A placid pool in Montour Run in Moon Township.
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Fall Colors Reflected in Montour Run
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Fall Colors on the Montour Trail
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More of Robin Hill, Moon Township
The only excuse we need for publishing more pictures of Robin Hill is that we have more pictures of Robin Hill. It’s a beautiful Georgian house designed by Henry Gilchrist for Francis and Mary Nimick; it was left to the township by Mary to be a park for the residents. We’ll walk around the house counterclockwise.
Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285. More pictures of Robin Hill, and a composite of the garden face.
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Montour Trail
The Montour Trail claims to be the nation’s longest suburban rail-trail. That is a matter of definition, of course: the trail connects to the Great Allegheny Passage, a rail-trail that goes through suburbs of at least three major cities—Pittsburgh, Cumberland, and Washington. But the Montour Trail is entirely within the Pittsburgh suburbs. It follows the path of the old Montour Railroad, which carried mostly coal until it finally gave up the ghost in the 1980s.
There are many short bridges along the trail, because it follows Montour Run for much of its length, and trains cannot afford to be as whimsical in their curves as small rivers often are.
Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Kodak EasyShare Z981. This bridge is prominently dated in the concrete.
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Montour Run in Early Autumn
In Moon Township, Montour Run alternates between placid pools reflecting the forest around them and gentle burbling rapids.
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Montour Run
End-of-summer sunlight filters through the leaves along Montour Run in Moon Township.
Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6; Kodak EasyShare Z1285. -
Remnants of the Oil Industry in Moon Township
California’s gold and Pennsylvania’s oil were the two great booms of the 1800s. The Gold Rush gets all the glamorous stories, because gold is shiny and oil is dark and slimy. But oil made bigger fortunes. According to Wikipedia, oil production in Pennsylvania peaked in 1891. Well into the twentieth century, it was common to see oil derricks even in back yards in suburban towns. “Oil Wells in Moon Township” at the Moon Township Historical Society has some personal memories of the oil industry in Moon Township.
Robin Hill Park preserves some memories of the oil industry, which you can easily visit if you walk down the access road behind the Robin Hill mansion.
Some of the pictures in this article are enormous, with more than 20 megabytes of data if you enlarge them. Be careful on a metered connection. We are trying out a Samsung cell phone with a 50-megapixel camera. The results are okay. It will not replace good cameras, but it gives us more pixels to crop out in an emergency cell-phone picture.
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Field of Flowers
Kodak EasyShare Z981. A field of native flowers in Robin Hill Park, Moon Township.
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Garden Face of Robin Hill, Moon Township
Composite of three photographs from a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6. Old Pa Pitt had intended to place this picture with the rest of the pictures of Robin Hill the other day, but his automatic stitching software failed him. He had been reasonably careful in taking the three photographs so that they would line up nearly perfectly, but the stitching software produced a comical monstrosity reminiscent of Frank Gehry. What went wrong? Only because Father Pitt was stubborn enough to edit the “control points” himself—“control points” being identical features marked in two pictures, so that the software knows how to align them properly—did he discover the problem. The parade of identical windows was too much for the program. The extreme symmetry caused it to identify this window as the same as that window, which caused the whole building to collapse in a heap.
So old Pa Pitt stubbornly picked out all the control points himself, and produced a nearly perfect rendering of the garden side of the mansion. Stubbornness is a character flaw, but it has its uses.
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Robin Hill, Moon Township
Robin Hill was designed for Francis and Mary Nimick by Henry Gilchrist. He gave them a classic Georgian country house, and, like many country houses, it is really meant to be enjoyed from the garden side.
The house was built in 1926, and for nearly half a century the Nimicks enjoyed it. When Mary died in 1971, she willed the whole estate to the township to be preserved as a park.
The front of the house presents a dignified appearance to the visitor.
Cameras: Kodak EasyShare Z981; Sony Alpha 3000; Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.
