The White Face of Cedar Street

unchartedadam

2 weeks ago

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Today, Safe Harbor Park feels peaceful. It is a popular hangout on summer days. Children play on the swing set near the pavilion, fishermen work the banks of the Conestoga, and dog walkers follow the meandering dirt road along the river. It is easy to believe this corner of Lancaster County has always been a place of shade trees, river breezes, and weekend picnics.

But the ground tells a different story.

Long before the park became a place for recreation, this was the site of the old Safe Harbor Iron Works, one of the county’s most industrious and rough-edged villages. In 1846, Reeves Abbot & Company of Philadelphia selected the mouth of the Conestoga to build an ironworks devoted to manufacturing railroad rails. The location made perfect sense. Iron ore lay nearby, and canal access on both the Susquehanna and Conestoga made it possible to move raw materials in and finished products out.

What rose here in just a few years was not simply a factory, but a company town. More than seventy duplex dwellings lined new streets cut with almost geometric precision through what had recently been quiet countryside. Names like Walnut, Cedar, Spring, Griffin, Willow, and Race marked a village built in a hurry for laborers and their families. Many of those workers were Irish puddlers, recruited during the years of the potato famine to do the brutal furnace-side work of transforming pig iron into wrought iron.

Safe Harbor boomed. Within a couple of decades, the village held a blast furnace, rolling mill, foundry, schoolhouses, churches, stores, hotels, taverns, and lodge rooms. At its height, the community swelled to around 1,200 residents. The rolling mill alone dominated the place, turning out vast quantities of iron and helping Safe Harbor produce a remarkable share of Pennsylvania’s rolled iron. During the Civil War, the works shifted from rails to war materiel, manufacturing Dahlgren guns for Union forces.

It was the sort of place where heat, noise, smoke, labor, and liquor all mixed together. Safe Harbor gained a reputation as one of the booziest places in the county, with five taverns, three liquor stores, and six beer halls doing steady business among men who worked punishing jobs in dangerous conditions. It was a village built on fire, sweat, and hard living.

Then came decline.

A devastating flood in 1865 wrecked canal facilities and severed the transportation lifelines the ironworks depended on. The plant languished, briefly revived, and finally shut down for good in 1894. The village lingered, but the heart had gone out of it. Buildings disappeared. Streets faded. Houses collapsed or were removed. Time and brush swallowed whole blocks.

Yet the old town never vanished completely.

Even now, the woods hold traces of it. Foundation indentations still mark where duplexes once stood. The Odd Fellows Hall survives as one of the most striking reminders of the lost village. The ironmaster’s house still stands as well, older even than the industrial town that grew up around it. On the hill, where East Spring Street once opened into a clearing, stood St. Mary’s Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, built in 1854 for the Irish workers and their families. The church is gone, but the cemetery remains. There lie Civil War veterans, victims of violence, and, in another section, the unmarked graves of at least fifty Italian immigrants who helped build the nearby Atglen and Susquehanna Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Known today as the Enola Low Grade Line, this massive three-year construction project came at an astonishing price, costing over half a billion dollars in today’s money and claiming the lives of more than 200 men.

There may be other remnants of the old company town that are harder to quantify.

Take, for example, Donna, who shared an experience her family has never forgotten. One day, after picnicking at the pavilion, they were getting into their vehicle when all five family members saw something they could not explain.

Off to the right side of what had once been Cedar Street, as one looked uphill from the parking lot, stood part of the arboretum. From one of the trees, Donna said, a white face peeked out.

It had no clear features. No eyes and no mouth that she could make out, only the unmistakable impression of a pale face watching from behind the trunk.

Then it moved.

The thing kept ducking behind the tree and then peeking back out again. The face hovered only a few feet above the ground. Donna and her family stared in disbelief for what felt like several minutes. There were no other people nearby. No cars. The weather was clear. The light was good. And when they searched for some ordinary explanation, they saw no sign that a person, animal, or trick of movement had slipped away behind the tree.

It was simply there, then gone.

For Donna and her family, Safe Harbor is, quite literally, a ghost town.

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