Nov 4, 2016 4 min read

BENTLEYVILLE – The funeral had just concluded, and a moment after former state Sen. J. Barry Stout’s flag-draped casket was placed in a hearse, a behemoth of a cement mixer rumbled past First Presbyterian Church on Main Street.

Whether it was divinely directed or mere coincidence, it was an appropriate symbol for a man whose name, over several decades, was associated with so many highway construction projects and business developments in Washington County. Stout was chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, and he capped his career on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

About 150 mourners filled the oak pews in the L-shaped sanctuary on Main Street as light streamed through stained-glass windows and burnished the autumn hues of chrysanthemums. Members of the American Legion honor guard who saluted the senator watched the service for the 79-year-old Stout downstairs on closed-circuit television.

The Rev. Andrew Scott, pastor of Stout’s congregation who had known the legislator for a dozen years, recalled the man with so many secular titles as “the guy in the back pew who would leave church with tears in his eyes, his thoughts not occupied with highways, railroads and bridges, but with the state of his soul.”

The senator’s brother, Bill, described the public figure who loomed large in Southwestern Pennsylvania as “a self-confessed country boy from Pigeon Creek.” Reared by two public school teachers, Barry Stout was one of seven children during hard times that proved true the axiom, “Struggle is the crucible of success,” his brother said. His parents founded a rail maintenance and construction business in Bentleyville that the family called “lug and tug. We were small, but that did not stop us from thinking big,” Bill Stout said.

And when he asked those gathered if they had heard the three-word sentence, “Stout has clout,” he drew laughter.

The clout, Bill Stout said, “was honed during an era when goodwill and compromise were actually practiced in our state Capitol.” He patted the flag on his brother’s coffin as he returned to his seat.

Bentleyville Mayor Tom Brown recalled the William B. and Mary Stout family station wagon traveling into town full of the Stout children. “No one knew then that one of those children in that station wagon would become a giant,” he said. “Nobody will ever be able to fill his shoes.”

Young Barry, who had been an outstanding student and graduate of Washington & Jefferson College and had worked at his father-in-law’s funeral home, had the late Democratic Congressman Thomas E. “Doc” Morgan of Fredericktown as a mentor who encouraged him to run for public office. Brown noted many who traveled to the funeral undoubtedly saw the Interstate 70 interchange project in progress at Route 917, which Stout foretold years ago.

He retired from the state Senate in 2010 after a 40-year legislative career, so it was fitting that a colleague, Sen. Jay Costa of Allegheny County, also eulogized Stout.

“On behalf of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to his family, thank you for loaning Barry,” he said, calling the late legislator “a masterful politician. He could change the course of public policy with his great will,” controlling billions of dollars in the funding stream.

Costa also said Stout would make sure that “roads and bridges had a slight twist through Washington County” and transferred the former Western Center to Washington County for the Southpointe and Southpointe II business developments where 5,000 people now work, traveling on the I-79 Southpointe interchange. He also came up with the name “Starpointe” for a counterpart in Hanover and Smith townships.

Highways are neither Democrat nor Republican, Costa said, and when pushing a project in his own district, he’d tell people three ingredients were needed to get a project done: “good design, concrete and the blessing of J. Barry Stout.”