Delmont residents seek to establish historical society

Vicki Walters of Delmont doesn’t want to turn her hometown into Colonial Williamsburg.

But the borough has plenty of history, and prospective members of the Delmont Historical Society would like it to have a more prominent place.

“What we’ve got going for us is this strong history of Delmont,” Walters said. “I think we have a lot we can use to build on.”

From the former Central Hotel building, built in 1814, to the recently-installed replica of Salem Crossroads’ original water trough that brought fresh spring water to the community, to the 1880s-era flour mill hidden beneath the red paneling of the Agway building on Route 66, Delmont is full of interesting historical tidbits.

“It seems like everybody we talk to has documents, photos and other historical items,” said Walters, who herself has a box she received from the area’s former history group, the Salem Crossroads Historical & Restoration Society, who she said really did have a vision of modeling the borough on Colonial Williamsburg.

“There’s no one place to pull all this together,” she said.

With that goal in mind, an organizational meeting for the newly formed Delmont Historical Society will take place Jan. 27 at the Delmont Public Library.

The idea for the society originated with another recently formed group, the Delmont Visionary Committee, whose goal is to bring a spur off the Westmoreland Heritage Trail into town.

To make a project like that attractive, Walters said, “we really need to have some kind of revitalization program to entice people to come downtown.”

In nearby Export, borough officials have taken full advantage of the Heritage Trail passing through town: the borough’s annual summer festival was centered around a grand opening for that phase of the trail, and there are plans to install a replica of the former Export train station alongside it, as well as relocate the borough’s war memorial closer to the newly laid path.

One location on the society’s mind is the Shields Farm log cabin, which Delmont council members have taken steps to fix in recent months.

“I’d like to push to add colonial gardens in behind the log house as an additional attraction,” Walters said. “We’d also like to do a garden tour in June in conjunction with the annual walking tours, and that can all be part of the revitalization program, too.”

The ultimate goal, she said, is to “be able to collect and preserve everything in one location, if we can get to a point where we have our own space.”

The organizational meeting for the Delmont Historical Society will be at 7 p.m., Jan. 27 at the library, 77 Greensburg Street.