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Exploring PA in a Tasty Way—Culinary Trails

This week we are excited to shine a spotlight on the Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (CRAFT) at Chatham University.  The CRAFT team created four culinary trails for the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development—trails that highlight the foodways traditions in southwestern Pennsylvania and throughout the Commonwealth. In the article below, guest writer and Program Manager for CRAFT, Cynthia Caul,  offers a taste of the Chopped trail.

By Cynthia Caul, Program Manager, CRAFT at Chatham University

A pig greets shoppers at the Stone House Butcher and Provisions in Farmington, PA.

“Chopped: A Charcuterie Trail” is not just for Foodies

“Foodie” is one of those words that makes me cringe a little each time I hear it. I am personally referred to as a foodie fairly frequently, and it always elicits an awkward laugh with a gentle correction out of me. I am not a foodie, and you don’t need to be one, either, to enjoy Pennsylvania’s Chopped: A Charcuterie Trail.

The trail was first released back in the fall, along with three other culinary trails from the Pennsylvania Department of Community & Economic Development, and it was developed by regional culinary historian Mary Miller and by our team at Chatham University’s Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (CRAFT).

As spring finally emerges, it’s a perfect time to revisit these trails as you plan your long weekend or even just a day trip.

As I mentioned in my first blog when the trails launched, we developed each of these trails with a food systems approach, incorporating a variety of food growers and makers, as well as a diversity of individuals responsible for cultivating our food traditions historically and today. In the same way that we took this holistic approach in selecting the stops along the trails, we also hoped to create experiences that could be enjoyed by an equally inclusive community.

If you just Googled “charcuterie” to figure out what it means, this trail is still for you. Take it from a person who just Googled the word for the very same reason a short few years ago.

And if you didn’t just Google “charcuterie” but were planning to, let me make it easy for you: Google defines charcuterie as “cold cooked meats.” It’s a French word that directly translates to “pork-butcher’s shop” or “cooked pork meats.” Today, it refers to a wide range of cured meat products, many of which you are likely to be familiar with. It does not just entail meats spread on a beautiful tray or wooden boards. It is also that backyard smoked sausage or kielbasa. Personally, my family has been eating kielbasa at almost every special occasion for my entire life, but we never once referred to it as charcuterie.

Sisters Ryleigh and Remi, whose family is friends with the owner’s family, work at the Hungarian Smokehouse.

So, if you read “charcuterie” and immediately associated it with an inaccessible or esoteric foodie trend, I hope you’re starting to reconsider (and if you already knew what it meant this whole time, I hope you’ll stick with us too).

Charcuterie certainly has been trending lately, but the practice of drying and curing meats dates back to the very first communities in what is known today as Pennsylvania as well as more broadly in North America. Many indigenous communities of this region made and continue to make jerky and are the inventors of pemmican, a mixture of dried meats, berries, seeds, and fat. Historically, this nutritious mix was invaluable to these communities during long winters and was adopted by many European colonizers upon their arrival here for the same reason.

Industrialization in the region throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought migrants from all over Europe and the world who carried with them their own traditions of drying and curing meats. The many who settled near the port in Philadelphia were often able to get imported meats from their countries of origin, maintaining their former food traditions here in the region. However, those who moved to more rural areas to work on railroads or in coal mines often adapted their traditions with ingredients that were readily available to them, creating new regional traditions.

A selection of meat and cheeses at Silver Star Meats in McKees Rocks, Allegheny County.

Seasonality continued to play a significant role in meat preservation. Farmers often slaughtered their hogs and other animals in the late fall or early winter, as the cold weather made it possible for them to preserve the meat safely. Once preserved, the meat would sustain them through the winter when it was otherwise too cold to cultivate food. Farmers typically had smokehouses in their backyards in addition to smoking shelves in their chimneys. Some of these smokehouses still remain today, and you can see them for yourself as you drive through the Juniata River Valley on the part of the Chopped trail that runs through the central part of the state.

Like the Baked trail, the Chopped trail will give you a full experience of your food, providing an understanding of its history and how it ultimately came to be on your plate, including all of the stages in between. The trail will take you to farms where the animals are raised, meat auctions, supply stores where you can get everything you need to cure your own meats, workshops to teach you how, and places to purchase beautiful handmade trays and boards to serve them on.

The trail provides an opportunity to visit a myriad of local businesses where you can taste and take home a variety of products, including deer and elk jerky, ring bologna, chorizo, kielbasa, soppressata or “soupie,” and so much more.

Specifically, the western part of the trail takes you to neighborhoods and areas within and just beyond Pittsburgh, including the Strip District, Larimer, McKees Rocks, Brookline, Crafton, and the Laurel Mountains. Highlights include:

A wide variety of authentic Italian pork products are available from Parma Sausage. Images courtesy of Parma Sausage.

Parma Sausage Products, a nearly seventy-year-old, family-owned company specializing in cured Italian meats that operates on the same street where the very first prosciutto was cured in the United States.

Mike, Brian, and Linda were working behind the counter at Silver Star on a recent Friday afternoon.

Silver Star Meats where owner Robert Germony is dedicated to preserving the recipes and memories of Pittsburgh’s Polish community, working with the many Polish delis that have closed their doors over the past decades to reproduce their recipes. For hunters, you can also get your own meat processed here.

Las Palmas Carniceria, where you can get both Spanish- and Mexican-style house-made chorizo from their meat counter in the back or tasty chorizo tacos from their stand out front.

The Hungarian Smokehouse on Route 88 in Carmichaels, Greene County.

