School Hill – one of three hills comprising the coal mining village of Hendersonville, Pa. The others are the Mine Hill and Bungalow Hill.
VILLAGES
(as reprinted from the Fall, 1994 issue of Pittsburgh History magazine published by the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania)
by Joseph Katrencik
Vanovka, Slovakia
Vanovka is an agrarian village of about thirty to forty houses in northern Slovakia’s Orava Valley. The village is nestled in the heavily wooded foothills of the High Tatra range of the Carpathian Mountains. A generation ago all the houses were made of logs; now more than half have been replaced by stucco and masonry. Nearby, on a high rocky cliff above the river, stands the communist restored Oravsky Podzamok castle. The castle, first referenced in 1267, was built to administrate the area and protect the ancient trade route leading to the Wieliczka Salt Mine and Kracow, Poland – about fifty miles distant. Slovanic tribes first came to this area in the sixth century. Previously, the land saw habitation by Celts and Germanic tribes. Since then northern Slovakia has experienced peasant uprisings, and invasions by Swedes and Batu Khan’s Golden Horde. In 1683 the Polish armies of Jan Sobieski burned 25 Orava Valley villages while on their way to save Vienna from the Turks.*** For a thousand years, from 907 A.D, when Magyars defeated Svatopluk and destroyed the Moravian Empire, until 1918 Slovakia was part of Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries strengthened Magyarization polices resulted in arrests for speaking Slovak in public, elimination of Slovak institutions, and severe cultural restrictions coupled with economic deprivation. Today an estimated 35% of the world’s Slovaks live in the United States and Canada. At one point Cleveland Slovaks claimed to live in "the world’s largest Slovak city," and Pittsburgh followed close behind, or perhaps we have just been more humble.
John Katrencik leaves Vanovka for America
By the early 1900’s my grandfather John Katrencik and his brothers Stefan and Andre had all left the Slovak village of Vanovka and come to America. Vanovka neighbors, all of whom were related in some way, forewarned them of gangsters in New York and especially Chicago, and of Indians in the west.
John first sought out Slovak contacts in Cleveland, where he had arranged to board, in hopes that he would get a job in the steel mills. He arrived at the friend’s house tired and hungry. A woman spoke to him in Slovak, and served hot coffee and buttered thick bread, and from big kettles on the coal stove – kapusta and potatoes flavored with garlic. When he finished eating the woman said, "More?"
"No thank you," John politely lied.
"Then the rest goes to the pigs," she said.
Many years later as my grandmother Teresa Katrencik stirred a ham bone in a kettle of broth, she would often say, "If only we’d had this bone in Vanovka."
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John and his first wife, Maria Jurovcikova
Steel mill work was too hot, so John left Cleveland to find work in western Pennsylvania coal mines. He also felt less homesick with Pennsylvania terrain similar to the Carpathian foothills of Vanovka. He dug coal and lived in company towns at Federal near Bridgeville, at Hackett near Finleyville, and finally settled in for a longer stay at Hazel Kirk, on Pigeon Creek, upstream from Monongahela City. The new village of Hazel Kirk was built in 1901 by the Kirk-Wood Company of Cleveland to house miners for Hazel Kirk No. 1 mine, which began operations the same year. John had married Maria Jurovcikova, who was also from Vanovka. In 1904 she bore him a son. However, in a few years John took his family and savings back to Vanovka. He returned alone to Hazel Kirk to earn more money to buy land in Europe, but in 1910 received word that his wife had suddenly died. She was twenty six years old. Their son was then raised in Vanovka by Maria’s parents until 1923 when he returned to America and his father. There is no photo of my grandfather’s first wife. Her only child has been dead for years; the only person in Vanovka who may have told me something about Maria Jurovcikova died in 1990. A tombstone marks Maria’s grave in Vanovka’s small crowded St. Wendolyn cemetery, and a rubbing of that tombstone is in my wallet.
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John meets Teresa – Jan Misanik’s sister
In 1909 Slovak immigrant Jan Misanik was boarding and working in Hazel Kirk. He worked for the mine as a carpenter – making tool handles, wooden spragues, and repairing wooden pit cars. He found time to make furniture for relatives and friends, and carved his own violin. Jan sent money to Vanovka so that his twenty four year old sister Teresa Misanikova (my grandmother) could come to America. In Hazel Kirk she boarded with John and Mary Jurovcik of the Adam clan. To earn her keep she helped run a four room household with as many as ten boarders at time, in addition to five Jurovcik children.
Jednota, the Slovak fraternal lodge, held meetings at the school house in Hazel Kirk. Jan Misanik and cousin Mato Zemencik were members, along with John Katrencik, his brother Stefan, and cousin Andy Snovak. Friends mentioned to the widower John that Teresa was a hard worker and would make a deserving man happy. Though she was also from Vanovka, John Katrencik vaguely remembered her since she was 8 years younger.
Teresa however was infatuated with Mato, who had accompanied her to America. In a short time though, John and his friends convinced her that he could be a fine husband. On the day he proposed, he brought her smoked sausages. "I made these for you," he said, "from my pig that I slaughtered, to show I am a good provider."
