirk that you're thinking of commanding the uss enterprise but colonel and he was a um he was a colonel door in the uh during the civil war yep uh actually served during the civil war uh was from washington um so we were just driving by and we saw it so i didn't have time to do a ton of research on them but he is from he is from washington uh and he was a member of the 10th pa volunteer regiment so another regiment that was primarily formed out of pittsburgh if i'm not mistaken yeah i believe so yeah primarily formed out of pittsburgh but it was before the 140th so a lot of a lot of guys went up to pittsburgh to enlist and then later on the 140th was formed yeah yeah the 10th regiment was the earlier of the regiments and that was before the war started becoming i for lack of a better term more popular to enlist than so but at any rate washington cemetery james t kirk and how perfect would it have been if he was a captain yeah so we're standing at the marker of thomas mckinnon uh he was a doctor in washington highly respected doctor in washington uh acted as a mentor to a lot of the doctors that would come about in the um in the late 1890s early 1900s that were responsible for for developing really what would become washington hospital he was the son of thomas mckean thompson mckinnon um and uh tmt was a congressman he was on the cabinet for president fillmore he was involved in a lot of local politics early on but then became a representative uh from this area in the 1830s and 1840s and he died in reading pennsylvania there's a lot of mckinnon's uh in this in this area right in here uh and you find that mckinnon's are of great importance to washington county history uh just about every uh every generation of mckinnon's made some sort of impact on washington county and we we selected this stone uh not only because of the history of it but because of the photograph that's on it there's actually this wonderful photograph that shows a family reunion from 1916 uh you know myself and rich we just really love the the stones where you see photographs like that because even if you don't know who the people are it gives you just a little bit more insight into who they were and into their family so right now we're here at the gablonski memorial uh joseph jacques yablonski was born in march 3rd of 1910 in pittsburgh his family had immigrated from poland earlier and pretty much as soon as he got old enough he started working in the mines pretty much immediately when he got into the mines he realized how bad the conditions were for the workers and he started getting really involved in umwa part of this was the fact that his father was killed in the mines and that's what prompted him to get very involved in the safety aspects for the workers in 1969 he ran against tony boyle who was the current leader of the umwa he accused boyle of nepotism misuse of union funds and pretty much all kinds of other bad stuff going on in the union uh needless to say boyle didn't take too kindly to this uh jackie blonsky did lose that 1969 election but he had pretty much upset tony boyle about as much as he could and the end result was tony arranged to have jablonski murdered in december later that year um two men came to yablonski's house in the afternoon and they were going to kill him his daughter answered the door and they asked if dad was home and she said no he's out campaigning and they lost their nerve and left well they ended up coming back december 31st new year's eve came into the house at night and killed jackie blonsky his wife margaret and their 25 year old daughter charlotte murdered in cold blood so it took several years of investigation from the local authorities and they finally exposed a very large corruption ring within the umwa tony boyle ended up serving prison time uh he died in prison the three men that murdered the ablonski family also went to prison uh the good thing about it is if you can call it a good thing is once all of this corruption was exposed there were some serious reformations within the umwa so in spite of three people having to give up their lives it did end up in resulting in you know in a good ending but uh probably one of the more famous infamous perhaps people buried in this cemetery so we're here at the stone the headstone of david atchison now if you remember from wow one of the first episodes that i did uh i talked about uh david atchison you know some of the veterans of the civil war from western pennsylvania uh uh james perman and david atchison uh you know i talked about and how he died july 2nd at the battle of gettysburg 1863 and that his men um retrieved his body uh and buried him next to a large stone and carved uh 140th in it so they would know where he was buried and then after the civil war actually not after the civil war but after the battle gettysburg his family traveled out there they found the stone or found the stone found his grave and moved him here uh back home to washington where uh they laid him to rest once again and so david atchison civil war veteran uh you know one of our heroes of the civil war gave his life uh you know hold the union together and and uh help in slavery uh buried here uh in washington cemetery so you can't go to a cemetery without stopping to pay respect to our veterans um most of the graves that are behind us are relatively recent late 90s early 2000s uh world war ii korea i believe there is one world war one vet buried over there in an older grave um but again you have to stop and pay respects to our veterans i mean really no matter what you know with with everything that's going on today you know the protests and you know whatever your standing is or your beliefs in our country or or your political beliefs whatever they are you know these men still they they fought for our country you know some you know these men here maybe didn't give their lives but they put their lives on the line for our country and basically for our freedom and so you've got to pay at least pay respects to them as the saying goes they signed a blank check payable for up to and including their lives for our nation and uh folks uh i'm i happen to be a son of the greatest generation my father was a world war is a world war ii vet thank god i've still got him with me uh we're losing a lot of our world war ii vets and korea vets on a daily basis so if you have a veteran an elderly veteran in your family please don't regret it later on take the time to talk to them hear the stories learn the history because all too soon it's going