[PRCo] Fwd:

[Schneider Fred]

Here is the link to the picture it stripped and did not include:
http://eldorado.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/i/image/image-idx? 
g=imls;sid=6ddbb800ae921496b29772eab5f8df7d;xc=1;c=accd;q1=charles;rgn1= 
ic_all;evl=full- 
image;quality=2;view=entry;subview=detail;lasttype=;cc=accd;entryid=x- 
msp285.b012.f02.i01;viewid=ACCD0654.TIF;start=1;resnum=15





Begin forwarded message:

> From: Schneider Fred <fwschneider at comcast.net>
> Date: January 3, 2009 12:48:26 AM EST
> To: Haney Sue <shaney7366 at aol.com>, pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Subject: [PRCo]
> Reply-To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
>
> HOW ABOUT THIS FOR A NICE PICTURE?  THE ONE WAY AT THE BOTTOM OF MY
> BOOK. (THE ONE THAT
> I HOPE DERRICK'S SYSTEM ENCODED SO YOU CAN SEE IT.)
> It's the Toll House on the Perrysville Plank Road  at West View,
> later known as Perrysville Avenue or U. S. Route 19.
> I like the picture because it shows why the trolleys were so
> popular ... they were a whole lot faster than a horse and
> buggy on a muddy rutted road.
>
> When the trolleys were first run up Observatory Hill, the road above
> Federal Street was still known as the Perrysville
> Plank Road.   That was 1886.
>
> Toll roads were more common in "olden times" than they are today.
> Pike Street through Canonsburg and Houston
> simply is a holdover from its days as a turnpike from Washington to
> Pittsburgh.
>
> They were probably more common in the east than they were farther  
> west.
>
> In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, my home, every single road leading
> out of the city of Lancaster was a toll road
>   at one time.   The traction company was able to obtain rights-of-
> ways rather easily simply by leasing the turnpike
> companies and then building along the shoulder of their existing
> roads.  When the state decided the free the toll
> roads in the teens and twenties, they forced to pay off Conestoga
> Traction Company for imagined future profits
> from the turnpikes.  They may have been a more profitable asset than
> the trolleys!   Well, not quite.  (In the 1920s
> and 1930s the public expected more than a dirt toll road and the
> costs were much higher.)
>
> I have an 1898 atlas to Lancaster County.   It shows all the toll
> booths.   I counted over 100 of them on that atlas.
> You could not sneak around a toll booth by coming out one road, go
> around to another road, and back because
> all the toll roads but their booths at the same crossroads out of the
> city.
>
> The last road made free was the Lancaster and New Holland Turnpike in
> 1930.   However, every single one of
> the highways extending out of the city of Lancaster preserves a
> simplified version of the earlier name.   I live about
> feet off the Lititz Pike (the old Lancaster and Lititz Turnpike).   A
> mile to my west is the Fruitville Pike.   A mile to the
> east is the Oregon Pike.  And so forth as you go around the city.
>
> In the middle 1920s a man named Schwartz bought an old home on the
> Fruitville Pike south of Delp Road, about 3 miles
> north of Lancaster.   His son Bill (my age) told me some great
> stories about his dad a year ago.   When he bought the
> old farm house it was infested with bugs and Bill said the way to
> kill them was with kerosene.   So dad came out with
> two five gallon cans of kerosene on the Manheim streetcar.   He got
> off at the village of Fruitville (about ten houses) and
> then walked south a quarter mile with the two five gallon cans to his
> new home.   Another time, in a snow storm, he was
> being gracious and plowing snow off the highway.   But the toll
> collector of the Lancaster and Fruitville Turnpike demanded
> a toll from him.   They got into an argument and the old man told him
> he could plow his own snow off the highway.
> (All the idiots are not living today ... there were some in the past
> too.)   It was sometime before the road became free in
> October 1928.
>
> And an old high school teacher of mine, best remembered for how bad
> he was as a teacher, did tell us once about
> how you evaded the tolls on the Lancaster and New Holland Turnpike.
> He said if you went to visit friends in New
> Holland, you simply stayed out until after eleven o'clock.   By then
> the toll collectors had gone to bed and you could
> come back home free of charge.   (My sister on this e-mail will
> remember Casper Kreider.)
>
> Some of the toll houses were actually erected in the streets.   I
> have a picture of one that sat in the right-of-way of what
> is now the Lincoln Highway just west of the Pennsylvania Railroad
> bridge in Leaman Place, Pennsylvania.   Well,
> some might call it Paradise and I guess it doesn't matter because
> neither are incorporated.   "It's as close as some of
> us will ever get to paradise."   Naturally, when the state bought
> that road in 1918, that building disappeared.
>
> But some of the toll houses remain.   One just opposite the end of
> Delp Road on the Lititz Pike appeared on the
> traction company's property inventory in 1925.   Even though the
> state paid CTC $20,000 for its leasehold on the
> highway in 1926, the trolley company still had some toll houses they
> could sell.   I wonder if the owners have a clue
> why their building is ten feet off a state highway????
>
> So much for reminiscing.
>
> Got to get to bed so I can see the modules at the East Penn show in
> Oaks tomorrow.
>
>
>
> Fred Schneider
>
>
>
> Title: Perrysville Plank Road Toll House at West View
> Date: unknown
> Creator: Charles F. Roth
> Description: In 1849 a group of businessmen organized a company to
> develop the Perrysville and Zelienople Turnpike or "Plank Road."
> Planked roads at that time had timber planking laid across low-lying
> stretches so horses and wagons could travel easily during rainy
> weather. The route of the Plank Road appears to have paralleled and
> in some places crisscrossed the Pittsburgh-Mercer Road (opened in
> 1805). The route from Warrendale north followed Dutilh Road (old
> Perry Highway) to the present site of the Doyle Equipment Company.
>  From there the road forked off from the Pittsburgh-Mercer Road to
> merge into what is now Route 19 north to North Boundary Road. The
> businessmen soon discovered that operating a turnpike was more
> demanding than collecting tolls and raising and lowering tollgates.
> Maintenance costs, toll-keeper wages, and other expenses eventually
> forced their company into bankruptcy.
> Subjects: Perrysville Plank Road (West View, Pa.)
> Perrysville Plank Road Toll House (West View, Pa.)
> Roads, Plank--Pennsylvania--West View.
> Collection Number: MSP285.B012.F02.I01
> Collection: Allegheny Conference on Community Development, Historical
> Society of Western Pennsylvania
> Copyright: HSWP Use and Restrictions
> Ordering Reproductions: Information; Allegheny Conference on
> Community Development (HSWP)
>
>
>