Creative History

  On the day before Halloween in 1948, a Saturday, in the early afternoon the Donora Pennsylvania High School football team was defeated on its home turf, Legion Field,  by local rival Monongahela High School.  The final score was Monongahela 27 Donora 7. Not a single pass was thrown during the entire game by either team.  But there was something far more odd, sinister and tragic than erratic play on the gridiron that both literally and figuratively overshadowed the field and the one hundred and fifty or so players and spectators who had gathered together that afternoon at Legion Field in suburban western Pennsylvania. The Smog. Speaking sixty-years later in 2008 to reporters from the Pittsburgh Gazette local resident Sam Jackson, who played in the football game for Monongahela High School remembered, “The smog was like a big cloud of yellowish mist hanging over the players.” Donora resident Paul Brown, who had left work early from the U.S. Steel Company Mill where he worked on

  No light.   No air.   No water.   Temperatures in excess of one-hundred and fifty degrees.  The smell of excrement and piss.  Hundreds of filthy, naked and sweaty men with only room to sit cross legged on the floor.  No room to lie down.  Not enough room to stand up. If heat exhaustion and dehydration don’t kill you then you may be lucky enough to lose your mind and go insane and into a blissful oblivion before someone strangles you, or bashes your head against the metal walls just to get you to shut up.   And then there are the beatings and the periodic executions, performed for sport by your sadistic captors on deck who will blindfold you, have you kneel and then slice off your head at the neck with the curved blades of their samurai swords and then laugh as your severed head rolls off the deck and floats out into the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Maybe, just maybe you’ll be “lucky” enough to live through the beatings, the dehydration, the starvation and the insanity, but in

  York County sits astride the waters of Chesapeake Bay, Virginia.  Today York County is considered one of the state’s most populous regions, situated as it is in the Norfolk-Newport News metropolitan area. York County takes its name from the city of Yorktown, site of the penultimate battle of America’s War for Independence in 1781.  Also, the county is home to Colonial Williamsburg, one of America’s most popular historic tourist attractions, a living history site, that attracts thousands of visitors each and every year. Not all that far from Jamestown, America’s oldest colonial town first settled in 1607, York County, Virginia was one of the first settled and most populous regions in British North America during the 17th century.  It was home to wealthy tidewater farmers, who grew rich off the profits from enormous sprawling tobacco plantations, that helped finance His Majesty’s Empire in the years prior to the American Revolution. Colonial Map of York County Virginia These plan