can be found in textbooks nothing can compare to a firsthand account of this information peters township is lucky to have a resident who has witnessed much of this history her name is esther barrett and she has been a resident here in the township for no railroad on the east side but even the roads aren't the same this road didn't go past this house at that time it came in at the crossroads and then across a side of this hill and just to be on the band it they evidently didn't like to build bridges and they went down over the hill there and forded the run because the bank was low then went up in front of the fire company house and on up onto they heal where mr george lives that's exactly across from her high school and when they changed the road then they had to build a new school because the road was taken away from the school and pleasant valley was a school that they had built and it was built in eighteen ninety three and it was the first school that was not named for the farm that it was built on or built near their thompson village school it was built on a fire farm but it was surrounded by the some property so it was called the denison school but this school pleasant valley got it name from the men who were building the school they evidently didn't come from around here and they said oh this is such a beautiful place this should be called pleasant valley and so that's what it was and if it had been named for the farm it was built on it would have been called the that it's experience all that isn't very hard to answer because the most significant change is transportation it ninety nine the pittsburgh railways company started a streetcar line ten cents then it was to go to peter's township high school by horse and buggy and then they in nineteen twenty  don't suppose the road commissioners decided maybe they should pave the road to pittsburgh and they started to build a brick road and they were it went past here and they started down by the creek which is the west end of the township but it only went up here to the band of the road and it was sixteen feet wide and it was brick and that was the first that i know of that was paved but the road also as i said since it went across here and was changed when it got beyond the roads and or dirt roads and people who did buy an automobile and there were a few i remember when i would run to the window to see an automobile and the people that did buy an automobile had to store them for the winter because they couldn't run them on the roads of our roads weren't ready it was due to the invention and buying of cars that preceded the paving of the road say had to have fave roads in order to run their cars and i think probably that has been the biggest change because now people can go out in their cars at any time and the first car that i have saw they had no top no wind shield no front doors at all and the wheels were like almost like and the gear shift was on the running board and it could it only went about fifteen miles an hour but the ladies tied their hats on they always had to where i have those space and then i remember the and they had side curtains just like you put on a buggy in the winter time and i can't remember where i went with them but i think i went to a  marathon those bait should never hear of it anymore and it had a sound that i could kill even when i was in the house i could tell when our car was coming home where you're speaking for about how bad the roads are poor conditions for driving sites on how did that having a fact if someone was el or sec how would you now well that was that was a very try time as i've said there were no telephones not until one nine hundred three and i can give you a little story about how trying that was a farmer and with his hired hand decided to take a load of hay to pittsburg one afternoon and his little girl the sick and but they didn't think she was very ill but and her mother and aunt bertha there had to take care over but as the day grew on by it she became very much worse and the mother had to keep going to the door to see if she could see someone who was passing to go for a doctor and finally she saw a cousin he was horseback and she asked him to go and find a doctor and you see the doctor didn't have a telephone number no telephones and then she said when you find a doctor and tell him to come then go down to the hill station which is about four miles and it was a man who lived down there that went to pittsburgh every day and tell him to go down to the wharf where they sold hey and tell the farmer to come home that his child was very sick well they couldn't get the word to him then until the next morning and then the hired hand was to bring a team home and they doctor came and he said i don't think the child will live through the night but come back by midnight and he came back at midnight he told afterwards he came back to sign the child's death certificate but she lived and grew up but you see how hard it was to get help you just had to go around when this cousin didn't he didn't go to the doctor's office he just drove rode around to see where he could find a doctor and the doctor in the winter time rode horseback and mostly but and if the roads were so they could run a sleigh why he came by a sleigh and he had a shovel and sleigh so if he had to shovel his way out he could and he charged a dollar seventy five cents a house guess and i'll send him the telephones on sol but i guess that i'll change in the telephones once oh yes it changed a great deal i recall when they first telephone line came through and of course we got it and the man i put it in and my father was murdered both working at it there and i was curious and i was looking on and they say i said wouldn't you like to clarissa weaver lived up over the hill and they set me up and rang her ring it when you cranked up thing you know and i'm sure she could have heard me without the telephone because i yelled i thought you had to make yourself heard but then when you wanted to call somebody that wasn't on your party line you just rang central which is wandering and asked for the person you wanted by name yeah but everyone knew everyone that well and everybody knew everybody else or who they were within a five mile radius and now we don't know people across the street but then they changed it to your head numbers and our number was one hundred seven and they called the number and then after that they called by line and number and  mine it was a private private line when i started to do counseling i got a private line well obviously