One fall evening, over dinner with our friend, Bobbie Jo (in case you were wondering, dinner was Garlicky Roast Chicken with Capers & Lemon, and lots of Italian bread to mop up the delicious sauce), we pondered on the forgotten histories of Johnstown’s working class immigrants, especially curious as to what the surrounding hilltop cemeteries might reveal. After a toast (or two) with Negroni cocktails, we planned out our Johnstown cemetery expedition to take place the next day, hoping for good weather.
Our Johnstown cemetery expedition purposely avoided Grandview Cemetery, the well-known postmortem repository of local rich and famous (as well as many not so rich and famous). Instead, we were looking for common plots of common people, located in the many smaller cemeteries scattered across the hilltops north and east of Johnstown. Starting with the earlier 18th century German Benshoff Hill Cemetery, we then progressed through the Eastern European immigrant cemeteries of the later 19th and early 20th centuries.
High-density, valley-bottom Johnstown has a sharp edge of steep, wooded slopes that bend into a hilltop mix of fields, scattered suburban houses, old crossroads villages and cemeteries. The German roots of this older, more rural Johnstown is apparent in places like Benshoff Hill Cemetery (in image below). George and Eli Benshoff were founding members of the adjacent Pleasant Hill Church of the Brethren, a 1708 pacifist sect (like the Mennonites) founded in Schwarzenau, Germany. The “John” in Johnstown is the founder’s last name, an anglicized version of German immigrant Joseph Schantz who laid out the city in 1800, long before the arrival of railroads, steel mills and immigrants from eastern Europe.
Kevin and Bobbie uncovering Johnstown’s common history at St. Nicholas Serbian Orthodox Church.
St. Nicholas Serbian Orthodox Church Cemetery is located at the head of Prosser Hollow, a cleft in Benshoff Hill that leads down to Minersville and Cambria City, Johnstown neighborhoods that filled with Serbs and other southeastern European mine and mill workers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Many first-generation tombstones are headed with the Serbian words, “Here Rests,” and include porcelain portraits of the deceased.
Croatians are also represented at Johnstown’s St. Nicholas Serbian Orthodox Church Cemetery like this young woman, Mila Marie Blagovich, whose body lies buried beneath the Croatian epitaphs; “Here Rests in the Peace of God,” and “Remember her forever.” Tragically, according to her death certificate, Mila died at Lee Hospital on July 12, 1951 from cirrhosis of the liver and alcoholism. She had worked as a waitress and was only 27 years old.
The Johnstown’s St. Patrick’s Day Flood of 1936 is memorialized by one of the victims buried at St. Nicholas Serbian Orthodox Church Cemetery. According to a rough search, this man may be Gregory Kostoff (probably an Anglo spelling for Kostova which is the “English” translation from the Cyrillic alphabet).
The 1930 US Census records indicate that Kostoff was born in 1875 in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He arrived in the US in 1908 at the age of 33 and his native language was Bulgarian (although by 1930, he could speak, read, and write English). Kostoff lived with his family (two daughters, Agnes, age 16 and Evangline, age 14) in a rented flat at 149 Bradley Alley Rear, Cambria City where he worked as a laborer in a brickyard.
The sons of southeastern European immigrants sacrificed in World War II are also represented at Johnstown’s St. Nicholas Serbian Orthodox Church Cemetery like Peter Rasich, a 24-year old corporal killed in Sicily.
The view of Cambria City and the West End of Johnstown strung out along the Conemaugh River reveals the shape of this mine and mill metropolis that drew tens of thousands of immigrants to dig its coal, smelt its iron ore and fabricate its iron and steel. People lived and worked in the narrow river valleys, but when they died their bodies were carted up to hilltop cemeteries, most operating as extensions of the churches the deceased belonged to in life.
Stacey backdropped by the numerous church steeples in Johnstown’s Cambria City, representing the numerous ethnic origins of the the late 19th and early 20th century resident population.
Johnstown’s Cambria Iron Works opened along the Conemaugh River in 1852, expanding to become Bethlehem Steel’s Lower Works in 1923, and finally closing in 1992. The steel mill’s 1864 Blacksmith Shop, however, still stands. A recent adaptive-reuse initiative has revived the Blacksmith Shop to new life as the Center for Metal Arts.
Semet-Solvay opened the Rosedale Coke Works up Hinckston Hollow from Johnstown’s Cambria Steel works in 1921. A mine portal opened at the coke works filled the materials pit with coal to be coked into the blast furnace fuel used at the Lower Works. Nary a tree grew on the now forested surrounding slopes.
Like the ruins of some ancient temple, concrete foundations are all that remains of Johnstown’s Rosedale Coke Works.
Fading fall foliage reveals hillside spoil piles that mark the locations of old Hinckston Hollow coal mines that operated above Johnstown’s Rosedale Coke Works.
A cluster of Orthodox and Catholic cemeteries occupy the narrow neck of Prospect Hill between Hinckston Hollow and the Little Conemaugh Valley at Woodvale including; St. Petka’s, Saints Peter & Paul, and St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian.
Little Kathryn Sandak, who is buried at St. Vladimir’s Ukrainian Catholic Cemetery was born on born on April 2, 1933 in Johnstown, PA and was three years old when she died on October 6, 1936 at Mercy Hospital in Johnstown.
