The approach is through a spacious avenue, curving as it nears the building, and crossing a little dingle, through which murmurs a gentle streamlet. The scenery is lovely, the soil fertile, the location airy and healthful.
The whole country around abounds in historic associations of the “olden time,” when the red man struggled against the advancing column of civilization. And what history has been unable rightfully to appropriate, legend and fiction have gathered up, and woven into dark and solemn drapery, wherewith they have clothed every prominent locality and invested every heroic character of those shadowy ages. Over these fields once roamed the Shawanese, who, driven from Florida, made their way to the head of the Ohio—a powerful, warlike, and restless tribe, who alone of all the Indians retained a tradition that their fathers had crossed the ocean. Not far off dwelt, for a time, a branch of the Lenni Lenape, who, in former days, had welcomed the Shawanese to their hunting-grounds. Tradition has it, that afterward the last mentioned tribe, forgetful of former kindness and hospitality, left their homes on the Ohio, crossed the Allegheny Mountains and fell by night upon the camps of the unsuspecting Lenape on the river Juniata, where they massacred many of them, and marched off with prisoners and plunder. Over these grounds, and up as far as the mouth of the Youghiogany, Queen Aliquippa, spoken of by Washington in his Journal, and visited by him in 1753, governed with rude and simple sway. Shingiss, King of the Delawares, the lover of Aliquippa, had the seat of his regal power near McKee’s Rocks, a little below Pittsburgh. He was young, generous and brave, and alliances with him were eagerly sought by both the French and the English. At the rustic court of Aliquippa, and one of her chief advisers, was Tonnaleuka, “prophet and medicine-man”—a solemn, mysterious personage, who sought, in caverns, to hold communion with the invisible world, and who laid claim to great knowledge in occult arts and mysterious rites.
At a distance of two or three miles from Homewood lies Braddock’s Field, on the bank of the Monongahela River—the theatre of one of the most prominent occurrences in our colonial history. The total defeat of General Braddock, on the 9th of July, 1755, caused an electric shock throughout the colonies, and occasioned profound grief and astonishment in the mother country. But on this field of death and defeat it was that Washington first gained a renown for wisdom and bravery which will be forever associated with his name. He was often heard to say that the most beautiful spectacle he had ever beheld, “was the display of the British troops on this eventful morning. Every man was dressed in full uniform; the soldiers were arrayed in columns and marched in exact order; the sun gleamed from their burnished arms, the river flowed tranquilly on one side, and the deep forest overshadowed them with solemn grandeur on the other. Officers and men were equally inspirited with cheering hopes and confident expectations.”