what this house is all about so we're going to start here and what was formerly known as the parlor i mean they didn't call living rooms and they were parlors so maybe they could tell us a little bit about it who wants to be first i'd like to tell you just a little bit about the right family and when they came to this area they were the first settlers in this part of western pennsylvania they came from harrisonburg virginia so found the land or saw the land joshua james right when they came to fight indians in the come from one valley they went back to virginia and they claim to this area eight hundred acres james and joshua joshua with his wife's charity sons cain and build a log cabin about two hundred yards from where this house stands james left and went to kentucky joshua bought his share of the farm and he and his wife lived here and had three children you nick lydia and agnes joshua wright was killed going to new orleans by the indians james wright met the same fright of fate in the ohio but charity was a very strong dedicated woman and she stayed on the farm with her three children and raised and in it prospered grew up to be a fine man became active in in the community affairs such as the community was and he built this house between eighteen fifteen and eighteen sixteen he lived here with his wife rachel and he had one child joseph joseph was a bright young is right holly but in any event if prospered here the house he built in the house is unique because it's a double house in it lived with his wife rachel and her mother on one side and no i'm sorry his mother charity on one side and her parents the james's lived on the other side and it's very very unique case they shared a common hallway but they each had access to their house from the outside independently of the other side and as you go through the house  see that it really lend itself well to this kind of living there were two kitchens and two rooms downstairs two rooms on the other side downstairs two rooms up stairs on one side and two on the other you look at the house the fireplaces are of the federal style and they were probably crafted by a furniture maker possibly the adams brothers who did a lot of this kind of work in the this area some of the wood work on the other part of the house isn't quite as elaborate so you i guess i would soon that in equiv on this side of it if you built the house i guess you'd like to take the better part share their names yes and we will go in and look at them they're busy in their welding is there anything else that you'd like to think i think you've covered the ground quite well except to mention that when virginia which is what they called a patent which today we would call a deed well there was a james and joshua trail or something to remember with my girl scouts we did this trail and it was way over on nineteenth and we went all around and they had the boy scouts had made this trail and we ended up somewhere around here it was interesting when you say james and joshua know the marriage pool was limited right and so you see the same name is appearing in family histories but rachel james was the next one ok build you everything they have to live not really i think she's covered the subject very well here or anything on the male the you know i think it's it's a well constructed house the bricks that from there for the outside were what did they call it brand here fired here right here right here on the property it's interesting that the way that they would do that by that i mean you didn't go to the brick factory to pick up your material to build a house and you had to do it on your own you might say in the it's a well constructed homes so i might add to that the house stayed in the right family until  the last of the rights died and that would have been a lizabeth anderson reese and she will the house to the marvins who had been in there a ploy there were five sisters and they in turn gave the house to the given to the historical society and since then we have tried to restore it as we have had funds we have a lot of fund raisers we have house tours historic house tours will have one in september automobile shows we had a marvelous civil war christmas last christmas and then the quilt is our ongoing fundraiser for the historical society and all those funds go to do community programs and different sections of it and i thought we'll never make anything out of it you know but it's in these ladies and we have different personnel here that have done an awful lot of work  what you have accomplished i mean the way you've decorated everything and all it really is beautiful and i have a question that has been bothering me it seems that someone told me way back or something that the family of williams's lived here then she didn't live in this guy can recall i don't ever recall ever hearing that she lived here because as a child i used to always tell you but all the way ems us lived here was wrong but i think that area across the street was once part of the eight hundred acres and the barn sure the farm one of the barns for the farm was across and also the spring was probably over they are as near as we can tell there's an old foundation of one of the barns up in the methodist churches at this at this time and but when they gave it they gave it with the understanding that only adam only ministers who were abolitionists could preach their oh a prime example of an early farmhouse which is one reason we're trying to restore it to a really good condition because there are not very many farmhouses that's right that are around still existing today and conditions where you're safe room is an exception the other thing that's interesting is it is a type of georgian architecture and it's unique in that it has never been victorian just you know so many of the old farmhouses they started t add you know all the pretend you're branded tram on the outside and this now says never at the done so it's really they say historians that is very unique in that way  ok perhaps maybe now we will take a look at the over to quilt room right in there right over right over through this door yes ok now we're in the quilting room here at the right house grace i believe has something to tell us about the original yes has john boyd who is that in my graduating class in a gale high school nineteen thirty five he was the instigator for getting this case has three stores big pan out there on the shelf this yes ok if you take that out you can see that we use this to park our pattern so that we know hi we're back now we're now we're in the what they