you're part of peter's town's history and in fact your family was part of american history is it true that your grandfather your great great grandfather did some work for george washington well that that's true my great great great grandfather was the indian interpreter for  great before george washington but that was not on my baird side of the house that was on my mother's side of the house and he had been captured by the indians when he was fifteen years old and he was he had made his way from south carolina june york when he was twelve and then he hired out to a farmer and stayed  there till he was fifteen and he made he made his way across some mountains to pittsburgh and then hired out as a clerk to traders who were setting up posts in ohio and he went into ohio and he was at the trading post by himself when they don't know where indians came along and took him and he was told that if he didn't of bay they him and do what they wanted him to do and become one of them by his alternative was to be killed well you when you have an alternative like that you go along but that and then he had lived at one time at sandusky and he came he had a trading post by that time and he would come to pittsburgh to get supplies and george washington had come up because he owned a lot of washington county and people were building on his property a was out behind it and he came up to find out about it and he met with my great great great grandfather but they on the other side of the house  my great great grandparents were the among the earliest natives of washington county and i have of search ific at them all the credentials to prove  area and i know their roots go back to center church when it started center church was founded in eighteen twenty eight and their names as on were on  that earliest list of membership there now if you're talking about indians in the area and that's something really new to people today we now don't know much about can you tell us what sort of relationship they had with the people who lived there do you remember hearing stories of well i think no i don't know anything about the indians ever was before my time a long time before my time but  remember that this but my own grandfather he lived in ohio and he played both indian children they were still they are he was born in eighteen twenty two know eighteen thirty two and my grandfather baird was born in eighteen twenty two and this other one was born in eight hundred thirty two and the one that was born in eighteen thirty two  there were indians living all around him at that time because the indians didn't go west from ohio until eighteen forty three and so he had indian friends that he played with and in the field next to where my great grandmother lived with an indian family and evidently they were becoming christianize because they had a little girl that they call little wild flower and she took sick and died and the indian mother came over and i asked my great grandmother if she would say a prayer at the grave of the little girl so evidently they were becoming christianized and grandmother did and because she was the indian mother was so pleased she made for her a beautiful purse it she took two pieces of tam a leather and on and put them together but before she put them together she be did each side in a scroll design of seeing pearls in white and shades of green and my cousin still has that  purse at dandy an eighteen forty three the government was sending the people away i asked and my mother used to be able to sing a song about the indians leaving and they you you are what made you decide to become a teacher in peter's time i didn't decide i was that way all my life when i was a little girl i did it on saturday to come i wanted to be in school and it wasn't that i was a genius or anything far from month but i love school and this would be hard for you to believe but when i was seven years old i knew all those states of united states the capital of each one and what each one was noted for all the counties of pennsylvania and all the townships of washington county when i'm a seven years old and the reason for that was that we had an exceptionally fine teacher and he'd drilled us on that but we drilled ourselves when our parents found out that that because he was planning to do they got maps and put it on the wall for us and we would try that every evening we would go to that my up and say them over and see who would be first one to manage so we became quite proficient but i had always wanted to be a teacher and i have never regretted it and you were teaching thirty five years i talk first thirty five years and at the end of thirty five years i quit to take care of my mother then i was out for two years and mr day came and asked me as i mentioned if i would go back because after i got my masters degree i started on my counselor certification i've told people i am a perennial co and i just keep going on and so when he asked me that out i said i can't because teachers who have taken their pension aren't permitted to teach except three  fifty days a year and that would work down to three half days a week and you can't do very much and three have to raise a week and mr day said well if we give you an assistant would you think of doing it so i talked it over with my mother and she thought i should do it she had been a teacher too and it was sort of in the blood and  i decided to do it and they gave me mr de bolt and he was just accepts only fine assistant and he helped for two years and then they got a full time teacher and  i stayed on for two more and then i quit because by that time mother of us and getting increasingly work worse and i was working around the clock and then i was out for two years and didn't do anything although i started on genealogical research i can't sit with idle hands and i had had the top and i thought well this would be a good time to try to make it into a quilt and another amp said to me well she said i have quilting frames up for three weeks at a time i said three weeks it'll take me three years and it took me six but i got a dumb and i kind of proud of it but the then  called me one morning and he had wanted me to go there and teach regularly and i said no i wouldn't do that but one morning he called me and he said we have eleven teachers he said we are in dire need of teachers will you come as a substitute and i did and i did that for nine years and then i quit again and i haven't been back in the school room since he ever missed teaching part do you ever miss teaching us the same well