Hungarian Smokehouse, where they carry a vast variety of jerky, beef sticks, kielbasa, pickled eggs and vegetables, smoked cheeses, and more.

The Stone House Butcher and Provisions offers grass-fed beef from their own farms, along with other products. It is situated on the historic National Road (Route 40) in Fayette County.

Stone House Butcher and Provisions in the scenic Laurel Mountains near Fayette Springs, which includes an inn, restaurant, butcher shop, and barbecue hut.

You can see the full-length trail on the visitPA website.

Whether you consider yourself a foodie or not, plan your trip today. This trail is for all meat-eaters.

And remember to bring a cooler!

About CRAFT

The Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (CRAFT) works to support robust regional food systems that are equitable, inclusive, and sustainable in Western Pennsylvania and beyond.
CRAFT works with a number of regional partners to develop culinary trails that support economic development particularly in our region’s rural communities.

These trails aim to highlight the rich heritage and food traditions of the region, as well as include the history and culture of all of the area’s historical and current residents. We take this inclusive approach in order to acknowledge, learn, and inform about the fraught and complex history of land ownership and food production in our region and country, recognizing and celebrating the contributions of displaced indigenous and enslaved peoples.

The trails provide regional farms and food businesses with increased markets and promotional opportunities, as well as providing tourists with a deeper understanding of the regional food system and the unique value and history of the food grown and prepared within it.

Cynthia Caul is the program manager for CRAFT at Chatham University and graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School for Public and International Affairs, where she studied International Development. Cynthia’s research has focused on food and nutrition security, land access, and the role of agricultural smallholders in an increasingly globalizing economy. She also worked at the Ford Institute for Human Security, conducting research on human rights-based approaches to improving agricultural land access for women farmers and was the 2017 recipient of the Simon Reich Human Security Writing Award. Prior to her current role, Cynthia worked on public health programming in Ghana with the U.S. Peace Corps.

If you’d like to know more about the culinary trails, check out her first post in this series, which features the Baked Trail.

All photos by Rivers of Steel, unless otherwise noted.

The City of Bridges. All images in this story are courtesy of Jeffrey Bowser, Instagram: fort_frick_412.

A Look at the Society of Architectural Historians’ 2022 Annual International Conference

By Jordan Snowden

As Drew Armstrong is chatting on Zoom about the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) 2022 Annual International Conference, he’s also looking out his window, which overlooks the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s Main Branch.

“I can actually look right over on the stairs and watch people,” says Armstrong, the Director of Architectural Studies and Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “I watch how people behave, and it’s amazing what goes by your window. To me, that is a reflection of very specific configurations of what’s around here, where things are located, what makes people comfortable, even where the sun is. You know, if you’re going to sit on the steps, have lunch, or have a conversation. None of that’s about history; although it is—you can see it in many different ways.”

The steps of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Armstrong and Sahar Hosseini, an Assistant Professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s History of Art and Architecture department, are the local co-chairs for this year’s SAH conference. They are firm believers that history is what is here; that we are bound to deal with history simply because it’s what’s present. It’s part of why they are so excited to show off the City of Bridges and its diverse landscape with the globe-spanning Society of Architectural Historians members who will be attending the 75th annual conference—the first in-person SAH conference in two years—to share what Pittsburgh’s landscape and architecture tell about the city’s past and its people.

“The way most [architectural historians] think about a building is not frozen in the past,” says Hosseini. “The building’s life starts from the past; it doesn’t end in the past. It continues, and each building has multiple lives. It continues to present and future. The buildings and the landscape and the city are just a way to frame these factors that contribute to making, for example, a landscape.”

The rear of the Produce Terminal in the Strip District with St. Stanislaus Kostka Church. Learn about the Pennsylvania Railroad Fruit and Auction Building and St. Stan’s during one of the public SAH tours.

Together with SAH Conference Chair Patricia Morton, Hosseini and Armstrong planned the 2022 conference tour site locations and a few other events, notably the Saturday seminar that focuses on current issues in the city itself.

“We care about what city [the conference] goes to, and the city itself is a really integral part to what happens during the conference,” says Armstrong.

Taking place from April 27 to May 1, the SAH 2022 Annual International Conference will feature thirty-seven paper sessions, keynote talks, social receptions, a city seminar, and architectural tours in Pittsburgh and nearby areas. Of those events, twenty-seven architectural tours, the Saturday SAH Pittsburgh Seminar, and the Sekler Talk, which architectural and urban historian Itohan Osayimwese will deliver, are open to the public.

“Even if you’re not interested in architectural history, the environment is used to tell a story,” says Hosseini. “So you can come to watch and listen and participate in the story. We’re hoping that we get people from the community to participate and share their thoughts at the Saturday seminar. It’s designed to be in conversation with the city and the community.”

Like Hosseini and Armstrong’s view of history, how the past informs the present, speakers at the Saturday SAH Pittsburgh Seminar will discuss how history informs current initiatives and future visions when considering building in Pittsburgh. Other topics include how a neighborhood, site, or installation can be reimagined as a place of inspiration and how Pittsburghers are working together to confront, challenge, and counter the destabilizing effects of local traumas and global threats.

“Virtually any architectural project in any city, any site, you are compelled—if there’s anything being changed about a building or a landscape—you are compelled to deal with history,” says Armstrong.

Visitors, native Pittsburghers, and Pittsburgh transplants can all find something to appreciate and learn in the various public conference tours. The Allegheny County Courthouse provides a combination of function and artistry. The Smithfield United Church of Christ and the historic ALCOA building allow an opportunity to analyze the application of aluminum. A tour of Pittsburgh’s Northside gives a look into the idea of the city as a place richly layered in time and history. While the Rivers of Steel partnered event, Heritage and Commerce: Redeveloping Pittsburgh’s Brown Sites, shows how sites in Pittsburgh are being creatively reused.

