– EPISODE 2 –

Saints Peter & Paul Orthodox Cemetery in the Ghost Town of Wehrum, Pennsylvania.

“Once cooler temperatures arrive and the fall leaves are shed, Saints Peter and Paul Cemetery, on the hillside above the ghost town of Wehrum, can be magically beautiful; especially under a gleaming blanket of fresh snow.”

We’re excited to present this second episode of our ongoing series “Fascinating Cemetery Haunts”. This special series regularly features new photo-essays highlighting one of the many intriguing cemeteries we’ve encountered in our travels throughout the U.S. Be sure to check in regularly on Catbirdlife.com, as Kevin and Stacey take you on an episodic, virtual tour of cemeteries we found to be especially intriguing. Click here to subscribe so you can be sure to receive updates announcing our next installment in this compelling new series or you may follow us on Instagram or Twitter.

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Few things spark the imagination more than the notion of a ghost town. The very idea evokes images of desolate, windswept plains and tumbleweeds blowing past decrepit wooden storefronts. So the idea of a ghost town outside of its stereotypical setting of the American west seems a little bizarre. Nonetheless, numerous ghost towns sites dot the landscape east of the Mississippi River such as Graysonia, Arkansas; Centralia Pennsylvania; and Thurmond, West Virginia.

Like the more familiar ghost towns of the American west, most eastern ghost towns were also once boom towns, population centers that sprang up rapidly, often centered around close proximity to a valued resource such as minerals, fossil fuels, timber, or even transportation. Unlike the ghost towns in the arid climates west of the Mississippi, remnants of abandoned towns in the humid eastern U.S. are quickly overrun with vegetation and can virtually disappear in a tangle of weedy brush and even young forest within a matter of decades.

Many factors can lead to the demise of a boom town, such as resource depletion, market fluctuations, or even a natural or human-related disaster. For any boom town that predated the automobile era (roughly before 1930), there was a much higher likelihood of the town being abandoned because transportation limitations of that time period could quickly make a place economically unviable. Also, it was extremely difficult for people to maintain residency in a place without any nearby (usually meaning walking distance) employment. In these cases, businesses, industry, and people, would all quickly pack up and move out. What was left behind, especially machinery, fixtures, lumber, and bricks, would often be quickly salvaged, sold and/or repurposed.

Unlike the well-preserved ghost towns of the arid western U.S., the remains of any abandoned town in the more humid eastern U.S. would be rapidly swallowed up by vegetation, making it difficult to find any trace of human presence. The only discernible remnants are often little more than a few scattered, crumbling building foundations hidden in the deepening gloom of weed-choked, young forest–a largely underwhelming and disappointing landscape to any adventure-seeker hoping to experience the haunted romanticism usually associated with the idea of a ghost town.

One eastern U.S. “Ghost Town” is Wehrum, Pennsylvania, located along a remote stretch of the Black Lick Creek in southeastern Indiana County, very close to the Cambria County border. Built in 1901 by Warren Delano (uncle of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt), Wehrum was located on one of the numerous bituminous coal seams scattered throughout western Pennsylvania. Like many resource-based ghost towns, Wehrum had a very brief existence as a fully-functioning town as by 1929, less than 30 years after its founding, the coal mine was abruptly and permanently shut-down. Within just a few, short years, Wehrum had but a handful of residents left, all the lumber had been salvaged and sold, and most of the viable equipment and machinery had been re-located or sold for scrap. What was left behind soon fell into a state of crumbling decay as the verdant Pennsylvania forest rapidly reasserted its claim along the Black Lick Creek.

Remnants of Wehrum, Pennsylvania, along the Ghost Town Trail, February 2022.

During its heyday, Wehrum had about 250 houses, a post office, jail, hotel, company store, one school, and several churches. Today, however, there are few visible remains of this once busy little town. Almost entirely swallowed up by the rapidly growing deciduous forest all that is left of Wehrum are the crumbling remnants of a few building foundations, the jail (on private property), and little else, with one notable exception…a little cemetery perched up on the hillside overlooking the former town.

Unlike most company coal towns in western Pennsylvania, in which inhabitants (most of whom were Roman Catholic or Orthodox recent immigrants) had to bury their deceased in the nearest parish cemetery, which was often a number of miles away, Wehrum had the unusual distinction of having a cemetery, albeit one only for people of the Orthodox faith. With land purchased by the Russian Orthodox Bishop Tikhon (now Saint Tikhon), the Saints Peter & Paul Orthodox Cemetery was established around 1902. The Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church itself was located in Wehrum for a brief few years until 1907, when the church moved to the nearby, larger town of Vintondale. Additionally, around 1924, a few years before Wehrum was abandoned, a new Saints Peter and Paul Church cemetery was established in Vintondale. The old Saints Peter and Paul Cemetery in Wehrum is still owned by the church, although like Wehrum it was abandoned long ago, with its last recorded burials in 1927.

