WPC Assists in Bringing the Ghost Town Trail Back to Life

The Ghost Town Trail in Indiana and Cambria Counties gets its ghoulish name from the mining towns that once existed along the railroad corridor. Wehrum, the largest of the former towns, once had 230 houses (one remains today), a hotel, company store, jail and bank. Warren Delano, uncle of President Franklin Roosevelt, developed the town. The Eliza Furnace, midway on the trail, is on the National Register of Historic Sites and is one of the best-preserved hot blast iron furnaces located in Pennsylvania.

The Cambria County Conservation and Recreation Authority has a vision of connecting the entire region through the trail. The Authority has its sights set on creating a lively, multi-use green resource for residents and visitors alike. Using the walking and biking trail, the Authority enhanced areas with art and historical installations to remind people of the early uses of the area for coal mining, forestry and iron processing. Many people ride the trail for recreational purposes and some residents even use it for commuting between towns.

In the summer of 2006, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy made a contribution to this vision of connectivity by designing and installing several planting areas to enhance the trail. In three key locations, WPC’s community gardens staff identified ways to create beds of native plants to beautify the area, create visual highlights that identify the trail for users, and emphasize the green resource that connects all these portions of the trail together through three different towns. The project focuses on high visibility, low maintenance native flora and visual connectivity to help people follow the trail in several locations where towns or roads create a break in the trail itself. The projects are designed for manageability so that the host towns can continue to care for these sites over time.

In addition to the Eliza Furnace, other mining biproducts remain and present their own environmental challenges to the Authority. An area negatively impacted by acid mine drainage needed to be addressed before moving forward on the project. Thanks to the efforts of many, the area has been transformed into a new green resource.
The project created plantings at all four trailhead areas, to help visitors navigate two street crossings and a branching of the trail. In Nanty Glo, the trail crosses a large parking lot and plantings provide a visual connection to guide users to the next trail segment.

In an area slightly off the trail, a dramatic cascading community garden was added to link the town more emphatically to the trail by making a visual green connection.
In Ebensburg, the project addresses three major street crossings and includes an area where trees are added.

In each of these sites, WPC’s expertise with community-managed green spaces is guiding the design and installation of the projects to make them as sustainable as possible by local supporters. Using The Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) federal funding for 2006, WPC is helping to create a new type of “Gateway” for each of the towns and for their connecting resource, the Ghost Town Trail.