Sunset at the Carrie Blast Furnaces, one of the two sites that are part of the Heritage and Commerce: Redeveloping Pittsburgh’s Brown Sites tour.

Led by Rivers of Steel’s Director of Historic Resources and Facilities, Ron Baraff, alongside GBBN Architects Principal, Anne Chen, the Heritage and Commerce tour will take attendees to Carrie Blast Furnaces, a National Historic Landmark site managed by Rivers of Steel, and Mill 19, a location found in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Hazelwood. Mill 19 is being redeveloped as a hub for manufacturing research and development within the original steel structure of the former LTV Steel site. Combined, Mill 19 and Carrie Blast Furnaces demonstrate Pittsburgh’s revitalization and the durability of its history of innovation.

“Because of the concrete nature of architecture, it’s an excellent way of showcasing things that have contributed to the making of it,” says Hosseini. “Specifically, I’m thinking about the city of Pittsburgh because of the concrete nature of these buildings and landscapes, like, say, Carrie Furnaces. It talks about a very specific chapter of the city of Pittsburgh, which doesn’t end there. It continues, and that’s the beauty of the site, is that it actually shows it as a living thing. I could talk about it for many hours, but if you go there and see the physicality of it, it’s a much better story, and that makes it all much more appealing.”

If someone were to ask why Hosseini and Armstrong picked the tour spots that they did, when there’s such a wide range of options to choose from when discussing Pittsburgh’s topography, it’s not as simple as saying that they thought certain locations were better than others. The pair believe that all of the sites that people can potentially visit are interesting—it doesn’t have to be Frank Lloyd Wright to make an impact. Hosseini and Armstrong aimed to provide conference attendees with options of various scales, at different times, in multiple parts of the city. Their decisions came down to two key questions: “What is it about a particular site or tour that tells something about the history of Pittsburgh?” and “What story does it tell about Pittsburgh and its history and its people?”

“We also wanted to make sure that we were covering sites that had something new or novel or value that didn’t get covered at the previous conference in Pittsburgh in 2007,” says Armstrong. “We wanted to show people that there’s been development and change.”

An iconic view of Pittsburgh from the West End.

The Wednesday tour to Mount Washington, for example, was chosen because it’s a rare case of a city where visitors can stand in one position and look over the densest, most central part of Pittsburgh and experience the geography, landscape, topography, and built environment and how those relate to one another.

“Pittsburgh is very much a product of its landscape,” says Hosseini.

Longtime members of SAH, Hosseini and Armstrong are thrilled to have had the chance to contribute to the organization, which has supported Hosseini’s own architectural research in the past. The planning process for the 2022 conference started in early 2020, before the pandemic. While much has changed in the two years since, Hosseini and Armstrong’s enthusiasm for the Society of Architectural Historians, the upcoming conference, and Pittsburgh’s architecture has not waned.

“We’re excited to share Pittsburgh with people who are coming from the outside,” says Hosseini. “This is something that SAH has been very specific about, the cities that it comes to. They want to showcase the city, and they care about the building and environment of the city that hosts the conference.”

Jordan Snowden is a freelance writer based in Pittsburgh whose work has been published in The Seattle Times, Pittsburgh City Paper ,and elsewhere. She also runs @jord_reads_books, a book-focused Instagram account where she connects with other bookworms. In her free time, Jordan can be found with a book in her hand or DIYing something with her husband.

Jeffrey Bowser is a local Pittsburgh photographer. His work focuses on Pittsburgh cityscapes, churches, industrial photography, and the Homestead / Mon Valley area. You can follow him at fort_frick_412 on Instagram  and learn more about him and his work here.

A detail Jane Grey Swisshelm’s Self-Portrait, circa 1840-1845 / Senator John Heinz History Center, Courtesy of N.N. Moore.

Woman’s History Month Feature: Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

To celebrate Women’s History Month, Rivers of Steel’s Interpretive Specialist, Dr. Kirsten Paine, crafted two articles on one of her favorite topics—Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm. In part one of this twofer, Kirsten examined the life of this woman who was clearly ahead of her time. Using Swisshelm’s autobiography as a starting point, Kirsten leaned on her own expertise in literature from that era to provide context for understanding this pioneering woman. In today’s piece, she digs in further, focusing on Swisshelm’s career as a reporter, newspaper publisher, women’s rights advocate, and abolitionist throughout the nineteenth century.

By Dr. Kirsten L. Paine

A Keen Sense of Self-Awareness

In a letter dated August 7, 1882, Jane Swisshelm declines her daughter’s invitation to stay. She writes to Nettie, “We see and estimate things so differently that it is quite out of the question for me to avoid being a source of apprehension to you all the time we are together. You never know when I am going to hurt someone’s feelings or do something to make myself ridiculous.” These lines highlight tension in their relationship, but they also demonstrate Swisshelm’s self-awareness. She is not always polite, and she can make people uncomfortable. Besides, she has work to do in Pittsburgh, she continues. The city “is in debt twice the amount the state Constitution allows. Her water works are a failure. I have exposed the fraud until the councils have sent an agent to talk or wheedle me into silence.”

