CHAPTER 29
By Third Grade my folks decided I was old enough to wander about our end of town on my own. It was a different world from today. Our town was relatively small, traffic although heavy on Lancaster Pike by the standards of that day, was light compared to how it is in the years of this millennium.
People warned of not talking to strangers, but there was little conscious fear your child might be snatched by a predator or pervert.
Neighbors watched out for each other and each other’s children. Few people locked their car doors when they went shopping. Many people didn’t even bother locking the house door, my father being one of those when he was home. My mother was a bit more cautious, but she only locked it at night before going to bed. In the summer doors and windows were often wide open since very few had air conditioning.
The map shows what we referred to as The East Side. It wasn’t the entire east side of the town, but it was the boundary for me in my little world during those grade school years. I have marked upon it the major points of my regular wanderings. I was free to walk the length of Washington Avenue, perhaps a bit short of a mile in distance, to attend church or go to the movie theater. I could walk downtown, visit the library, and go to my various new friends’ homes.
This map is Downingtown today, not in the 1950s. However it hasn’t changed much from the air over those decades with the
exception of the clutter of the downtown shopping area. In those days there were rows of stores along Lancaster Avenue. These did not quite run completely east to Green Street. Behind the stores to the north there was an access alleyway and behind that the millrace from the paper mill. The millrace and paper mill are gone and a shopping mall has filled their place. (Photo is looking east from the
main intersection, 1942) The borders of the shopping district in the 1950s began at the main intersection of Lancaster and Brandywine Avenues (Rt. 30 and Rt. 322). The Great Swan Hotel stood on the southeast corner of the intersection and the Downingtown Bank on the southwest corner. (Left: Swan Hotel, 1850.)
This intersection then and to this day was infamous for flooding.
In did so in August 1942, but I was too young to remember that occasion. It did so again when Hurricane Hazel swept through in October of 1954. I rode my bike down to the edge of town to view that devastation. The main intersection and much of the shopping district was under water. I made my way down the access alley a ways, but the millrace was raging up over the street.
On that side of the intersection, just behind the corner store, a great-corrugated pipe under Lancaster Avenue carried the millrace beneath the intersection. The water spilled out into the Brandywine Creek on the opposite side just past the bank lot. Going down the access alley was a foolish and dangerous trek at flood stage. During my childhood the millrace swept a boy into that pipe and beneath the streets. I am not sure whether it was Hazel or another rise of water, but he didn’t survive. I used that instance as a catalyst in my novel, Gray. I changed the sex of the person to female. She survived the pipe. The villain rescued her from the creek and took her prisoner.
When she reached the bridge the water was bubbling and throwing up white foam. Her boots were useless and a hindrance, since the water was above the tops and pouring inside, wetting her socks and shoes. It was difficult to walk in the swiftly moving current, but she pressed on. She wanted to see what the canal looked like from the middle of the bridge. Holding the iron railing, she pulled herself to the center. The sound was boisterous. It filled her ears with noise that numbed her brain. Water lapped up her legs and she had to hold tight to keep balance as she stood looking north at the canal. She could not see the perimeters of the channel at all; and the millrace and road were under water.
She started cross to the far end and wade into town, letting go of the rail to turn and immediately was knocked off her feet and swept
across the alley. She reached for the opposing rails, grasped them briefly then went beneath and plunged from the bridge into the canal.
She screamed, but couldn't even hear herself over the roar and knew no one else would either. All her scream got was a mouth full of water, which slipped into her throat and made her cough. The water turned her over, dunked her under, brought her up in time to see the lip of the underground pipe above her head. She snatched at the upper rim, missed and plunged into darkness.
The noise was great, echoing against the corrugated pipe; the current more terrible as the area compressed. It sent her in a spin, turning her over and over like a top.
She was drowning. She should have stayed inside like her father said. She would never grow up and have children of her own. She was going to die under the streets of Wilmillar and be a notation in the almanacs recording the great storms of the century.
I’m going to die.
And as she thought this, she popped out into daylight, the canal widened and the water grew a bit less fierce. She was still alive but that gave her little more hope of rescue. She bobbed up and down, a blond haired cork amidst the white foam, when suddenly the world dipped away and she was going down the small falls into the Whiskeyrye itself. Now the creek had her and sucked her to its center where she was swept along ever faster.
Here were more dangers. Not just drowning, but rocks, big boulders jutted up in the water waiting to smash her; break her bones, knock her senseless. There were branches lodged between some rocks prepared to pierce her or snag her neck in a crotch and strangle her. She screamed for help, but like before, there was too much roar. She waved her arms, gasping for breath, her clothes pulling down, trying to sink her and only failing to do so because the strong current pulled her up and along.
As she came near the high railroad trestle past Shoestring Road, there were two boys on a knoll who had also sneaked out to see quiet a sight. One boy tugged at the other and pointed at the object bobbing in the water.
"Somebody’s in there," he yelled.
The other boy struggled to see, but couldn't catch a glimpse. The first was certain and insistent. He dashed away to find help. The other stood with one hand clamped against his brows to keep rain out of his eyes, straining to see whatever it was his friend had seen.