The cemetery is situated on a hillside above the abandoned town of Wehrum, in an overgrown, wooded plot that is gradually becoming more woods and less open space. One interesting characteristic is the mounded nature of many burial plots. More common to dry and/or rocky environments, such as desert or mountains, mounded graves are highly unusual in Pennsylvania cemeteries. Although these mounds could possibly indicate a deliberate, cultural preference, presumably among people of eastern European origin, it is more probably linked to the site’s unusually thin, rocky soil and sloped conditions. It appears that many of the graves were deliberately terraced with stones in an attempt to created a more leveled appearance. Whatever the cause, the mounded graves are especially apparent when the cemetery is blanketed by snow, and it makes for an especially intriguing landscape.

During the summertime, when vegetation and brush can be a tangly impediment, it’s more difficult to access and appreciate the individual grave markers, as well as the overall cemetery. Once cooler temperatures arrive and the fall leaves are shed, Saints Peter and Paul Cemetery can be magically beautiful; especially under a gleaming blanket of fresh snow.

Like most Christian cemeteries, the Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Cemetery is oriented so that the grave markers face east. This is in keeping with Christian belief that during the second coming of Christ, he will appear to the east, so the already deceased can therefore meet Christ face-to-face. Additionally, many pre-Christian, pagan traditions (which strongly influenced Christian traditions) often venerated the sun and preferred to bury their dead in east-facing graves, so that the dead could face the newly-risen sun each morning. This ancient east-facing burial tradition makes the Saint Peter and Paul Cemetery of Wehrum especially enchanting around sunset, as the orthodox cross-topped markers are backdropped against the flaming orange and yellow of the of the setting sun, far beyond the horizon of the adjacent farmland.

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Like all boom towns, Wehrum had a relatively brief period of existence, with only about thirty years of human habitation. Therefore, it’s not surprising to find that the vast majority of the burials at Saints Peter and Paul Cemetery are not elderly people, who have lived out the fullest extent of their lives, but are instead, mostly people under the age of 40. Mortality rates in the early 20th century, especially for children, were appallingly high. In this era before antibiotics and immunizations, the dangers of disease and infection were a very real threat and many infants and children succumbed to any number of diseases such as typhoid, diphtheria, and measles. Aside from disease, other dangers were ever-lurking, as the hazards of a pre-modern household made children (as well as adults) especially vulnerable to threats such as fires, scalding water, and hot stoves. Wives in coal patch towns like Wehrum, were often unimaginably burdened with household responsibilities, which sometimes made it difficult to carefully supervise children every minute of the day, a circumstance which sometimes had tragic consequences.

Until the advent of modern medicine, adult mortality rates in the U.S., like infants and children, were also very high at this time, with women being especially vulnerable to complications of childbirth, especially post-natal infections. For adult men, coal mining was (and still is) an extremely dangerous occupation, with mine collapses, gas explosions, coal dust inhalation, and dangerous machinery. Additionally, being a coal mining town, along with all of the associated industry and machine shops nearby, even non coal-miners were exposed to highly dangerous working conditions on a daily basis. One especially tragic coal mine disaster was keenly felt throughout the entire Black Lick Creek Valley on the morning of June 23, 1909 when seventeen mine workers lost their lives, with an additional sixteen injured (four of whom died a few days later) from a gas explosion at Wehrum Mine No. 4 of the Lackawanna Coal and Coke Company. The deceased miners of Orthodox faith, most of whom were from eastern Europe, were buried at the Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Cemetery in Wehrum, however, none of their graves are visibly marked today. The Roman Catholic miners killed in this tragic 1909 accident, most of whom were Italian, were buried at nearby Saint Charles Cemetery in Twin Rocks, where a memorial (see image below) was erected in their memory many decades later.

A stroll through this lovely place, especially at dusk, can be an truly haunting and moving experience. All those lives, who descended upon the valley so quickly and then, almost as quickly, vanished, nonetheless have left traces of their humanity in the quiet, peaceful Pennsylvania woods. Mothers, husbands, sisters, and sons. All once deeply loved; and all once deeply mourned. Their cold stone monuments, starkly silhouetted against the deepening gloom, reminding us to fervently embrace this gift of life and love. For like them, you too will soon be. Memento mori.

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Written by Stacey. All photos taken by either Kevin or Stacey (except as noted).

WORKS CITED:

Dusza Weber, Denise. 1991. Delano’s domain: A history of Warren Delano’s mining towns of Vintondale, Wehrum, and Claghorn. A.G. Halldin Pub. Co.