By 1882, Jane Swisshelm had returned to Pittsburgh for good. Her work in journalism, nursing, and political activism had taken her to St. Cloud, Minnesota, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Illinois, and towns in between. However, Pittsburgh had changed in the intervening years, and she felt the strain of its expansion as industrial production boomed in the Monongahela River Valley. In Swissvale, the Allegheny Car and Transportation Company made state of the art rail freight cars. In Braddock, the Edgar Thompson Works was the first of Andrew Carnegie’s new integrated mills. Across the river in Homestead, Carnegie opened Homestead Steel. As Sylvia Hoffert notes in her biography, Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life, 1815–1884, “the world was closing in on her” (Hoffert 184). Still, Swisshelm had work to do.

At the time, she had intended to take up a new series “for lecturing in the Opera House or Library Hall every Sunday afternoon by way of teaching people how to live” (Swisshelm, 1882). She insists, “there is no one but me for this work” (1882). She closes this letter to her daughter by asking that her husband, Ernest [Allen], write to her again about “building workmen’s houses here” as thousands of laborers poured into the Mon Valley seeking work in the new factories.

Two portraits, about twenty years apart. Left: Self-Portrait, Jane Grey Swisshelm, 1840-1845 / Senator John Heinz History Center, Courtesy of N.N. Moore. Right: Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm, journalist, activist, and Civil War nurse, Joel E. Whitney, photographer / Whitney’s Gallery, St. Paul. United States, ca. 1865. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

An Astonishing Career Begins with Letters to the Editor

For decades, Swisshelm believed “there is no one but me for this work,” and built an astonishing career in the United States as a preeminent journalist and reporter on behalf of many progressive causes. Her journalism career began in Pittsburgh in the late 1840s when she wrote a series of letters to the editor of the Pittsburgh Commercial Journal, Robert M. Riddle. These letters take up one of the tenets of the early women’s rights movement: the right for women to own property. Riddle published several of these letters. On October 28, 1847, Swisshelm writes about how a husband assumed all legal authority over any of his wife’s assets: “All they both have and all they can acquire are his, and only his, to dispense as he sees fit.” On December 11, 1847, Swisshelm writes, “There are that matter of quirks, wibbles and turns in the laws which relate to married women, and there is not one lawyer out of fifty who understands them or is fit to conduct any business which concerns them.” These letters to the editor seem like radical public statements; however, Swisshelm builds on an existing foundation of women writers who circulated their own ideas in print.

Throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, middle-class white women like Swisshelm found limited opportunities to express political opinions in public. Popular fiction, especially novels and short stories, represented one opportunity for women writers to discuss their ideas with a reading audience. For example, Lydia Maria Child, known primarily today for editing Harriet Jacobs’s memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), wrote the acclaimed novel Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times in 1824. Catherine Maria Sedgwick, a best-selling writer from Massachusetts, published short stories in periodicals from the 1820s through the 1850s. Her most famous novel, a historical romance, titled Hope Leslie, was published in 1827. Both of these writers use historical fiction to explore questions about women’s and Indigenous people’s rights. Since women also comprised most of the reading audience for books like these, women novelists cultivated ecosystems for the public exchange of social, cultural, and political ideas that eventually developed sophisticated organizational and communication networks between women.

By the time Jane Swisshelm penned her first political opinion pieces as letters to the editor in the Pittsburgh Commercial Journal, she actively participated in a thriving culture of women writers. Her important steps forward came at a moment when other women like her began organizing en masse to demand rights to property, inheritance, divorce, and custody of children, as well as the vote. Publisher Robert Riddle owned other newspapers in Pittsburgh. In addition to the Pittsburgh Commercial Journal, he owned the Daily Gazette, Daily Morning Post, Mystery, Albatross, Spirit of the Age, and Pittsburgh Catholic. Newspaper publishing in the 1800s was a lucrative, if risky, investment. Some newspapers established broad subscription bases, while others occupied niche areas of interest. Countless newspapers went bankrupt after brief runs while other newspapers ran for decades. As emerging industrial technology made it feasible to make periodicals relatively cheap to produce and inexpensive to purchase, more newspapers meant more opportunities for marginalized voices to find reading audiences. That was the prevailing idea for Jane Swisshelm. She saw an opportunity to create change, and she took it. Because Swisshelm contributed to several Pittsburgh papers and gained a loyal—oftentimes vocal—readership, she approached Riddle with an idea. What if she edited and published a newspaper of her own?

The Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter—Swisshelm’s First Newspaper

Mrs. Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm, image courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society. Scan from original on Epson Expression 10000XL. Full credit below.

By Swisshelm’s own account, Riddle initially was unsupportive. She writes about his response in her autobiography, Half a Century: “I was going to start the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter; the first copy must be issued Saturday week, so that abolitionists would not have time to be discouraged, and that I wanted him to print my paper” (Swisshelm 106). The city’s abolitionist outlet, Albatross, went bankrupt, and its demise created a vacuum for progressive political writing. According to Swisshelm, Riddle did not immediately take to her idea. She writes, “he had pushed his chair back from his desk, and sat regarding me in utter amazement while I stated the case, then said: ‘What do you mean? Are you insane? What does your husband say?” (106). Eventually, Swisshelm convinced him her husband’s opinion did not matter. He agreed to this venture together, even if he refused to furnish her with her own desk (108).

The Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter was Swisshelm’s first newspaper. It was also the first Pittsburgh-based newspaper with a woman at the helm. Swisshelm celebrated this achievement: A woman had started a political paper! A woman! Could he believe his eyes? A woman!” (113). The inaugural edition of the Visiter was published on December 20, 1847.  From the outset, Swisshelm intended the paper to highlight, advocate for, and provide a platform to abolitionist and women’s rights writing, and by the end of 1848, the Visiter had over 6,000 subscribers. Throughout the newspaper’s run from 1847 to 1854, Swisshelm maintained a strong, if sometimes controversial, editorial hand and a clear political voice.

