Brownsville is one of the towns down the river from our place. It was a major industrial town...the first steamboat that went down the Monogahela to the Ohio to New Orleans and back (under its own power) (1814) "revolutionizing transportation transportation and commerce"...the first cast iron bridge (1834)...the industries of wiskey, of linen, of glassmaking, of papermaking...products all shipped down the river...a Silicon Valley of its time...
but now that past remains but mainly confined to murals on old apartment buildings...
and some "historic buildings" such as the Nemacolin Castle...still inhabited the high hill above the river town...but mostly it is a town in disrepair...hard to see how places like the shuttered Karl's Fashion Center are going to bounce back...even when brightened with flags for the annual fourth of July parade...
Then a barge filled with piles of soft coal, carbon buried nearly 500 million years ago beneath these worn hills, plies its way down river...to a power plant possibly...treading the muddy waters...creating when the dust settles from its being burnt another thin layer to the geologic record...