i did at first but i wouldn't have let my mother know that for anything because i didn't want her to feel bad that i was quitting on her account and  e loved every minute of teaching i've always liked it and but no i'm still interested in the school so that's why you're here build and i don't know exactly when the first school house was built in the community i know that the gregg school was a very very old school and that was the four runner of person valley and person valley itself was built the one down here was built in eighty ninety three and this house was built about the same time so that's how old is how serious and  my grandfather went to that school and he was going there and  and the new england printer because the way back in that day they didn't have bookstores and every family had those books so they could take those books to school and they'd all have the same books and in the very early school they didn't have desks and seats like they have today they had benches and the children kept their books on the window sill and but down  this place and value school they had a large seat in the rear of the wrong and in the front of the room they had them for the little dogs because all ages of children when and valley they were double seats you had a seat mate and strangely enough there wasn't trouble with too much talking among the children but the boys sat on one side of the room and the girls sat on the other so when you called a class there were boys and girls both in the class so they had to go to the front of the room to resize and there was a long bench under the blackboard and usually they would sit on the long bench except in spelling class and in spelling class they would trap and spelling a trapping is  they had a spelling lesson of probably twenty words or maybe twenty five and another child at the head of the class would give them a ticket for that day if she were trapped if she missed a word the child who spelled it correctly below her went to the top of the class then at the end of the day by the one at the top of the class daughter's ticket and went to the foot of the class and then worked his way up again and there was never any trouble about doing homework and spelling because after you got five tickets you got a little card and after you got five cards you got a larger card and so everybody was wanting to have a get these cards and i have a big guard or two so one big card indicated that i had been to the top of a class twenty five times while can you tell us about your first day of teaching in your first teaching job that you had my first year of teaching was the house and i was coming near the beginning of the year to start school and the school didn't have a teacher and my first teacher was a lady and she only top kill christmas time because she got married at the time and then the man a man teacher came who taught us about some much geography and where i didn't have a school at the time but i was certified to teach and the teachers could take a test and if they passed the test state could change and she had told it without my knowledge she told the school board to ask me to be the teacher and when i don't learn where i was to go because it was considered such a bad school i had some nervousness oberg but i went and i stayed was her she lived in that district and so i stayed with her and the children i had heard before i went there that they were having just a little slip of a girl that was going to teach and they'd carrier out the first week what was our school coming to and i was i don't know whether it's independence or really stubbornness but i was determined that i wouldn't be carried out i can even remember a part of war the first day and i wore a white sailor dress with a blue collar and i and she had differences with the man teacher that was there at that time and she used an iron poker on him and so when i was she was eight years old when i started and i said to her i gave her the third grade reader for she was eight years old and she said i guess you i read in the fourth reader and i said well if you read die slowly in the third reader i'll be glad to give you a fourth reader but when i called the class to go to the front of the wrong she didn't go and i said bessie this is your class and she looked over her shoulder and she said i guess ya ain't going up the all she went and strangely enough about a year ago i got a telephone call and she said do you remember me and she gave me your name and i thought  well how could i forget you but i told her i remembered her and i said where are you living she said in washington and she wanted some direction and i gave them to her and i said you'll have to go past my place to go to this place and she wanted to go she wanted to go to the cemetery and i said i wish she would stop but about two months later her obituary was in the paper but after sixty years she had gone me on the phone i want to find that when you were a teacher that most of your students went on to college or did they get a fine hour no that was not true when i was a little girl going down here to pleasant valley the big boys and girls you see this is all farming community and the boys especially were needed on the farm in the fall the spring so the big boys would help on the farm until maybe the first of november then they would come into school and then about the first middle of march they would quit again and help with the spring work the girls were better about coming because there me work for them wasn't as stringent as for the boys but even when i went to high school they never not too many people going to high school at that time but the first class in peter's township had to graduates the first day the first year it was in session it had to graduate because the two girls that were graduating had come from another high school and finished it peters and they both went to college that that was very unusual and and when i was in high school we had a very start up with the teachers examination they would go to summer school taking a teacher's course at summer school and then past six am a nation and then if you topped through the first year you could take provisional examination and that would allow you to teach for three years without taking another examination and at the end of that time you could take a professional examination and that gave you a certificate for all time and i know teachers that are living today that top on those certificates all their lives but i didn't i wanted to teach in high school and i went on to college but i