Marietta has always been a place built in layers.
Long before electric wires crossed its roads, the town began as a river outpost. First as a Native American trading place, then as a ferry crossing known as Anderson’s Ferry, and eventually as a bustling industrial community pressed tight against the Susquehanna. Iron furnaces glowed nearby, rail lines rattled past, and for a time in the 19th century, Marietta produced so much pig iron that it earned the nickname “Little Pittsburgh.” Taverns, boardinghouses, and workshops sprang up along streets already worn smooth by generations of foot traffic.
By the early 20th century, much of that industry had faded, but the town remained firmly rooted in its past. Old houses stood shoulder to shoulder. Roads followed paths laid out long before anyone thought to name them. Beneath the quiet surface, Marietta was a place where history never quite stayed buried.
That truth became unexpectedly clear in late April 1913, when newspapers in Harrisburg and Lancaster carried a strange report from Marietta.
As part of a modernization effort, crews from the Edison Electric Company moved through Marietta and the surrounding countryside, installing new poles and running lines that would bring electric lighting to town and nearby roads. The Harrisburg Telegraph published the first account on April 26, followed three days later by the Lancaster Daily Intelligencer.
While digging along Colebrook Road, known today as Old Colebrook Road, about a half mile from town, the pole-setting crew struck something solid beneath the soil.
At first, it seemed like nothing more than an inconvenience. Edward Hammond, working with an iron bar, pushed harder.
The bar broke through something wooden. The hollow kerplunk it made was enough to stop the work.
As the men widened the hole, their unease grew. Beneath the dirt lay a black walnut coffin, remarkably well preserved. When the lid was breached, bones emerged from the soil, including a skull.
For a brief moment, the men feared the worst. Had they uncovered evidence of a murder?
Then someone noticed the sparkle.
Among the disturbed soil and coffin debris, Theodore Nissley spotted a stone that caught the light. It glittered sharply enough to stop him. Newspaper accounts described it as a large diamond, an object so unexpected that it instantly became the focus of the entire discovery.
Nissley slipped it into his pocket, intending to examine it more closely once the day’s work was finished, but he never got the chance.
When he reached for it later, the stone was gone.
Somewhere between the open grave and the roadside, the diamond had vanished.
As officials looked into the matter, the mystery of the black walnut coffin began to dissipate. There was no crime to investigate. Instead, the grave proved to be a relic of Marietta’s earlier days. Long before the establishment of the town cemetery on the triangle of land surrounded by Bridge, Fairview, and Gay Streets, a small burial ground association had existed in the area along what was then Colebrook Road. The grave predated modern records and had simply been forgotten as the landscape changed around it.
But stories like this tend to outlast the work that uncovers them.
Even now, Old Colebrook Road quietly passes cornfields, giving little hint of what once lay beneath it. And somewhere between the road and the soil below, there may still be a large diamond waiting.
If you ever find yourself walking that stretch and see something glint in the dirt, don’t trust the discovery to your pocket.
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