Documenting and Interpreting Immigrant Communities: Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1840-1920

An Undergraduate Research Training Model *

 

James R. Alexander

University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown

 

In 1993, the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown (UPJ) established a history research training institute to provide instruction and field experience in primary research for undergraduates funded by the Southwestern Pennsylvania Heritage Preservation Commission (SPHPC). [1] In the summer of 1994, UPJ conducted the first of two summer field research training programs offered under the grant in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Recruitment was selective among advanced undergraduates in history and related fields and ten students were drawn from colleges and universities across the mid-Atlantic region. Our funding allowed coverage of scholarship assistance and some housing costs.

 

The research training site chosen for the first summer was the Cambria City National Historic District, a self-contained, contiguous 10-block neighborhood adjacent to the site of the historic Cambria Iron Works in Johnstown. [2] This neighborhood became the final destination of multiple waves of immigrants during the industrialization period, from the earliest Irish and German immigrants who clustered in Johnstown in its canal and early iron period (1840s-1870s) through several major migrations from southeastern and central Europe in subsequent periods. It still hosts seven catholic parishes (German, Slovak, English-speaking/Irish, Hungarian, Croatian, Polish, and Ruthenian) and three non-catholic churches (Slovak, Hungarian, Serbian) of national origin. Extant institutional evidence of other groups, from Scandinavian, to Mexican, to southern African-Americans, has been lost as these groups passed through to other communities or through urban renewal. Documentation of the site, including demographic and spatial patterns, social and religious institutions, and sections of the built environment, was compiled in a set of Student Field Reports which was made available to historic and heritage preservation agencies and research libraries in southwestern Pennsylvania. [3]

 

In the second summer (1995), UPJ was able to recruit from a wider range of colleges and universities, and drawing fourteen students from Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Iowa, California, and Washington. Students were recruited by direct solicitation of nominations from targeted members of history departments (mostly in urban, immigration, labor, 19th century, social, and public historians). [4]  Again, some scholarship assistance was made available for tuition and housing costs.

 

The Research Training Program

 

The research training site selected for 1995 was the Minersville historic district, a discrete six-block neighborhood nestled along the Conemaugh River also adjacent to the Cambria Iron site and across the river from Cambria City. [5]  The smaller Minersville site allowed us to experiment with multi-station entry of spatial and demographic data into a common computerized data base, [6]  primarily from manuscript census records from the period 1870-1920. [7]  Data were cross-referenced against all available city directories, Sanborn and other maps, and some church records. [8]  Independent student projects uncovered and used a wide range of public documents to identify the earliest (18th and early 19th century) land use patterns, commercial activities, public works development, public health profiles, changes in occupational mix, and persistence of certain earliest ethnic groups over time. Documentation on selected families in the data base was supplemented by consulting church and cemetery records and local newspaper obituaries [9] and, in some serendipitous cases, through family contacts. Finally fourteen extant structures or plots were fully documented throughout the period, including several commercial establishments and the local school.

 

The core emphasis of the research training program was on the value of collaborative research. Training aspects, from historical and methodological background readings, [10] to data collection and interpretation, were focused on a single active research site, allowing students to develop a sense of collective ownership over the research process and its results. Students were able to see and experience that primary research could become more cumulative and broadly interpretive through collaboration. Data base construction was a group project, and in most other assignments, students worked in teams. Even in individual projects, students learned to draw data, data sources, references, and perspectives from one another. During any given week, the usual schedule found the morning hours devoted to seminar discussions of readings, methodological approaches, and gathering/interpreting strategies. At the end of each week, overview and summary sessions were held, with presentations to the program director. On three occasions, local agency and historical society professionals were invited in to hear and critique student presentations of preliminary findings. [11]  Students were also able to consult one-on-one with a number of visiting scholars brought in during the summer to provide perspectives on the group and individual projects and to share their own research experiences with disparate forms of primary data. [12]

 

Results of student research were presented at an open community forum in St. Stephens Slovak Catholic Church in Cambria City, attended by over 130 community residents, many with current or past ties to Minersville. As in the first year, project results were compiled into a set of Student Field Reports which were distributed to relevant historic and heritage preservation agencies and research libraries. [13]

 

Achievements of the Program

 

Students received a unique instructional experience using and interpreting primary data. The intensity of the experience, combined with the proximity and manageability of the site, provided students with a rich, diverse, and substantive research experience not available in the normal course of most undergraduate (or even graduate) curricula. The opportunity to collaborate in multiple-entry data base construction and experiencing the fruits of truly collaborative field research were equally valuable, especially to students who are too often encouraged to consider historical research as a solitary enterprise.

 

It was equally important that students be exposed to value of using multiple approaches to gathering and interpreting primary data. A range of approaches used by scholars in several fields were explored and discussed, and the potential applicability to our site debated. Students were then free to utilize what they considered to be appropriate approaches in their individual projects. Issues of data reliability and data collection were also discussed, so that students could be exposed to the analytical limitations of the data they were trying to interpret. Finally, by moving from the aggregate to individual levels of data collection, students learned the interpretive perspective yielded by each type of data in the context of the other, a view too often lost when dwelling on one level of data collection.