For example, in 1849, the Visiter received pushback in the form of an opinion piece from a competing Ohio newspaper called the New Concord Free Press. In it, the writer claimed that the Constitution itself guarantees the continuance of slavery and attacked Swisshelm’s position; in true editorial fashion, Swisshelm responded to this argument with her own. Her characteristically witty tone and sharp dissection of language shines through a response published in the Visiter’s February 17, 1849 edition. She writes, “Who are ‘the people’ of a country? Webster says it is ‘each, every one, common people. The body of persons who compose a community, town, city or nation.’” She continues to argue, “these people of the U.S. ordained the Constitution to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and posterity. All slaves were a part of the people, and lest there should be a mistake, they are named as ‘persons held to labour.’” In the conclusion to her article, as the Constitution cannot support simultaneous liberty and slavery, and if the Constitution does guarantee slavery, the document “is not worth straw enough to burn it.”

A Progressive Power

After the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, women’s rights issues, not just the right to vote, gained national traction. Some argued that the abolition of slavery should happen as part of a broader push for equal rights for women. The Visiter took up many of these arguments, and Swisshelm frequently published her own opinion columns. In her 2006 dissertation, “Women of reform: The periodical editing careers of Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Healey Dall, and Jane Grey Swisshelm,” Terri Amlong investigates the ways in which several of Swisshelm’s articles combine her political stances with personal experiences. Her acrimonious divorce from James Swisshelm was not finalized until 1857, and it was granted only after protracted court battles over property and custody of their daughter, Mary Henrietta [also known as Nettie or Zo]. Amlong highlights two important pieces. One, published in the August 18, 1849 edition, is a review of E.D.E.N. Southworth’s popular novel, The Deserted Wife: “[W]henever two are really weary of each other, they are no longer married; and nobody can marry them—no combination of men can marry them. It is a base prostitution of the name and object of marriage, to bind two to live together contrary to the will of either.” Swisshelm asserts, [T]he State cannot be benefited by what is crime in the individual! The second appeared in the August 3, 1850 edition. In this piece, Swisshelm argues that expecting women to “marry either for a living or to maintain a respectable standing in society” is a disservice to all women. Instead of training girls only to become wives, Swisshelm maintains “all be educated in some useful employment or profession, whereby they may get as good a living as a man can get.”

Journalism was “as good a living as a man can get” for Jane Swisshelm.  She sold The Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter to her co-editor and friend Robert Riddle in 1854, and publication of the paper shuttered shortly thereafter. Swisshelm moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota, where she started two more newspapers: the St. Cloud Visiter and the St. Cloud Democrat. She continued to write for the rest of her life. She made friends with the likes of Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and she made political enemies on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Whether in Minnesota, Washington, D.C., or on Civil War battlefields, Swisshelm’s commitment to the written word—to the power of the press and women’s power won by the pen—prevailed. The Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter remains her most influential contribution to American journalism and her lasting legacy in the venerated Pittsburgh newspaper industry.

Bibliography

Amlong, Terri A. “Women of Reform: The Periodical Editing Careers of Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Healey Dall, and Jane Grey Swisshelm.” Order No. 3232483 University of South Carolina, 2006.

Hoffert, Sylvia D. Jane Grey Swisshelm: An Unconventional Life. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter. (1847–1854) (microfilm)

Swisshelm, Jane. Half a Century. Jansen, McClurg & Company, 1880.

Swisshelm, Jane Grey, “Letter, Jane Grey Swisshelm to Nettie Swisshelm [August 7, 1882]”
(1882). Jane Grey Swisshelm Letters. 18. https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/jswiss-letters/18

Image Credits

In order of appearance:

Swisshelm, Jane Grey, painter. Self-Portrait. Ca. 1840 – 1845, painting. / Senator John Heinz History Center, courtesy of N.N. Moore.

Whitney, Joel E, photographer. Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm, journalist, activist, and Civil War nurse / Whitney’s Gallery, St. Paul. United States, ca. 1865. [St. Paul, Minnesota: Whitney’s Gallery] Photograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Whitney, Joel E, photographer. Mrs. Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm / Whitney’s Gallery, St. Paul. United States, ca. 1860. [St. Paul, Minnesota: Whitney’s Gallery] Photograph. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Enjoy Dr. Kirsten L. Paine’s article? Read another story from the A Literary Look series. 

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John Mahn, Jr., at work on the Explorer riverboat.

Profiles in Steel

Rivers of Steel’s Profiles in Steel series shines a spotlight on the talented members of our organization’s community.  From staff and volunteers to collaborators and patrons, it takes a dedicated group with many and varied talents to support the community-based initiatives offered through Rivers of Steel.

In this installment, we meet John Mahn, Jr., a deckhand on the Explorer riverboat. Breaking barriers is something John Mahn, Jr. has been doing his entire life, from his time working in the steel industry to his recent distinction as the first Black person appointed to the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. While he understands the significance of such steps, what is really important to him is connecting people with the outdoors.

John Mahn, Jr.’s Story

By Brianna Horan

Meet John Mahn, Jr.

If you’re looking for John Mahn, Jr., the odds are good that you’ll find him outdoors and near a body of water—preferably with a fishing rod in hand.

His favorite local spot these days is Cross Creek Lake in Avella, where John and his then eight-year-old daughter, Brandee, were among the first to cast a line when it opened for public fishing in 1985. He spends a lot of time on the Monongahela River—John’s last name happens to sound the same as its nickname, the Mon—because it’s so close to his home in Charleroi. The part of the Youghiogheny River near his home runs slower and shallower than in other areas, making it good for wading. John knows a lot of great fishing holes “all up and down I-79,” and if he follows it north to Erie, he can take the boat he has docked there out on “the big lake.”

