Fort Mason Museum allows visitors to experience life in early twentieth-century Fayette County. It features exhibits of local industries, a turn-of-the-century physician's office, typical home life, and a hands-on early school room.
Masontown
Masontown borough, once the hub of the Klondike coal region in Fayette County, has experienced an economic downturn in recent years, but remains an attractive and tight-knit community. Masontown covers about two square miles, located along Route 21 in southwest Fayette County and bordering the Monongahela River.
Originally called Germantown, the borough was founded by John Mason, whose name was anglicized from Johanias Massonage. The German immigrant built Fort Mason on the Monongahela River in 1780. The town was laid out in 1798 and incorporated in 1876.
Masontown remained a quiet farm market center in its early years, growing to about 400 residents by the time it marked its 100th anniversary in 1898. But the population skyrocketed as the borough became the center of the Klondike coal region at the turn of the century.
Local historians can't pinpoint how the region in southwest Fayette County came to be called the Klondike. Still, the best explanation is that the coal mines opened here at about the same time as the Klondike gold rush began in Alaska.
At the turn of the century, several coal mines, including those at Ronco, Leckrone, and Bessemer, were founded around Masontown. Immigrants came from southern and central Europe to work in the mines and the coke ovens. Their descendants continue to make up much of the borough's population.
The borough also increased in size with the annexations of Bessemer's coal patch and Sandy Bottom's farm village. These two areas still retain distinct neighborhood identities in Masontown.
The Klondike region went through cycles of economic booms and busts, with the last economic upturn occurring during the energy crisis in the mid-1970s. Borough residents also worked at other mines farther away, most notably the Robena complex in Greene County.
While the mines sustained Masontown, they could also exact a terrible toll on borough families. Five of the 37 miners killed in the explosion of the Frosty Run section at Robena mine on Dec. 6, 1962, were from Masontown. Four others were from the nearby communities of Ronco and McClellandtown.
All the coal mines in the Klondike region have been closed for decades, and Robena shut down in 1982. While a handful of Masontown residents still commute to coal mines in Greene County, most of the town's miners are retirees.
Residents can't help but be reminded of the coal industry. They merely have to look to the west at the steam cloud billowing hundreds of feet into the air from the coal-fired Hatfield Ferry electric power plant, across the Monongahela River in Greene County.
The decline of the coal industry in Fayette County caused a corresponding fall in Masontown's economy. The borough's population dropped from a high of 5,000 residents after World II, to about 3,500 today. Masontown's fortunes have also been rocked by the closings of many unrelated industries, most recently garment maker Gateway Manufacturing.
Residents note that Masontown has been transformed from an industrial center to a "bedroom community" with many retirees. Unlike many communities in southwestern Pennsylvania that have suffered similar economic downturns, Masontown's residential areas are well-kept. The town also has a still-viable, if shrinking, business district.
One of its most attractive features is the row of 40 Bradford Pear trees lining Main Street. Surprisingly, the trees aren't the product of Masontown's boom times but the fruit of a 1970s redevelopment project.