didn't do it right away when you when you first got your certificate and you first started teaching were men usually chosen as teachers over women or did men usually get paid found it was boarding around they boarded around with her but the parents of their children if they didn't board around they got eighteen and the lady teachers got twelve if they didn't board around but they got nine if they didn't board around and you know there was something still in the minds of directors when i ta school before i quit the last time i was not paid so much because i stayed at home and i had a master's degree and i was the only teacher at that time that had a master's degree being a teacher in a one school can you tell us about some of the responsibilities you had to your students besides being their teacher teacher in a one room school was everything she was the playground director she was a referee she was a doctor she was a nurse sh children i have a souvenir i gave the children on the last day of school it's there on the table and i had forty two children and all grades and besides hearing thirty classes a day you can hardly understand that but you had to have thirty classes a day because everyone had to be heard in all of the subject then when it came spring because the eighth grade had to take the counties that was the county examinations then they had been only having fifteen minutes a day for grammar and to respond to which were the two most difficult subjects and so the teacher on her own would stay till five o'clock if they wanted to stay and they always wanted to stay you didn't have to they they weren't compelled to stay but they always stayed and then in the last four weeks i taught on saturday morning and we didn't get anything extra for that we just did it because we wanted to help the children get through and the questions to the teachers that he had designated from the township who were to give the test and they gave the test but they did not correct the papers they collected the he wrote them a letter and advised them to return to eighth grade for another year can you tell us the sort of discipline that was probably in the school that you taught it when you first began and i think if i ever had any success and teaching and i hope i have had it was because i treated the children like i wanted to be treated myself when i was teaching at pleasant valley one of the boys came in one day and he said bill won't give us the bag and i said who's bad is that he said it's mine oh i said i think he'll give it to you i said we'll see and i walked out onto the porch and this was a black boy and he was about fourteen it could have tied me in a bo there was a little first grader on a porch and i said to her evelyn would you want to take a walk with me and so i took her by the hand and we went down across a playground where this boy had  one leg slung up over the end of the bat and he was just watching me and i was thinking she was proud going along and i was trying to answer her but i was thinking oh what am i going to say to him what am i going to say to him but i got within as close as almost as i was in that chair and i said william i'm sort of embarrassed i have to speak to the biggest boy in the you've seen and just even looking out your window what have been some changes that over the years all the biggest changes in peter's township has been a arrival of new people of people who come in here from business firms an error here for a couple of years and they're transferred someplace else we never got to know them as i said i remember this field over here of when it was a feel it was a great thing feel clear to crossroads and now they have all these people and today traffic is terrific i waited down at the mailbox one day five full minutes before i could cross the road because i have to cross the road to get my mail and i think that is probably the one of the biggest things and it's still growing but if you will notice they this is a modern map of peter's township here on the piano and the western part of that peter's township if so much more built up  the eastern part but the eastern part of it get that way you may be sure i was with one of your former teachers one day we'd gone to lunch and so we drove around over the township and i was amazed there are hardly any farms the left and at one time all of this was farming community mr weaver had a farm mr mcdowell still has his farm but he kept cheap and he kept sheep and elias i think he said he got them in about nineteen twenty nine and that it was a fine way of keeping his farm clean because sheep closely the grass closely and washington county at one time was the greatest shape grazing county in the united states and it ceased to be that when the mines opened and the people came in to operate the mines they brought their dogs with them and the dogs around the sheep and if sheep are run by dogs they don't grow right afterward it isn't that their their fright i know mr mcdowell came over one day and asked me if i had seen a dog and i said it's the jurors he said it better not be and the dog had been on his sheep and then another thing that has happened in discipline really he have said all sorts of inconvenience by people riding their motorcycles over his fences they rode the old fences down and he put up new fences and they cut them and one day he went out and it was as sheep lying in the field and he just turned it over with his foot and there was an iris through its back so you can understand why people are getting away from farming it they just can't do it any more mr b about on down toward finishing he still has his farm but on this side of mcmurray i don't know where there are any farms what do you feel is the us to store part of peter's township today the most historical part well that would be hard to answer we i think the churches and the roads you can't go on a road that isn't paved today that you can but but you can drive on it and when you think that that has all happened w years because i know when we had a marathon car in nineteen twenty seven why you couldn't run it in the winter time because there were no to the roads weren't fit to run out on and people walked off i don't want to tell you that peter's township had  a higher form of education an institution of higher form of education when they didn't have a high school they had the old  probably as far from center church as down to the shop and save store from here and they used the data center church for their assembly and for their literary societies and there are very