'Bring this site to life': DCNR, IUP partners aim to preserve, uncover stories from early Black settlement near Johnstown

Feb. 11—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — For more than a century — and perhaps dating back to George Washington's presidency — a Black settlement grew on Laurel Hill above Decker Avenue in what became Johnstown.

Residents farmed the land and sent their sons to fight for freedom in the Civil War, records show.

Some accounts show that several families from that settlement have roots in the Johnstown area that predate by as much as 15 years the arrival in the late 1700s of city founder Joseph Schantz, or Johns.

But traces of those families' stories are somewhat scattered and weathered away by time, like the remnants of foundations at the site of the settlement.

A group of Indiana University of Pennsylvania faculty members is working to change that.

Alongside the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources — which owns the land once home to people with last names such as Smith, Brown and Harshberger — efforts are underway to compile and preserve historical accounts compiled locally about the families' histories, and perhaps to uncover new details.

"The Brown's Farm settlement is important because it highlights the early presence and participation of Black Americans in the area as it was developing into a robust community," said Erin Conlin, an IUP associate professor of history.

Census data documented just 14,000 free Black residents in the entire state of Pennsylvania in 1800. Details on the Laurel Hill families' parts of that history need to be compiled into a "comprehensive" collection before any push to pursue new leads, Conlin said.

'History and heritage'

Old Johnstown Tribune obituaries, articles and research by members of the Black community already provide insight into some settlers.

Edinborough Smith first settled the land by 1800 and at some point married a Native American woman who died in the 1820s. Their son, John E. Smith, joined the 3rd Regiment, U.S. Colored Troops, in the summer of 1863 before the outfit's participation in Civil War sieges in South Carolina.

Smith and another resident, John Brown, survived the battles, and the former was memorialized by the the Grand Army of the Republic in Johnstown.

For any family trying to make a life in western Pennsylvania's wilds in the early 1800s, hard choices had to be made — and there's evidence that "strong women" in their families kept them together in difficult times, according to archeologist Benjamin Ford, an IUP anthropology professor.

Part of Ford's role will be to pinpoint the settlement's landmarks, he said, saying that the team is using geographic information systems (GIS) mapping to mark and identify the exact places where important structures once stood.

The research group obtained funding through the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy to delve into some of the "untold stories" of western Pennsylvania's parks and forests — in this case, to help preserve a settlement whose ruins remain today on DCNR land, according to Ford, who is also working alongside fellow IUP history professor Jeanine Mazak — Kahne.

"The goal is to help DCNR better interpret and manage some of these history and heritage sites," he said.

DCNR Cultural Resources Program Coordinator Angela Jaillet-Wentling said the research is part of a broader effort to look at the history of underrepresented populations whose stories "haven't necessarily been the easiest to uncover."

"That's part of what makes this so exciting," Jaillet- Wentling said. "And we're going to be able to look at it from multiple disciplines — including archeology, geography and history — to build a more robust narrative about this settlement."

Johnstown Area Heritage Association Executive Director Richard Burkert praised the effort.

He noted that JAHA has contributed its own research about the settlement.

There's a long-held misconception that the roots of Johnstown's Black community date back to around 1900, in an era when Bethlehem Steel Corp. started heavily recruiting Black people from the South to fill jobs in the mills, Burkert said.

But that's only a midpoint in the story, he added.

"The origin of Blacks here really goes back to before the town developed, when Johnstown was just some backwoods trading center," Burkert said. "And even many in today's Black community don't know that because this settlement predates their communities here."

This research, he said, "will help bring this site to life."