to be gone here's another interesting headstone that we found um how often do you see a headstone anywhere with the title sir night you fight with the strength of many men tonight and this one took a little bit of digging because obviously it kind of jumps out at you um so edward little was born in 1836 in long town england and then immigrated to the united states um he was a contractor and a builder and you know not what you'd call the most stand out person in washington one of the better families they were very successful but you know he wasn't like he was a politician or anything like that but again the cernite tends to stand out so we had to do a little bit of digging on this one and here sir knight is uh part of the knights of columbus it is the highest order that you can receive in the knights of columbuses and i'm sure many know the knights of columbus is the largest catholic fraternal organization in the country and they have levels one two three and four only 18 of the men i believe it's only men i can't say for certain but to join the knights of columbus only make the fourth quarter and earn the title of sir knight and what stands out and when you obtain the first the fourth order the certain night title is it is a level of patriotism because back when the knights of columbus were first being formed uh there was a big concern at the risk of sounding with the whole separation of church and state thing that everybody was thinking oh you're strictly for the catholic church you do what the pope says yada yada you don't care about your country part of their creed uh has to do with patriotism so that's when the fourth order came in to be and that's when you earned the title certain nights so apparently here's a gentleman that immigrated from england and became an extremely patriotic american so another fascinating success story and i'm gonna slide in real quick um probably the only time we're going to be eye to eye i don't know downhill so i just want to say what the reason we came here to this particular one as one of the board members uh at the historical society brett clancy uh he and his family were walking up here and i got a text from them months ago uh with asking about this sir knight edward little and i said you know what i don't know off to do a little looking and i i did a little looking and didn't find anything it kind of slipped my mind and i said something to brett i said oh you know you need to find that again and take a picture of the of the stone for me and he just did it i don't know probably a week ago maybe he sent it to me and that's when i asked rich about i said rich i can't find anything what can you find uh so we we definitely want to thank um thank brett and his family uh for for telling us about this one because it's a great story uh and another one we were really hoping i was looking for this gentleman by the name of william oliver william l oliver uh because i came across him and i wanted to find the stone so i found the story but couldn't find the stone uh and william oliver was a hat manufacturer in the early um early 19th century uh so sometimes starting around around 1815 and he dies around 1833 now the reason i think we can't find his stone is because i believe just doing a little bit of research that maybe his wife is buried here and it just says that he died yeah because he just disappeared uh sometime around 1832 33 uh they said for several weeks leading up to his disappearance he started acting strange he was kind of what they you know i guess maybe what we would call office hinges today yeah just acting a little bit weird and disappeared well what's interesting is that you know look at his uh we were trying to figure out why and then we looked at his job title his job title he was a hatter and i'm sure everybody has heard the term mata that is a hat or the mad hatter off of alice in wonderland the the manufacturer of hats with the wool procedure mercury was used in the manufacturing process and mercury will leach into your skin and it drives you crazy you you just you you lose your screws and so that that was there's where the term came from mad as a hatter you went mad when you were making hats because of the mercury poisoning so we have uh we have one well not buried here baby yeah i don't know where he's at at least a mention of him uh somewhere in the cemetery so if you're going through and you happen to see it please message me please let us know because i i'd really like to see it so that's that's william l oliver died sometime around 1833 so if you find it let us know so once again i want to thank everybody for joining us for another laid-back history thanks to rich for coming with me up to the uh up to the cemetery and thank you to the washington cemetery for allowing us to come up and film and and see some of these incredible graves and tell some of these amazing stories i think we definitely need to come back uh you know rich and i were talking about it'd be great to go hit maybe some of the smaller cemeteries around the area i know west ellick has a great cemetery there uh claysville so maybe we'll go hit a few more and do a couple more of these episodes in the future uh so thank you everybody for uh voting for this one because i think it's it's really going to probably be one of our best episodes uh so thank you for that again thank you to washington county tourism promotion agency if you want to help support laid back history you can do so by donating at wchs sorry at wchspa.org click donate now or go to paypal dot me slash wchspa and you can donate there thank you everybody so much for tuning in and watching every week thanks again to to rich for uh for joining me and we will see you next week for oh wait what are we gonna do next week um so let's do the uh so the the second uh second place in the voting were the was the toll houses for the national road so next week how about we'll do the toll houses so joint what's that road trip road trip the average so maybe rich will be with me again um so we're going to do the toe analysis so thank you again we'll see you next week for another laid back history

Channel: Washington County Historical Society PA

Views: 669

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Laid Back History, Washington County, Washington Pa, Washpa, Western Pa, Western Pennsylvania, Cemetery, Washington Cemetery, History, Pa History, Pennsyvlania History, Graves, Grave markers

Id: _f1hBUfkGlo

Length: 28min 13sec (1693 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020