“A Fallingwater Homecoming” Free Exhibit
Opens at the Bear Run Interpretive Center
May 18, 2004
by Sarah Cleary, Fallingwater Curator of Education
When I moved here in 1990, I quickly learned to never explore the western
Pennsylvania countryside without a full tank of gas and a detailed county map. I could no longer rely on the Midwestern “make three rights and you’re back where you started” approach, and was an utter failure at finding landmarks like Springfield Pike or Jim Mountain. If it wasn’t printed on a roadmap, it simply didn’t exist for me, until I realized that many local landmarks exist in community memory, often associated with an element in the landscape. One such place was Bear Run, Pennsylvania.
At that time, Bear Run was still published in the local telephone book as an address. But there was no post office, no highway sign, only the Bear Run Church of the Brethren, our Bear Run Nature Reserve, and the “Bare” Run Tanning Salon up the hill. The USGS map identified this place as “Kaufmann;” contemporary maps simply ignored it. But I knew it had once been the address for Fallingwater: “A Forest Lodge for Edgar Kaufmann at Bear Run, PA,: as Frank Lloyd Wright put it in 1938. The people must have moved on, I guessed, and the place was reverting back to its original natural beauty, celebrated by Wright and now cared for by WPC.
The living memories of the people who called this place home are the subject of our premiere exhibit at the Bear Run Interpretive Center, “A Fallingwater Homecoming.” Opening in May 18, the exhibit explores the connections between the people who once lived in the rural community known as Bear Run, and the natural landscape that is still defined by the stream of the same name. Many of these people helped build Fallingwater, and some still live in the area. The exhibit is based on over 25 oral history interviews that were conducted in 1997 by Brian Gregory, then a graduate student in history.
From these interviews emerges a portrait of a community of people whose livelihoods depended upon the land. Farmers, hunters and trappers, stoneworkers, lumbermen - all harvested the resources Bear Run had to offer, including ice! “They used to cut ice there in the wintertime,” recalls community member Bill Scarlett. ‘”They loaded it on sleds, and they stored it in the icehouse. They packed the ice in sawdust, and they’d have ice all summer.” Bill can still spot some of the old tramways in the reserve, left over from the vital timber industry here. “There used to be a narrow gauge railroad that went down off the mountain, on down to Bear Run where they transferred the logs onto trains and took them to the mills.”
As resources were used up, however, the village disappeared, some houses becoming part of the summer camps that appeared on site at the turn of the century. The Depression took its toll. “There weren’t a lot of dollars to be had, I recalled Ruth Rugg McVay. “You could go out in the woods and pick blackberries and walk with them to Ohiopyle and sell them for a dollar a bucket. People used to live on buckwheat cakes and pork in the wintertime.” So when Edgar Kaufmann began construction of his new vacation home, people took note. “It was a farming community,” remembers longtime WPC employee Earl Friend. “The older people were doing their farming, and the boys had to get out and make a couple of dollars. We were just thinking about the dollar.”
The physical community may be gone, but its memories certainly aren’t! This spring, plan to view the exhibit to learn about Bear Run, take a hike in the Reserve and discover traces of the past in the landscape, and then enjoy the fruits of local labor at Fallingwater. “A Fallingwater Homecoming” will be on view until July 25; a public and community gathering will be held on Sunday June 13, to which you’re invited. For more information on exhibit hours, and the gathering, please phone the Fallingwater reservations office at 724-329-8501.
This project has been supported in part by the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, the Federal-State Partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Photos from the Fallingwater Homecoming Exhibit
Contact Curator of Education, Sarah Cleary, at scleary@paconserve.org for information.
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