Growing up as a youngster in Cambridge, Massachusetts, John’s draw to water was just as strong, but his options were considerably more limited. “It was a city; we didn’t have creeks running everywhere like in Pennsylvania. There was the Charles River, and that was about it,” John says. He quickly figured out that the best fishing in town was at the local water supply lake, which were all ringed with ten-foot fences topped with barbed wire. “They had blue gills, sunfish, and bass in them, though, so if I wanted to fish, I’d sneak under one of the fences and hide in the bushes to fish from there.” His parents also helped him experience the great outdoors whenever the opportunity arose. “My dad wasn’t a fisherman. He wasn’t outdoorsy or anything like that—but he was into whatever his kids were into,” John says. “My older brother was into scouting, so my dad got into scouting. I liked to fish and run around in the woods, so my mom and dad made sure I got plenty of that. I went to church camp, I went to scout camp, I went to YMCA camp, and I even went to the Jewish community center camp.”

He remembers the impact that those experiences had on him as a child, shaping him into the person he is today. Retired from a 35-year career as a supervisor in the steel industry, John is heading into his eleventh season as a deckhand on Rivers of Steel’s Explorer riverboat, having joined the crew when the vessel was owned by RiverQuest. Explorer was built as a floating classroom, and it typically welcomes 3,500 students on board every year to participate in hands-on education programs. In a region that is defined by river valleys, creeks, and waterways, for many students these field trips are their first experience on the water.

“The first thing they ask me is, ‘Where is the poop deck?’” John laughs. “They all want to see the poop deck, and I have to tell them that we don’t have one. Then they see [Explorer’s Captain] Ryan [O’Rourke], or they see me, and they say, ‘You mean you can actually make money working on a boat?’” It’s an eye-opening experience before the education programming even begins. “I think about it every time we have those kids on the boat,” John says. “They have so much available right in front of them, and some of them are clueless about the opportunities that they have. It’s kind of sad in another way, because I think about some kids like me who never get the opportunity, and this is right in their back yard.”

John Mahn, Jr. and Magisterial District Judge Eric Porter pose for a picture together after John’s swearing in to the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission in December, 2021.

Connecting Kids with the Outdoors

Connecting kids with the outdoors is one of John’s top priorities in his newest role as a Commissioner appointed by Governor Tom Wolf to the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. Appropriately, John made sure Washington County Magisterial District Judge Eric Porter, who John used to take fishing when the judge was young, swore him into the position. “He was a classmate of my son John Wesley’s, and when he was little the only way I’d get him to go fishing with me was to take a friend with him.”

The Fish and Boat Commission is an independent state agency with a mission to protect, conserve, and enhance the Commonwealth’s aquatic resources and provide fishing and boating opportunities. John will serve as a commissioner for the next four years representing District 2, which includes Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Washington, and Westmoreland counties. John will serve not only the current anglers and boaters in his district, but also those who have yet to realize their passion.

“I told our executive director the other day the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission is so far off of these kids’ radar. If you’re growing up in Homestead or Braddock, the Fish and Boat Commission might as well be on the moon it’s so far away from you,” says John, who is working on an initiative with the agency that would bring conservation officers and outdoor recreation instructors into classrooms to talk about all of the ways to enjoy time in nature. “Something that always sticks with me is the idea that talent is evenly distributed, and opportunity is not. There is no doubt that there are some future outdoorsmen and outdoorswomen sitting in the schools—they just have to get the opportunity to get outside,” John says. “Some of them will grab it and run if they’re given the chance. The worst thing you can tell a kid is ‘You’ll never be able to do that,’ or ‘We don’t do this.’”

Left: John Mahn holds up a norther pike in Ontario, Canada. Right: John Mahn shows off a lobster on his friend’s boat, off the coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

A Life Filled with Firsts

Limiting preconceptions like those held no water in the home John grew up in or in the life that he’s shaped. At age 71, John is the first man of African American descent appointed to the Board of Commissioners, a stride that begins to make the agency more representative of the population it serves—particularly at a time of increased scrutiny of the barriers that people of color face when accessing the outdoors are encountering increased scrutiny. But being the first or only Black person in a space is nothing new to John.

“I understand the significance of it, and I want other people to understand the significance of it—but to me, it’s not a big deal because I’ve run into it so much in my life,” John says. “If there was something I wanted to do, I wasn’t going to let anyone else tell me that I couldn’t do it. I love to fish, and I would go to different places to fish, and I would run into the same thing—people who’d say that you can’t stay here. Well, I’m here, I came here to fish, so I’m going to find a place to fish. I never let that bother me. I would do what I had to do.”

John’s mother modeled that same mentality and determination while he was growing up in the 1960s, whether participating in sit-in demonstrations at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter or insisting that her sons be educated alongside white students at the local public school. “There were only two high schools in Cambridge, a vo-tech school, and Cambridge High and Latin School,” John explains. “If you were Black and you were a boy, you were going to the vo-tech because you weren’t going to college.” But that wasn’t going to be the case for the Mahn boys—their mother engrained the notion that they would be college graduates before they were old enough to understand what college was. John’s older brother, seven years his senior, was one of the first two Black males to attend High and Latin in the early 1960s. John couldn’t help but notice that his brother came home from school with torn shirts and black eyes almost daily during that first year. It also didn’t escape his attention that his own elementary school principal—who lived across the street—drove past him every day as he walked to school. “When I went to school my classes were integrated, but when I went home the neighborhoods weren’t,” John says. “I didn’t know it at the time, but we were redlined. I never thought much about it, that his side of the street was white, and on my side of the street it was all Black. And I didn’t know about redlining at that time. All I wondered was how come Mr. Murphy sees me every day going to the same school he’s going to, it’s wintertime—why didn’t he offer me a ride?”