call the restored kitchen of the right house and i believe wind has something to tell us about this room restored kitchen means to take out any cabinets that were in here and the sink which somebody did add years later originally there were no cabinets no sink no refrigerator of course and no starve and we believe that there was a summer house type of thing in the back of the house where the cooking was done originally the kitchens were probably going on the porch like outside yes be it beyond the porch oh ok we found a foundation last year that probably was the summer kitchen at the  time there is evidence by the steps that you the little rise in the floor here that you to kitchens were added after the house was built sir but as we say without today's modern devices this was an era where there were no recourse is to doing things for yourself you had no choice but to keep your own food and preserve as much as possible for the winter time much of what they ate was salted brined in some way they they stored it in cracks like this one i don't know if you can catch this or not but these were lined up in a basement full of sauerkraut or if it was butchering  cooked all the sausage put it into the crocs and poured all the fat over it put it in a cool place and they they were able to eat that until they got down to the bottom of the crack and there was nothing left it's amazing the way things are kept the way they tours who have said that their folks did the same things and we didn't get to be quite true of course when you live on this sort of thing all winter and there's a dandelion or rhubarb or anything that comes up in the spring people could hardly wait to get and yes this was yes we're not sure that that they were not sure when they were put on the house but there's a general belief that they were in addition after the house was originally built  eplaces and that yes it is some fireplace this is the addition of the crane that a gray shaffer's husband found and put on she was just talking about there was a lot of danger in cooking in a fireplace the ladies were long skirts at the time and there were many fires started in clothing and it was a very cooking was a very dangerous occupation at that time i could see that they had no protection really no no they did not they probably ate a lot of one dish meals and we need to mention also that this house is a little unique in that over each kitchen there is a room that is not accessible from the rest of the house the accessibility for exist is a doorway that faces the back room the back yard that goes up behind the fireplace here and the day rooms were undoubtedly for farm help was not slavery because mr wright was totally opposed to slavery undoubtedly had housed farm help just a place for them to sleep well when they stood outside the entrance yes yes you cannot been hiding places for slaves that there is a place in the other room that appeared apparently had a partition that has been removed and it has been suggested that this could have been on the underground railroad they've kind of lost track of what happened to the underground railroad out of washington so it's not unlikely that it could have followed a red torturers path to get to an area like this so that's a possibility but am i painting on the wall that's done by one of our members bob connell who does beautiful beautiful work and the many of the paintings in the house the one in the living room over the mantel was done by bob and donated to the house of you can see this was a beehive of activity they did their spinning and everything and weaving and so on in this room because it was be warmer in the winter yes and that would probably be candle they made lantern by the door would be that would be the normal place because if they were going out to the barn or outside they would grab the lantern and go up the hill to the barn or to take care of the animals in the backyard there's an old watering trough that was used for the animals and of course we have the candle molds on the ceiling some interesting wood new tools i would guess that that was a milk store maybe that's what i would think they would use that for me ok yes in the set on i think yes so i get a little emotion here emotional because of freddy he suffered a stroke here last year and he was one of our foursome in the golf golf game and when i mentioned freddie it just kind of well wells up in here but now i can remember coming in here this fireplace was an open there and i didn't realize at the time that there was a our players here but they had it at that time i thought they had it fixed up very nicely and they lived here and they had this room the two rooms out there and two rooms house well this house had the furnace and had the fireplaces and they've all been closed up for the most part i think we have something they're all made to so this was a very necessary thing to know how to your days they saved all of their fat groupings from anything and rendered it cleaned it up by putting it in water so that all the fat raised to the top and all the imperfections  bottom dave skimmed off the fat mixed it with lye and turned out homemade soap and it's very characteristic smell of homemade took everybody's smell exactly do same good it was shampoo laundry soap scrubbing so right some things we don't quite know where to put the book you know that there are all and they were something that would have been used on the farm but i'll we don't have a barn or outbuildings to  incredible talent in tasted just manages to really dress up the house it is the improvement in the last year has just been a standing and we're very very grateful for her exquisite taste her energy and work in gathering all of this together he went to say something about this five player the fireplace is interesting originally when we got the house that was cemented in and truly it looked like someone had stood in the doorway and thrown semana at it it wasn't finished off it was just lump they were always they would do just oh no yes for one two wood we took had the cement removed last year and it revealed the many stages of heat for this house the original part was for wood then coal came in and then you could see the pipes when they put central heating in gas heat so it's not very pretty but it's kind of interesting to see what happened to heating as time went on and bernice was able to get that beautiful fire screen which dresses adopt a little and makes it acceptable to leave it open like that over on the wall here you will see the brick that is a far wall the days with those