Kathryn’s father was Nicholas Sandak, who was born in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and her mother was Anna (Sely) Sandak, who was born in Pennsylvania and at the time of Kathryn’s death, they lived at 664 Highland Avenue, Johnstown. According to her death certificate, Kathryn died of Ileocolitis, an inflammation of the ileum and colon usually associated with Crohn’s disease.
Graves of the unknown at the edge of Saints Peter & Paul Roman Catholic Cemetery.
Stacey and Bobbie flanking the Riblett family’s massive treestone standing among the English, German and other Northwestern European dead at East Taylor Township’s Headrick Union Cemetery.
Stacey at Headrick Union Cemetery in East Taylor Township, photographing a tiny replica of the famous and much-copied “Weeping Angel” tombstone. The original monument, formally entitled “The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Alter of Life”, is an 1894 sculpture by artist William Wetmore Story. He carved the monument to commemorate his wife, Emelyn Story, and it is located at her gravesite in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, Italy.
It’s all in the editing! The end product of the photo Stacey took that day: a now artfully revised image of the diminutive “Weeping Angel” replica at Headrick Union Cemetery in East Taylor Township.
Carpatho-Rusyns built Holy Trinity Byzantine Catholic Church in 1908-18 among the crowded steel mill worker housing of East Conemaugh where there was no room for a cemetery. Therefore, the cemetery was laid out up on the hill along the old William Penn Highway in East Taylor Township.
Outdoor altar at Holy Trinity Byzantine Catholic Church Cemetery in East Taylor Township, Cambria County, Pennsylvania.
Grave marker for a little boy at Holy Trinity Byzantine Cemetery in East Taylor Township, Cambria County, Pennsylvania. John Bovan died at home (343 2nd Street, East Conemaugh, PA) on November 26, 1924 at the age of nine. His father was Elix Bovan and mother was Helen (Rudock) Bovan. After an illness of sixteen days, John died of acute nephritis due to follicular tonsillitis.
Even simple marble markers were often too costly for the working class families of Johnstown during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a cheaper alternative, many bereaved families either made their own grave markers out of wood, metal, glass, or cement, or purchased a locally produced cast concrete marker. This broad-based concrete folk marker at Holy Trinity Byzantine Cemetery is etched with the Slovak words, “Tu Spoceva” for, Here Lies. Note the death year of 1918, which might possibly be related to the global flu pandemic.
On our way east toward Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, passing through Mineral Point in the pathway of the 1889 Johnstown Flood.
Old bridge approach at the Little Conemaugh River in Mineral Point, Pennsylvania.
Hillside drift mines once worked by underground immigrant miners living in Conemaugh Valley towns have been replaced by contour strip mines like this recently reclaimed Amfire mine above South Fork showing distant wind turbines generating electricity along the breezy crest of Allegheny Ridge.
Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, was a coal patch community opened around 1902 by the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Company across the Little Conemaugh River from South Fork. Beth Mines acquired the operation and ran it as a captive mine for Bethlehem Steel’s Johnstown plant into the 1980s.
This was the Ehrenfeld that actor Charles Bronson would have recognized, having been born there as Charles Buchinsky in 1921, 11th in a Russian family of 15. His father died when he was 11 and Charles followed his older brothers into the mine until his stint in the US Army Air Corp as a tail gunner during World War II. He pursued an acting career after the war and made it to Hollywood by way of Philadelphia and New York.
Towering above the Little Conemaugh River and the Pennsylvania Railroad Main Line in this circa 1950 photo, Ehrenfeld’s bony piles have only recently been removed and hillside reclaimed.
Fifficktown near the lower end of Ehrenfeld in 1994 when St. Michael’s Greek Catholic Church was still standing on the hillside above town. Having emigrated from what is now Slovakia, the Rusyn Fifik family founded St. Michael’s in 1905. The church has since been demolished, but the cemetery behind it remains.
St. Michael’s Greek Catholic cemetery, final resting place for the ethnic Rusyns of Fefficktown and South Fork, Pennsylvania.
Among the Rusyn ghosts of Fefficktown in Pennsylvania’s Little Conemaugh River valley.
The Little Conemaugh River Valley was Pennsylvania’s pathway west pioneered by the Allegheny Portage Railroad in the 1830s and the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1850s. Coal mines opened along the railroad attracted the immigrants now buried beneath the grass of Fefficktown.
St. James Cemetery, across the valley from Ehrenfeld, the final resting place of so many who toiled in the villages below; including Charles Bronson’s father, Walter Buchinsky.
The sun sets on the grave of Joseph Gresh (1878-1920) in Saint James Cemetery, thus ending our beautiful day of exploration. Although his original grave marker is handmade and roughly rendered from concrete, a newer, commercially-produced marker was apparently added some years later.
Post-expedition reward: steak dinner at Al Patti’s Bar in Indiana, PA!
**Special thanks to our friend, Don Lancaster, for researching the histories of the deceased.
If you find cemeteries and grave markers fascinating, you might also want to check out Stacey’s cemetery photo gallery on Instagram: @memento_mori_sp
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A very interesting. & Informative article, GOOD read !
Thanks so much, Marty! Johnstown is such a fascinating place and we hope to occasionally write more posts that highlight its rich history.