Shortly after John’s older brother graduated from High and Latin and began his studies at Franklin & Marshall College, their mother passed away. John was in eighth grade at the time, and also had a younger sister. “A single parent back in those days was almost unheard of,” John recalls. “My dad now had three kids and a job [as a machinist] to handle.” The Fox family, who had employed John’s mother  as a domestic, helped his father formulate a plan to enroll John in a boarding school just south of Boston. With John’s older brother away at college, that would leave only his little sister at home.

The year he started at Milton Academy, he was one of the first three Black students admitted in the boarding school’s history—one in eighth grade, himself in ninth grade, and another in tenth grade. “For myself, I think the Jewish kids had a lot harder time of it than I did,” John says. “I remember people saying the N-word, not directly at me, but within earshot. As far as being treated differently or being treated poorly, I didn’t remember that as part of the experience.”

It was during these years that John began to realize his love for boating, joining his friends on their families’ boats and cruising from Boston to Maine. “Every day was like an adventure,” he recalls. “You never knew who you were going to run into, you had to plot a course, you had to navigate by compass and buoys. You never knew right where you were. You might sail all day and never see another boat.” John also worked on a lobster boat during high school. “There was a lobsterman, and we said we were helping him, but we were just in his way, really. He put up with us and let us haul the traps,” John recalls.

Eager to see more of the world outside of Boston and Cambridge, John followed his brother’s path to attend Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1968. The school became co-ed while he was a student there, so his younger sister also enrolled there when she graduated from high school. Finding adventure in the great outdoors remained a priority for John, and he spent the summer of 1971 in a Rambler on an epic road trip with high school friends. They headed west across the United States and then back east via Canada, camping in National Parks and staying with friends and family along the way.

John, his mother-in-law Maxine, with his wife Jeannie celebrate the holidays.

Making a Home in the Mon Valley

Another thing John found in college: love. John and Jeannie met while attending a friend’s wedding in New York City—he was a friend of the groom, and she was a friend of the bride, and soon they were married themselves during John’s junior year. “When I graduated, it was time to figure out what we were going to do. She wanted to stay in New York, and I just could not do it—I am not a city boy. We couldn’t afford to move back to Boston. So, reluctantly, she agreed that we could move back here,” he said, referring to Jeannie’s hometown of Charleroi. “We’d visited many times while dating, and there was a strong outdoor tradition that I was into.”

Jeannie ended up moving back ahead of John, and her father helped her get a job in human resources at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corporation’s Allenport Works, where he worked as the only Black supervisor among about 3,000 employees. When John arrived in Charleroi to join Jeannie, the young couple lived with her parents at first. His father-in-law let John know that the plant manager at the Allenport Works was aiming to hire another Black supervisor who had a college degree. “I’m sitting at the table eating his food, and he’s telling me that so-and-so’s looking for a worker—so I figured I better try it. And so I went and had the interview,” John says.

John landed the job, and he and Jeannie moved to an apartment in little California for about a year, about ten miles from where they’d been living with her parents. “My wife is from a very large, tight-knit family, and she felt it was too far away from them. She wasn’t seeing her family as much as she wanted to be, so we bought a house in Charleroi so she could be closer to them,” John says.

By the late ’70s, John Wesley and Brandee were born, and Jeannie left her job at Wheeling-Pittsburgh to raise their children. John advanced through managerial positions at the mill over the course of a thirty-five-year career. “I can’t say anything bad about the mill. I bought a house, I put two kids through school. It was a good living, and it served our needs,” John says. “I ran the roll shop until I retired, and I was the supervisor the whole time. The one thing I liked about it was that the majority of the guys I supervised had the same interests that I did. I wasn’t a golfer, so I didn’t golf—but it seemed like everyone that worked under me was either a hunter, a fisherman, or a boater. So when I was off, I was always doing one of those things.”

Some of the men who John managed weren’t interested in finding common ground, however. “Once Jeannie’s dad retired, I was the only Black supervisor in the mill.” And while this wasn’t a new experience for him, he saw clear differences between the way that the mill workers reacted to his presence and the way his fellow students had treated him in school. “Adults are sometimes not afraid to express their true selves. I had to supervise guys who didn’t take kindly to me giving them orders, and they made that known . . . Let’s just say the Mon Valley wasn’t the most enlightened workforce. The guys worked hard. They had hard jobs—they had hot, dirty, uncomfortable jobs to do. I give them credit, but there was also a small minority that spent more time trying to get out of work than if they’d just done the job to begin with. I got an education in college, but I also got an education of a different kind in the mill.”

That discrimination extended in the community outside of the mill, where many organizations and establishments made sure John knew he wasn’t welcome. “As much as I love to hunt and fish, I could never figure out why the gun clubs and sportsmen’s clubs were always full and never accepting members. When it came time to teach my kids about the outdoors, those kinds of facilities weren’t available to me. But I made sure they learned what they needed to and had those kinds of experiences. When my son was young, I bought a boat and took him fishing,” John says. “To this day, there’s a place two streets over from my house that I can’t walk into and get a drink. This is 2022, and I can’t walk in there and get a drink.”

