Book Talk Coincides with Official Opening of Memory Room

Monday, June 21, 2010

Joseph Comm, author of “Rock Springs Park,” signs a book for Patty Swiger at a signing event held Monday at the Chester Municipal Building. Prior to the signing, Comm talked about how his book came to be. (Photo by Nancy Tullis)

On this date two years ago, the Chester Kiwanis Club hosted an "Images of America: Rock Springs Park" book talk and signing at the old Chester High School.

Read the article at http://rockspringspark.blogspot.com/2010/08/rock-springs-park-book-release.html .

Monday, June 21, 2010

Chester Hall of Fame and Memory Lane Room in the old Chester High School Building, now the City’s Municipal Building (2009).

On the same date, The Memory Room project in the old Chester High School officially opened,  coinciding with a slide show book talk on Rock Springs Park sponsored by the Chester Kiwanis Club.

Read more about Memory Lane at http://rockspringspark.blogspot.com/2011/08/memory-lane.html.

Impromptu Parking

Rock Springs Park was designed as a trolley park and to that end never truly established parking areas for customers arriving by automobile.   

As early as 1908 automobiles carried patrons to the park but parking was limited to found space. At first, as seen in this postcard image, that meant parking along the trolley loop near the lower entrance.

When the park was re-imagined by C.C. Macdonald in the mid to late 1920s an upper entrance was added under the third hill of his new Cyclone Roller Coaster. The aerial photograph below clearly illustrates that the trolley loop all the way back to the lake and bath house was used for parking, as was the area near the Chester High School to access the upper entrance gate.

Black Model Ts line the trolley loop and lower picnic park to the lake, as well as, near the high school to the west.



The series of photographs which follow shows that this trend continued into the late 1960s until the park closed in 1970. Most travelers from Pennsylvania parked near the lower entrance as it was the first one they encountered along Route 30. While those traveling from southern West Virginia along Route 2 or across the Chester Bridge from Ohio may have used the upper entrance more often.

First Chester Graduation Held at Rock Springs

As if to illustrate the long connection between Rock Springs Park and the local school system, this image shows the parking lot of the old Chester High School transformed into an amusement fair next to the former site of the area’s “Premier Panhandle Playground” – Rock Springs Park.

A recent blog post about the changes to Chester High School over the years made me wonder about the time line of these changes and what was used for secondary education prior to the red brick building constructed by the Finley Brothers in 1928. So, I went to straight to my favorite source, Roy C. Cashdollar's History of Chester: The Gateway to the West for answers. Roy did not disappoint.

In 1906, the first full four-year high school building in Chester was erected at Third Street and Indiana Avenue. Prior to this structure, named Central School (pictured above), children met in homes or in one room buildings. These early schools were not graded, but in 1903, in anticipation of the new brick Central School, the first Chester freshman and sophomore classes were formed in a makeshift school building in town along the north side of Indiana Avenue between Third and Fourth Streets. Called the Mechanics Lodge, it also housed a general store and the post office.

Cashdollar notes, "the first high school graduation ceremony was held in Rock Springs Park on the stage of the old Summer Theater." The graduation class size that year was one, Olive Hamilton, who was the first and only Chester high school graduate in 1906. It was also the only time the theater was used for this purpose. The Summer Theater constructed in 1903 by C.A. Smith burned down in 1917 and was not replaced.

"When a special act of the legislature was made, Chester was organized as an independent school system in 1904. Thomas L. Young, who was the water works superintendent for C.A. Smith was one of the original board members." Roy C. Cashdollar.The Chester High School was constructed "on rather swampy lands" at the corner of Sixth and Indiana Avenue in 1925. It was officially dedicated on January 4, 1926. The original structure consisted of twelve rooms and two additions were added over the years with the largest one being done by through a W.P.A. project during the Depression.

With the construction of the Chester Primary Building (pictured with Rock Springs Park in the background in 1969) and Oak Glen High school in the early 1960s, the Central Building was abandoned in 1963 and razed in 1967, replaced with a playground which still displays the original school bell.

A Road by Any Other Name

Improvements along Chester’s main street in the past several years have included brick-lined sidewalks and new lampposts sporting red and blue banners noting places of historical significance; including the old Chester High School, the World’s Largest Teapot, and my favorite – Rock Springs Park (pictured).

Growing up in Chester, West Virginia, I often incorrectly identified the main street through town as “Main Street.” Mostly this was because I lived on a dead end and many lost drivers would interrupt a street wiffle ball game or a game of catch to ask us for directions to the bridge. It was easier to refer to the main drag though town as “Main Street” rather than its given name “Carolina Avenue.”

There have been two Chester Bridges – the old one and the new one. The old one at First Street closed in 1969 and the new one opened in 1977. During the intervening years, drivers used Newell's toll bridge.

Carolina Avenue in Chester is clearly "Main Street" as it is the address for the post office, fire department, several banks, and most other businesses. You enter Chester at one end of Carolina Avenue and exit at the other. Plus, It’s the only street in town with traffic lights – four at present – two when I was a kid . Not to mention, geographically speaking, Carolina Avenue neatly divides Chester right down the middle with the mountains to the south and the Ohio River to the north. Historically speaking, it was the very first road in town.

Our family business, Herche's Pharmacy, was located on Carolina Avenue and Third Street in Chester.

The reason many vehicles stopped and asked for directions in my old neighborhood was because at one time Carolina and Virginia Avenues were along a trolley route that led from East Liverpool, Ohio, across the old Chester Bridge and on to Rock Springs Park. Approaches to bridges in those days were not sprawling clover leaf exchanges like today, but could be found anywhere; including at the end of a winding neighborhood street like ours or at an abrupt 90 degree turn like the one off Route 2 to enter the Newell Bridge. Before the interstates, drivers had to go through the small towns and in many instances the main drag was not a straight shot.

There was no gentle cloverleaf-style off-ramp at the northern portal of the Chester Bridge. Drivers were forced to make a sharp left into downtown East Liverpool.

In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Juliet delivers the famous line, “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” meaning “What matters is what something is, not what it is called.” This is apropos when talking about Carolina Avenue in Chester. A quick Google Map search shows it to be Route 2 today. Before the new Chester Bridge (which by the way is actually called “The Jennings Randolph Bridge”) was built, the old trolley route through town was designated as part of the three mile section of the Lincoln Highway through West Virginia, making Carolina Avenue also the Lincoln, and then Route 30.

Call it "Route 2", "Route 30", "The Lincoln", or any other name you want, but Carolina Avenue in Chester is still Main Street to me. If you happen to be in town over the 4th of July, as I was last week, and see it festooned in red, white, and blue bunting and rows and rows of American flags, you just might call it "Main Street USA."

Although he did not stop and ask for directions, Jack Nicklaus got lost in my neighborhood looking for the old Chester Bridge in the early 80s. He was heading to Ohio with his father for a tournament, we learned on the evening news. We weren’t sure if it was Jack until he did a three-point turn at the end of our dead end street and we saw his vanity plate which read, “PGA.”