History (And Ghosts) Along the Allegheny

I just found this article in the Trib about a history-themed picnic next Saturday, July 23 in Brackenridge’s Prospect Cemetery. The organizers promise hot dogs and ghost stories.

I will not be able to attend this, and I don’t have any information about it except what I found in this article. However, I linked it here because I think that this will be a lot of fun.

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Several years ago, Jonathan and I went to this ghost walk in Prospect Cemetery. I learned that the cemetery held the graves of Henry Marie Brackenridge and his family. I didn’t grow up in the Alle-Kiski Valley, so this was my first introduction to the greatness of Mr. Brackenridge.

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Here is my blog entry about my second exposure to the Brackenridge legacy.

This linked blog entry is actually about The King’s Orchard, a historical fiction novel about General James O’Hara. However, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the father of Henry Marie Brackenridge, was a good friend of O’Hara’s. Thus, the novel dramatizes the elder Brackenridge’s courtship and marriage. Breckenridge Senior founded the University of Pittsburgh.

Here is what I learned about the Brackenridge lineage from The King’s Orchard:

Hugh Henry Brackenridge grew up poor on a farm in New England. He borrowed other people’s books and saved up enough money to send himself to Princeton. One time, one of the books that he borrowed accidentally got eaten by a cow.

The first time that Hugh Brackenridge saw his wife Sabina, he was a lawyer headed to the courthouse in Washington PA and she was a farmer’s daughter chasing after a runaway cow. He watched her vault over a fence without touching the fence, and he told the other lawyers that if she did it again, he would ask her to marry him. She did it again. Her father said that Brackenridge couldn’t marry her because he needed her to “shrub the meadow.” Brackenridge paid Sabina’s father $10 to hire somebody else to “shrub the meadow.” Brackenridge was worried because he intended to have a career as a politician (and he also later founded the University of Pittsburgh) and Sabina had no education, so after the wedding, he sent her to finishing school in Philadelphia for a year.

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I didn’t take this photo from the Prospect Cemetery. Last Halloween, I took this from Harrison Hills Park in Natrona Heights, less than 5 miles away. (I just confirmed this via Google Maps.) However, both look out over the Allegheny River.

I’ll probably blog more these next two weeks. I have a morbid story for later about a body on a cruise ship.