Two centuries and counting: Wright House serves as showcase for local history
Harry Funk/The Almanac
The history of the Enoch Wright House includes Civil War encampments once lad by retired Peters Township Middle School teacher Vaughn Daily. The event pictured took place during Memorial Day weekend in 2005.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
The Enoch Wright House, November 2010
Harry Funk/The Almanac
The Civil War uniform of Dr. David Anderson is displayed in the Costume Room.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
A mannequin is on display in the Native American Room.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
The Celko Log House sat in West Finley Township from the late 18th century through 2003.
Harry Funk/The Almanac
Upstairs rooms accessed only by outside doors have led to the suggestion that the Wright House once served as a hiding place for fugitive slaves. The rooms, though, could have been used as lodging for farm workers.
Robert Connell works on a project to seal the Celko Log House in 2005, two years after its relocation to the Wright House property.
The log house is pictured on Dr. David Celko's West Finley Township property prior to its 2003 relocation and reconstruction.
Re-enactor Kate Cunning stands in front of the Celko Log House during the 2015 Soup and Stroll event at the Wright House.
The Peters Creek Historical Society's annual Soup and Stroll open house event usually features members in clothing of yesteryear, as seen in November 2008.
Leonard Marracini, Peters Creek Historical Society vice president, shows an oil-burning head lantern once used by miners during a presentation in the Wright House's Coal Mining Room, 2012.
William Jenkins' model of a room-and-pillar operation is on display in the Coal Mining Room.
The kitchen on the western side of the Wright House resembles its original appearance.
Pewter mugs hang above the fireplace of the Wright House's old kitchen.
The Wright Room features a 19th-century bed.
Before there was a Peters Township or even a United States of America, there were the Wright brothers.
They were named James and Joshua, and they trekked west with their families to start new lives of uncertainty amid little but the forest and the native people who had preceded them.
Various sources list the Wrights as arriving in what then was one of either two colonies – Pennsylvania or Virginia, depending on whom you asked – between the mid-1760s and early 1770s.
Whatever the case, their name lives on a quarter of a millennium later in a thriving showcase for local history: the Enoch Wright House and Museum of Westward Expansion, located for 200-plus years near Peters’ southeastern corner.
Built from 1815-16 by Joshua’s only son, the house and about an acre and a third of surrounding property are owned by the Peters Creek Historical Society, a 55-year-old organization that focuses its preservation efforts on communities served by the watershed for which it is named.
Along with its status as one of Peters Township’s most venerable structures, the Wright House is home to a wealth of materials from various eras, all the way back to primitive artifacts from the early indigenous population.
On a larger scale, an authentic 18th-century log home, moved from its original location and reconstructed in back of the main house, offers visitors a firsthand look at the austere living conditions of the time.
Such resources are of particular value to Peters Township Public Library in continuing to make major strides in chronicling the history of the municipality. Members of the society’s board have met with library staffers to establish a closer working relationship, one that should benefit anyone who enjoys delving into the local area’s past.
The Wrights
At the heart of the Wright House, of course, is the Wright family, especially the descendants of Joshua.
He and his brother left Rockingham County, Va., making their way more than 200 miles and taking title to 400 acres they obtained through a land grant offered to settlers of what was known at the time as the “Backcountry.”
James, though, decided to keep traveling west, landing in Kentucky. Joshua stayed with his wife, Charity, and their three children, but he perished in an attack during a bartering expedition on the Ohio River in 1781.
Although son Enoch was just 5 at the time, he and his sisters inherited their father’s property. Success in farming and other ventures allowed Enoch to build the house that still stands.
It actually was constructed as a duplex, with Enoch and wife Rachel living on one side and their only child, the Rev. Joseph Wright, and his family on the other. Joseph’s oldest son, Joshua eventually inherited the house and lived there until 1861, after which it became rental property.
Nearby residents were Joshua’s youngest sibling, Charity, and her husband, Dr. David Anderson. Today, some of their possessions are on display at the Wright House, including Charity’s bed and David’s uniform from the Civil War, during which he served for the Grand Army of the Republic as an assistant surgeon.
He later was elected to a pair of nonconsecutive terms in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, the latter one concluding two years before his death in 1903. Prior to Charity’s passing in 1925 at age 84, she had been the last of Enoch Wright’s surviving grandchildren.
Both of the Andersons are buried in Finleyville Cemetery, about half a mile from the Wright House.
The rooms
The Wright House is compartmentalized as a series of displays in various rooms, many of them offering glimpses of what life was like in the 19th century.
One of the house’s two kitchens has been preserved in close to its original state, with visitors able to see how early residents cooked meals in a pot suspended inside a fireplace.
Next to the kitchen is the Colonial Room, the focal point of the Westward Expansion component. Organized by former Peters Township resident Robert Connell, the room features mannequins sporting common clothing of the mid-18th century, along with portraits that Connell painted using the most historically accurate information available, including George Washington in his 20s.
Also on the first floor is a Native American Room, which also contains a mannequin donning appropriate garb, along with arrowheads that have been found nearby and ancient tools that were recovered from an archaeological dig of a local burial mound.
Upstairs is the Coal Mining Room, boasting a collection of artifacts and donated to the Peters Creek Historical Society in 1980 by the family of retired coal miner William Jenkins. Included is a model Jenkins built to depict the long-ago practice of room-and-pillar mining.
According to the historical society, a coal mine operated on the Wright property in the 1880s, and David Anderson’s obituary states: “At one time he was one of the most prominent independent coal operators in the county.”
Other sections of the Wright House’s second floor are the Costume Room, featuring apparel and footwear of yesteryear; the Wright Room, replicating a bedroom circa the 19th century; and the historical society’s library.
The log house
In early 2003, Dr. David Celko, a Peters resident, offered a donation to the historical society of a 16.5-by-20-foot log building on property he owned in West Finley Township. Although its construction date is undetermined, the estimate is during the 1780s.
“It is typical of what the Wrights would probably have lived in as their second or third home before building our Wright House,” the late Fred Braun, a historical society member, wrote in an overview of the reconstruction project. “According to Dr. Celko, it is said that an 80-year-old man lived in the house as a recluse for many years and died there in about 1950.”
Today, the Celko Log House serves an integral purposes, as the historical society’s website states:
“We believe we can now tell and illustrate the only story of an early settler family and their times in the local area, their stages of housing, and their involvement in and contribution to westward expansion following the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars.”
The Underground Railroad?
An architectural feature of the Enoch Wright House is the presence of two rooms, one above each kitchen, that are accessible solely by enclosed stairways that lead from outside doorways facing the backyard.
Because a substantial portion of the property was farmed, one theory is the rooms, both of which have fireplaces, provided lodging for itinerant help.
Alternately, the suggestion has been made that, given they can’t be reached from inside the house, the rooms could have served as hiding places for fugitive slaves.
The Wrights’ abolitionist stance is reported in contemporary documents, and the obituary of Charity Anderson published in the March 11, 1925, issue of the Monongahela Daily Republican includes:
“Wright’s (Methodist) Church, at Anderson Station, was originally built by her grandfather, Enoch Wright, on his own land, and by him made available for use in the worship of God by all Evangelical denominations with the provision that nothing in defense of human slavery should ever be said from the pulpit.”
Given the understandable lack of details about what has come down in history as the Underground Railroad, the purpose of the Wright House’s mystery rooms probably never will be known.
For more information, visit peterscreekhistoricalsociety.org.