Jan Misanik returns to Vanovka
John’s brothers had returned to Vanovka, but Teresa’s younger brother and sister arrived in Hazel Kirk from Europe. At the end of World War I, when travel was safe again, Teresa’s older brother Jan Misanik returned permanently to Vanovka. He married Suzanna Sopchakova and they lived in a typical Vanovka log house. The house was heated by a whitewashed clay stove whose smoke vented into the attic – where in good times sausages hung from the rafters. In 1932 Jan’s wife died giving birth to their fifth child, and he soon married his uncle’s widow, Rosalia Misanikova. She was ten years older than Jan, and according to his daughter Suzanna, she did an admirable job raising the young children. Jan was killed in 1959 – his son Wendo’s dog barked, frightening the family’s horse, which pinned him against the barn wall. Ironically, Jan’s father had died in 1940 from lingering injuries suffered when, at age ninety two, he tried to round up stampeding neighborhood cows. As his granddaughter, my grandmother, often said, "God knows your end from the beginning."
John and Teresa move from Hazel Kirk to Hendersonville
My grandparents John and Teresa Katrencik lived in Hazel Kirk until October, 1928. The miners in Hazel Kirk and Van Voohris had been on strike, and the family moved to the coal mining town of Hendersonville in Cecil Township, Washington County – a mile south of the Allegheny County line. The Henderson Coal Company had built the town around 1913, when the railroad line was completed. John and Teresa and children John Jr., Fred, Sophia, Rudolph and Joseph lived in a wooden framed, four room company house, and like those in Hazel Kirk, it had no electricity or indoor plumbing. Eldest son August continued to work and board in Pittsburgh while my grandfather dug coal in the Hendersonville mine with sons John and Fred. Daughter Marion was born in Hendersonville in 1930. Eventually August would return to Hendersonville and work in the mine, as did brothers Rudolph and Joe when they were old enough.
Jan Misanik’s descendants in Vanovka
Today in Vanovka, Slovakia Jan Misanik’s daughter Suzanna lives with her husband Tomas Jurovcik in her father’s old log house, next to the barn where he was killed. Across the street in a modern house live Suzanna’s son Stano and his family. Stano is a crane operator. With his father he raises pigs and chickens, and harvests hay, vegetables, fruit, garlic, caraway and poppyseed. The family sleeps on featherbeds stuffed by Suzanna. In the village streets one has to be careful not to step in goose droppings. In 1990 no one in the village had an automobile, though Stano once owned a Skoda but sold it when he went to Libya for construction work. Two cousins attend computer school, and come home in the evening to gather hay with hand made wooden rakes. On a utility pole next to the church cemetery is mounted one of many rusted loudspeakers- from which the Communist Party would broadcast daily news and information. In some Slovak villages the Nazis were the first to eliminate the town crier and his drum in favor of a loudspeaker system.
Hazel Kirk today
In Hazel Kirk, Pennsylvania there remain a few occupied houses, but my grandfather’s house is gone, along with the mine, most of the slate dump, and the school house where my aunts, uncles and father attended first grade. Few current maps show that Hazel Kirk exists. In nearby Van Voohris Misanik and Zemencik relatives tend gardens, can tomatoes and bake nut rolls for holidays. Down the road in Crackerjack lives Big Helen, daughter of John and Mary Jurovcik- who took my grandmother in as an immigrant boarder in 1909.
John and Teresa’s descendants in Hendersonville
Hendersonville, Pennsylvania still seems to survive in its own way, even without the coal mine which closed in the late 1940’s. Katrenciks still live there. There is a lower row of four company houses on what has been known as the "mine hill’ – it was the nearest of three village hills to the coal mine entrance. In the first house live John and Teresa Katrencik’s son Rudolph and his wife Grace. On the extra property next to his end house Uncle "Roe" grows tomatoes, onions, beans, peppers and garlic, and every spring and summer bordering areas are glorious with lilacs, gladioli and roses that he and his wife once donated to decorate St. Elizabeth Church – until the diocese closed the parish in 1993. From his teens until his retirement he had labored in coal mines and steel mills, and now hunts for arrowheads, bottles and Indian bones as he has done since childhood. He has mapped remnants of the nineteenth century Great Road which once led from Canonsburg to Pittsburgh. You can see where it used to be from his front porch. The second house has been empty since Uncle Fred Katrencik’s widow Irene died in January, 1994. If the house is not sold perhaps Fred’s son will again plant potatoes in the garden this summer. The third house has been abandoned since Aunt Grace’s Hungarian parents died years ago. The foundation is collapsing and the chimney is nearly gone. The weathered outhouse is still in back and the wreck of a powerboat of all things is parked where geese used to roam. The last company house in the row was once my grandparents’. It had been their home and
the family’s gathering place from 1928 until widowed Teresa Misanik Katrencik died in 1983 at the age of ninety seven. Now the house has an addition and aluminum siding. Teresa’s great granddaughter lives there with her husband and children. In the summer tomatoes and garlic grow in the garden, toys liter the walk, kids play in the street. From the long front porch you can look down the valley at the worn slate dump. You can see the Montour Hiking Trail – where the railroad tracks used to be, and imagine a steam locomotive pulling a long line of coal cars.
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