The boy who ran did not have far to go to find aid. Police and firemen were everywhere on the perimeter of the flood. He told the first fireman he found there was a person being swept down stream and the alarm went out. Soon a search and rescue mission began.
Mary Beth was being carried further from town, into an area called The Narrows where the Whiskeyrye split into two. The branches both became very constricted, thus the nickname. As she came to this area, she was swept left into the narrowest branch and because the bank rose sharply there was a break where water no longer covered Creek Road. She was pulled near shore and grabbed at branches and vegetation, at rocks, at long grasses, at anything to stop this madness and save her. Nothing held. The branches snapped, the rocks were too slippery, the grasses pulled loose from the soil. The ground teased her, so close she could touch it, but not gain it. It scraped, scratched and bruised her as she tumbled along. Soon the two branches would rejoin, the creek would widen and she would go past Brockett Mills into the woods and she knew once in the woods no one would see her.
Mary Beth Darlington was drowning.
Just when she knew she was a dead girl a hand snatched one of her flailing arms and she was jolted to a stop, the hand pulling one way, the water pulling her the other. The hand holding Mary Beth was strong, but her foot was entangled in something under the water: tree roots growing out of the bank, rocks, something anyway; and he could not pull her up. She tugged her leg forward with all her might, thinking her bones would part at the joints, her ankle hurt until she didn't think she could bear the pain another second, and then she felt a loosening and a moment later her foot slipped out of her shoe and boot and she was free. She popped out of the water like a champagne cork freed from the bottle and the man holding her fell backward on the bank and she landed atop him.
Excerpt from Gray (1995)
The stores ran east from there on both sides of Lancaster until the
railroad tracks just to the west side of the Minquas Fire Company. You can make out the train tracks between the firehouse and the Sunoco Station in the photo to the right. I had to cross those tracks many times in my young life and always hesitated after seeing the Dick Tracy film, Cueball.
Trains stopped me on journeys downtown at that spot. The trains would pause across the highway picking up or dropped off cars on mill sidings. In those days steam engines still pulled many of the freights and I would keep well back, intimidated by the loud hiss and puffs of steam, shrill whistle and grinding of the hitches.
The S. Austin Bicking Paper Mill took up a large portion of land across from the firehouse at that time (photo of the crumbling Bicking Mill today). Austin Bicking also owned a large paper mill on the corner of Lancaster and Brandywine, running behind the bank building. Austin was a cousin, his great grand uncle, Frederick Bicking, being my great great great grandfather.
The firehouse is still there but not in use for fire engines. For a
while it was converted to a restaurant called Molly McGuire’s.. In 2014 I took the family there on Mothers Day for dinner. In has since closed.
That railroad line has long been gone. A nature trail now runs from center town deep into the woods along the Brandywine Creek where the trains once steamed through picking up freight at the paper mill and the Iron Works. The Iron Works is gone as well. The Struble is the name of the trail, after former Executive Director of the Brandywine Valley Association, conservationist Robert G. Struble.
The Downingtown Library was and is on the south side of
Lancaster about half the distance between Green Street and Chestnut. Stuart Meisel lived directly across from the Library and Teddy Miller lived next door to Stuart on the west side of the Meisels. Many homes running east from Stuart’s (including his) dated to the Colonial period.
Dave Fidler lived in an old home directly across from the East Ward School. East Ward was on the corners of Lancaster and Whiteland and Whiteland and Washington. There was a gas station on the corner of Lancaster and Whiteland opposite the school ground. I believe it was either an Atlantic Station that later became an Esso or vice-versa.
Uwchlan Avenue ran on an angle toward the northeast off of
Lancaster just opposite the east corner of East Ward School. Bill Brookover lived a couple blocks up this street in newer homes built along its west side. Going a bit east on Lancaster just past the gas station was an apartment building. Denny Myers lived in this building when I first knew him and Gary Kinzey lived there later. The apartment building set back about halfway between Lancaster and Washington.
I lived at 424 Washington, just cattycornered across the street from East Ward’s playground. Later I lived just up the street on the same side as the school at 417. Billy Smith lived on Washington nearer Chestnut Street. Denny Myers moved into the same house after Billy’s family moved to Coatesville. Iva lived about halfway between that house and 424.
Ronald Tipton, when I first befriended him, lived on the far west side of Washington Avenue. He lived in the same apartment building as my heartthrob, Mary Jane Chudleigh, at 120 West Washington.(pictured) Ronald later moved to an apartment over an office on the corner of Chestnut Street and Boot Road.
My church where I went to Sunday school was the Downingtown
Methodist Episcopal Church on Brandywine Avenue, directly across from where Washington Avenue ended. The movie theater was about a block down from the church on the same side. It was the Roosevelt Theater and formerly the Downingtown Opera House. The Brandywine Creek ran behind the church and theater and cut the town in half, being the dividing line between the East Ward and the West Ward. We locals called that whole street Creek Road.
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