It’s a reality that’s strikingly similar to his wife’s recollections. As a high schooler in Charleroi in the 1970s, she was not permitted to eat inside restaurants; Blacks were refused a seat and received their order in a bag to go. “Technically, they weren’t denying you service, but you’d have to take it somewhere else to eat,” John says.

His father-in-law faced even more blatant racism in the early 1980s, when he met with a group of fellow former mill employees at the local Italian Club. “It was the early ’80s, and the company—business was bad, so they laid off the union guys. But the people who were on salary and were managers were just fired. It worked out that all the guys who were let go were older, so they got together and hired a lawyer from Detroit to fight age discrimination,” John says. “They had one meeting, and the president of the club went up to them and said, ‘You can meet here again, but he’s not getting back in here,’” referring to John’s father-in-law. “This was twenty or thirty men meeting there for two or three hours drinking. I give the other guys a lot of credit, because they took their business elsewhere.”

John, with a wrapped head to protect himself from the sun, displays a bonefish in the Bahamas.

A Life Outdoors

Even as intensity inside the mill and the injustice outside of it remained present, the outdoors was still a steady constant in John’s life. “You go in the mill, and it’s hot, it’s noisy and dirty. So you need—or at least I do—some adventure in my life,” he says. “When you get in the outdoors, when you go fishing, you never know if you’re going to catch something or not. It’s all unknown, and it’s something you have very little control over. That sense of adventure is what the outdoors is all about for me.”

As a freelance outdoors writer for the Mon Valley section of the Tribune-Review newspaper’s Sunday edition, he captured that sense of adventure for readers for about thirty years. He’s also a past president and current member of the Pennsylvania Outdoor Writers Association. “Doing that for so long, I got to see a lot of kids being introduced to the outdoors—not just fishing, but boating, camping, and hiking.”

One outdoor experience he’ll never forget is a fishing trip in New York on Lake Ontario with his then thirteen-year-old daughter Brandee, which turned out to be a good reminder of the surprises that can come along when they’re least expected. As they were casting their lines, Brandee asked her dad if he would get her fish mounted if she caught a big one. “I thought, ‘What are you going to catch?” so I said, ‘Sure,’” John remembers. “Well, I had to get it mounted, and it’s still hanging on the wall. That was in 1991, and it’s bigger than any fish I’ve ever caught! I still kid her about that to this day.”

John Mahn, Jr. during a charter excursion on the Explorer riverboat, 2021.

Working on the Water

In the early 2000s, John returned to his native state and earned his Coast Guard license to run a passenger boat at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy on Cape Cod, where he was once again the only Black student in the class, and this time one of the oldest. That license would come in handy when the mill he worked for closed in 2009, bringing an end to a 35-year career in steel industry management. Before long, he was behind the wheel of Miss Pittsburgh, a 50-foot enclosed pontoon boat, shuttling passengers to sporting events in Pittsburgh. His work with this company ended up taking him far beyond the three rivers. When the owner purchased a new vessel, Fantasy, in 2010, John signed up for what he thought would be a two- or three-week voyage to bring it from New York City via the Hudson, across the Lake Erie Canal, and into Pittsburgh via the Ohio River.

With his bags packed with warm clothes for October weather on northern waterways, John and the rest of the crew were surprised to find out that the Fantasy was too tall to go on the Erie Canal when they arrived in New York. A new plan was devised to bring the boat out to the Atlantic Ocean, heading south to connect into the Intracoastal Waterway. After cutting across Florida on the Okeechobee Canal, Fantasy redirected North to enter the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway in Mobile, Alabama. From there, the crew navigated to the Mississippi, and finally to the Ohio River and its destination in Pittsburgh. “That was a long, long trip,” John recalls, noting that Fantasy’s top speed was around ten miles per hour. “We would stop every night, and on Sundays we’d find a Steelers bar wherever we were, and then we’d get on our way. Towards the end, we’d go around the clock and take shifts because it was taking so long.” The crew was flown home for Thanksgiving, and then resumed the voyage. John eventually had to return home by the time the boat had made it to Tennessee, but he was waiting in Pittsburgh to greet his fellow crew when they arrived in Pittsburgh. “That was an adventure, to say the least. That was one of the things that you got into having no idea what is going to happen,” John says. “You think one thing is going to happen, and it’s nothing like that—it was 180 degrees different than what I expected.”

By 2011, John’s fellow captain on Miss Pittsburgh, Curt Graham, let him know that he was getting slammed with hours at his other job piloting the Explorer riverboat for RiverQuest. John didn’t need much convincing to start training on that boat to help his friend out. Sadly, after about six months of training, John was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2012. “I took forty-some radiation treatments, and you have to go every day to get your radiation. By the time I got out of those treatments, there was no way I could [also continue training],” John says. When he returned to Explorer later that year in remission, the boat was fully staffed with captains. “I didn’t want to quit, so I decided I’d just take a deckhand position. I was still out on the water.”

More than a decade later, John remains a constant fixture on the Explorer, assisting with deck operations, handling the lines, keeping watch for traffic and obstacles, and working with the rest of the crew to maintain a safe and welcoming environment on the riverboat—even if it does lack a poop deck, to younger passengers’ dismay.

“I love that job,” John says. “I don’t tell [Captain] Ryan, but I would probably do it for nothing.”

Brianna Horan is the manager of tourism & visitor experience at Rivers of Steel, where she helps groups design customized travel experiences throughout southwestern Pennsylvania. She also lends her considerable writing talents to this blog on occasion and can often be found on the Explorer riverboat, where she manages Rivers of Steel’s public tours and private charter experiences. 

For more stories from our Profiles in Steel series, check out the interview with Ed Parrish, Jr.