would not be throughout the entire house as we mentioned earlier the brick was probably fired on the property and this is a softer brick that would have been used outside you can also see in some instances the horsehair that they used in making the brick and in the more and in the mortar really bore than the brick yes but that would not be they say in every room it would just be in certain rooms and it is a fire wall  probably because they didn't have enough brick to do it everywhere but if they could contain it and that was a kitchen that would probably be the area that would be most likely to have a fire and it's interesting to know too that in the attic which we won't go up to because it's so difficult to get there but there is a ladder going up to the roof that originally had a trap door on to the roof and they could go up there and check the roof to see if any sparks had ukulele and it's called it adds oddly enough music came with it and it's played by number in the music has the numbers and you hit the string for that number and so on so it was given to us quite unexpectedly we were having a rummage sale and a man brought it did and said would you like to use this for we didn't want to sell it because we really had no idea of the value of it and have mount tolls and this is post bay one of the most extensive collection mound tools in the area we were very very fortunate and very appreciative of having these things donated to the historical society because they are of great historical value these mountains were found for the most part in clay or pennsylvania now the indians probably did use these themselves as much but they to to dig to build to break up things to copy things he has and then of course we have and large large number of indian artifacts and things that were made with muscle shells very very interesting yes we also have in the ceiling i don't know if you can get that or not you can see the last that way the house was built something to do with gaston villa in the region is part of the gaston bill post office and it is an indication of something to do with the house because this farm is extended into gas stairs up to the roof and we use the attic primarily for storage now so it's a pretty yes and it's a it's a pretty substantial attic actually if they had an overflow of children or anything the displays in this room were given in one thousand nine hundred eighty two the historical society by the estate of william jenkins he was a retired miner who made all of these displays got them together and as you can see they're like in a box and you could put the lid down and mr jenkins would go around to the schools and show people how are students how mining evolved in this country or in this area and of course this is one of the major reasons for pittsburgh's success in industry we had the rivers and we had coal so those were two major major things in the development of pittsburgh and western pennsylvania so it's very very interesting he has pictures of people waiting outside the mine after a disaster the families and then there's all the little displays of how they work was actually done there are pictures of the animals that went into the mine and brah but coal out and some of these animals never never came out of the mine they lived in the mine they died in the mine they were and it's interesting we always think of mules or horses but horses  and oddly enough got goats yes so it's very very interesting and we're very grateful to have this we would like to do some major work in this room but unfortunately it's going to be a major supports that they left and then of course they don't do that anymore right and they're doing the long home long wall mining and this is what's causing all the controversy in western pennsylvania right now that they used to leave those supports under buildings and so on yes yes they're just a lot of things that need to be done in this room but it still does not lessen the interest and the value to students and people who are interested in mining and it's interesting at christmas time we had a civil war christmas festival here was a wonderfully attended and just marvel of the interesting but this room was of much interest and maybe of more interest to people than any room in the house of the men just gathered here and they talked we were fortunate to have one of our members who was a geologist and he was able to do a lot of really intelligent talking with them so we were very very very fortunate yeah i see your poster up there for a circus ye and of course behind you is the the bird cage where they kept the bird in the cage and if they found the bird dead they knew they'd better get out of the mine because there were gases you know exactly exactly ok the other room is just one of the bedrooms yes way across and across the hall we have a library a pair the people can make appointments to go through and we have books of interest in it newspapers all kinds of reference books and if somebody wants to explore something they may possibly find it there and we your turn just have nothing to say oh oh well this is the only room in the house where we have any original right furniture the bed belong to charity right the old just look at the the work it's just beautiful we have this is a picture of alexander whop hopkins anderson and he would have been the great great some one civil war uniform and oddly enough and sadly enough the buttons were removed from some of the truly sad we have banned uniforms from  community and and that sort of thing a stovepipe hat and these are just things that were given to the society in the bedroom seemed the appropriate place to  genealogy of the rights which we can't pay here and these cupboards are filled with all kinds of resources newspapers from gaston newspapers from  over this area dating back to the early one nine hundred some we have all kinds of reference books on the shelves and this library is available to anyone who wants to come and do some research but you do have to make an appointment and i believe there's a minimal fee for it isn't there when because we have to have someone come down open the house and stay here why you're using it but authentic it's a reproduction of bill's yes yes and then this is a letter dated eight hundred thirty five  written to general robert finlay and it was given to us this aside so we do have some things of interest here in the library that might be helpful to someone and they're welcome to come and make an appointment and see what we have in the library the house also is available for tours by appointment