The Story Behind Baker Towers

"Address Unknown"

An Essay by Jennifer Haigh

Every Sunday afternoon of my childhood, my mother took us to visit our grandmother. I rode in the back seat of our Dodge Dart Swinger. My brother Jimmy sat up front. We returned at dusk, the country road high and winding; at each bend in the road, a lovely vista opened. At the final turn, our town, Barnesboro, lay spread out before us: six church steeples, neat rows of houses, the main street steeped in Sunday quiet. Each time we turned that corner, Jimmy repeated the same baffling phrase: Mama broke Barnesboro. My mother was mystified, but I understood his toddler logic. Our town lay in a cleft between dark mountains; from our vantage point, it seemed a mountain had been broken off. The lights in the valley were its glimmering innards, sharp in the twilight.

Barnesboro, Pennsylvania, is the town where I was raised. It was a mining town, named for the man who bought up the farmland and found bituminous coal underneath. For a century the Barnes and Tucker mines employed much of the town; its company store did such a booming business that the Pennsylvania Railroad built a siding to its back door. The streets bustled: in the days before automobiles, miners spent their entire paychecks downtown. On union wages they built houses and sent their kids to college. Miners played in the local baseball league, wildly competitive; they fished in springtime and hunted in fall. They became Elks and Moose and Knights of Columbus. They socialized at the Polish Legion, the Sons of Italy and the Slovak Club.

Then, in the late 1970s, the mines faltered. In the '80s, they began to close. Miners could stay and scrape by on lower-paying service jobs, when work could be found at all. Or they could move their families out of state, leaving behind parents and grandparents, schools and churches, beloved landscapes, lifelong friends.

Some stayed. But others, hundreds and then thousands, decided to leave. In a matter of fifteen years, the town's population shrank dramatically. Retirees, with their pensions and Social Security and black lung checks, were unaffected; it was the young families who sold their houses and left. Property values fell. The tax base shrank. And before long, Barnesboro was struggling for survival. Not just individual families, but the town itself.

Around this time, some local businessmen proposed merging the town with nearby Spangler, which was also struggling. Why pay for two police chiefs, two sewage authorities and two parks departments when neither town could afford such services? The new borough, with a brand new name, would have a population of less than 5,000, but it would have an easier time attracting federal and state funding. Most importantly, local taxpayers would save thousands.

The merger was put to a vote and defeated. But five years later, when it reappeared on the ballot, voters in Barnesboro and Spangler said yes. And effectively voted their towns out of existence.

In a way, all names are arbitrary. Before it was Barnesboro, my town was called McAnnulty, after a farmer who owned a sawmill there. An infant's name -- always with the middle name attached: James Harry -- sounds cumbersome and oddly hollow, until the child grows into it. Until a deeply suitable nickname -- often with a story behind it -- can emerge. Imagine changing that child's name in adolescence. Family stories would be interrupted by footnotes: we called him Jimmy then. The child wouldn't disappear, but wouldn't he see himself differently? Wouldn't something be lost?

Names matter. Years ago, some friends of mine moved to the ever-expanding suburbs of Washington, D.C., to a planned community called South Riding, Va. The name fascinated me. Virginia has no North, East or West Riding, and if there ever was a Riding family, nobody seems to know about them. It seemed to me a name that meant nothing, chosen because somebody liked the horsy, aristocratic sound of it.

A fair-weather fan, I have always gravitated toward the older sports teams: the Steelers, the Oilers, the Packers. Those names are relics of a different time, when players actually came from the cities they played for and those cities were defined by their industries. When a meat packer might become a star athlete, when a Pittsburgh player might have worked, even briefly, for Beth Steel.



My father died in 2003, nearly four years after Barnesboro disappeared. It is strange that the town where he lived most of his life no longer shows up on a map. Yet he was a practical man: He'd served some years in local government and was in favor of the merger. It won't change anything, he said, just before the towns merged. People won't forget.

In some ways, he was right. Except for a few signs at the town limits ("Borough of Northern Cambria"), my town looks the same. Ask anyone for directions, and Barnesboro and Spangler remain the points of reference. Call it whatever you want, Barnesboro has not been broken. But for how long?

People don't forget. They simply go. My Ukrainian grandparents, who pronounced "Barnesboro" with a hard rolling of the R's., died years ago. My father's generation, graduates of Barnesboro High School, are passing too. Boys Jimmy's age, who played Little League in Barnes and Tucker jerseys, are raising their families elsewhere. We remember Barnesboro, and in that way it will live -- but only as long as we do.