few people know about that old academy and of ray and i was small and we walked over the hills to church on sunday i had noticed a stone wall and a long bartie poplar trees and i said to my father what was there it must have been something important always said that was the site of the old stone wall academy but i don't know when it was discontinued i don't know whether my aunt said gone to that school i know my father didn't he went to jefferson college in canada's berg and then he went to ohio northern university in ohio that's where he met my mother and that's how i have to be boston see you and your whole family you lived in pierce township percent many years what do you think is an aspect of the community that has kept you and your family here that is but it has kept you here made you want to continue to live here  i think we have noticed that people coming out here want to stay people new people they seem to want to stay here and of course we have our roots here then there'd down so deep it would be difficult to pull them up but it has been a pleasant community and we had schools and the was in peter straub ship but in reading mr noah thompson's history it was in union township across the road from peter's township and now if you were to check the number of churches in peter's township there must be more than half of the house and i would be say it is safe to say that would be more than a half a dozen or so it had it is very edges and of course we had to street car line the street car line gave way to the bus service to pittsburgh and we had that we have had excellent transportation just by street car and bus not counting the railroad earlier feb nineteenth nine and the bus was discontinued last october and i am i so later eve i say take down some things here that you have that you wanna shall i ask can you tell us a little bit about the things you have on the table there well i had them put those things out because it blows the old all the map of peter's township with all  people who live there at that time their names are on that map and the churches are marked down most of the schools are marked and i thought that would be interesting and so then i put a modern map up so that you could see the difference in the modern map the western part of the township is the one that is most closely settled and in the old  was really through the central part of the township and then as this is a path and a patent was used instead of giving a deed if you sell property you have to give a written contract that you have sold the property and this was the the the way that they did that out in the very early times this patent is dated seventeen eighty six so it's over two hundred two hundred two years old and it goes and it has a state seal on and it  it was granted by the first governor of pennsylvania to an anthony height and it but it's my great great grandparents that bought it from m height and so they got it and in that early day i want to tell you all sold their burn no cemeteries and my great great grandparents were buried in the orchard on the farm and i was the only one who was available to do the business concerned with it and i went to the mortuary and asked the mortician what we should do with it and he said don't try to lift the graves he said day when he found out the day the earth the latest date was eighteen twenty four and this was nineteen fifty three he said you you would lift it and assumes it struck their errors it wouldn't be anything there well i went to the stone man and he said i would suggest you do the same thing that they do when boys are lost at sea or anyone is lost at sea or boys don't return from the service they are missing in action he said they put a tombstone in the cemetery for them so we get down there is a tombstone on the bared log in centerpiece cemetery and it says in memory of the grandparents of thomas baird james anderson who died eighteen twenty four his wife died gene nine but  ago the boy scouts had a project and one of the boys called mother called me and said that her son was given a project of looking up these graves and she knew about these graves over the bared homestead farm and she said would you take him to them and i said yes i'd be glad to but i said how did she get over here she said oh you'll come over on his bike so he came over on his bike and we drove over them at two they where the graves were and at the time the graves were put there and there was a still in existence and mr emerson was living on the lot when we went there and i went down to the house and explain to him who we were and what we were doing and he said oh i was told there were graves on my house and i said they won't hurt you but we didn't want to leave them put a little fan surrounded because we thought that people just throw junk in there  that was the way we resolved this situation on the stand for closing interview is there anything that you'd like said the community it's not yourself are you'd like to share wit the community well i have always been very pleased to stuff a part of this community and of course i have lived here all my life in i was born in i wasn't born in this house but i was born in peter's township and my father was born in peter's township and his father i'm not sure that his father was but he lived in peter his father had died when he was fifteen and he came to live with the andersons who were his grandparents but he went to the denison school and that was his copybook and that  copy book is one hundred and fifty two years old and then that center church there's a picture there of center church how it was before it was built to and it was not always on that particular spot it was down far out there where the manse is and the first church was down there and then they built they the one that is there now but it was just a single rome no basement under it and how we work to put a basement under that church and then the last few years i'm it would be the last few years to you it would be probably before your time even by the additions were made and the and the cemetery was there to be here by the members of the church and there are people buried in that cemetery who would never set a foot in any church and it's filling up fast ok thank you very much for talking to us today i want to thank you and also for talking to all the people in peter's township because by letting us interview you and telling us  valuable knowledge and sharing with us what you know you've really helped a lot of people in peter's township and thank you very much well please