 

During those two summers, UPJ was able to gradually build up a positive image in the community for its direct involvement and interest in local history and heritage preservation. Students moved easily and continuously in and out of local government records offices, and heritage preservation associations for the entire summer, and while this was a valuable experience for them to better understand the complex mix of local groups interested and involved in historical projects (and on which they may have to depend for access to critical primary data), it also changed the perspectives of many of those groups to the role that student researchers could play in their collective interest in local heritage. In their day-to-day research activities, in their interviews of current and previous residents of the neighborhood, and in their community presentations, students exhibited their knowledge and “ownership” of the history of the neighborhood and became friends of its residents and true ambassadors for its history.

 

As many who have been involved in local history can attest, this achievement cannot be over-estimated. Many historically-significant communities have been targeted by research projects that residents perceive (often correctly) as being only interested in very selective aggregate aspects of the historical record (mostly demographic and extant building data) that meet the program objectives of some external (often federal) agency. Research teams or summer interns seem to descend like locusts during the summer months, scratch around in local public record offices and interview some local sources for a short period, and then leave. The results of those research activities are rarely seen by local residents. Whether this is a fair view or not, many residents remember only that researchers came knowing nothing about the neighborhood and left knowing little more. To the degree that researchers do not have the time to or are not particularly interested in placing collected data into the historical or personal context that is most dear to residents, those residents understandably become skeptical of the researchers’ or the project’s real motives, raising the suspicion that their community and its history is being “used” to serve some externally-orchestrated (and sometimes highly publicized) project from which, rightly or wrongly, no discernible benefit comes back to the community.

 

Some Final Thoughts
 

Research training at the undergraduate level is a tenuous business. During the traditional academic year, when undergraduates are carrying four or five course loads, concentrated primary research supervision and training is difficult if not impossible. The summer “archaeological dig” model we developed to overcome many of those problems allowed us to blend substantive and methodological readings and discussions with actual application on a continuous project over which students could acquire a sense of collective ownership. Students could measure their individual contributions to the overall project results and still take pride in the enterprise as a whole. The most gratifying aspect however was that it successfully moved students through every aspect of the research process in a single project, giving them experience with and appreciation of the hard issues involved at each stage, with continuous and personal supervision and mentoring. In the process, students were able to engage in front-line primary historical research, an eye-opening experience for many, whose previous research experience involved only secondary literature and at best reflected on someone else’s data. Many senior project or thesis topics were refocused or changed when our students returned to their home institutions after the summer training. [14]

 

      

 


* Presented as a research poster session at the Social Science History Conference (Migration Network), October 10-13, 1996.

 

[1]   SPHPC is a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Interior spawned by the America’s Industrial Heritage Project. The dynamics of establishing the cooperative relationship between UPJ and the SPHPC have been described in NCPH’s Public History News (Fall 1994) and AASLH’s History News (November/December 1994).

 

[2]   The Cambria Iron Works and several of the contiguous neighborhoods are documented in two HABS/HAER publications of the America’s Industrial Heritage Project (NPS, Department of Interior, 1989):  Sharon A. Brown, Historic Resource Study: The Cambria Iron Company , and Kim E. Wallace, ed., The Character of a Steel Mill City: Neighborhoods of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

 

[3]  Copies of the bound Student Field Reports were distributed to the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, the Cambria County Historical Society, the Cambria County and UPJ Libraries, and the research collections of the Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Copies were also retained by the SPHPC as contribution to their site documentation, and stored in its AIHP archives at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

 

[4]   Since the SPHPC oversees numerous sites over a nine-county area and felt some obligation to move the training site around the region, there was some debate after the first year of funding over whether students could be recruited to spend a summer research field experience at a more rural site (such as one of the early iron furnaces) or a site of more esoteric interest (such as the early remote coal mining towns connected by the East Broad Top Railroad), even with scholarship assistance. We argued that undergraduate history students, though they may covet this unique type of methodological training experience, had to be drawn to it by familiar or passingly interesting aspects of American history to which they had been exposed, and the 19th century urban, immigration experience was more likely to be common to their backgrounds. We simply did not have time to provide that kind of general background after they had arrived. Also, aspects of that broad topic were included in the teaching responsibilities of a wider range of faculty in undergraduate history departments, who we believed (accurately) would be our principal recruiters. In the second year, when the Minersville site was approved for funding, the quality of our recruitment, our training curriculum, and our research product was demonstrably higher. In short, the model worked. Unfortunately, after the second year and under increasing budgetary constraints, the SPHPC attempted to focus on one of its rural sites (the East Broad Top communities) by relocating the training program to the Pennsylvania State University landscape architecture program but was unsuccessful in recruiting students.

 

[5]   There was of course interest in returning to the Cambria City site, since a significant base of documentation had been laid down and many interpretive projects remained incomplete. The next year’s students could have then contributed to the cumulative interpretation of the site. It would have however not been the same experience, i.e. the experience of creating the core documentation for a site. As a model for undergraduate research training, it probably doesn’t matter what site is chosen. The SPHPC, the funding agent, having already committed to funding projects across a nine-county area, preferred to move to a different site, hopefully outside Johnstown. UPJ argued successfully to start documentation for the Minersville site, since the Cambria Iron Project was a SPHPC priority project. Interestingly, the selection of Minersville for the second summer’s site allowed us to investigate the degree to which the two neighborhoods developed independently which, unknown to local agencies, they had.

 

[6]   For the first two weeks, students worked in two- and three-person teams to gather, interpret, classify data from microfilm and hard copy records that had been acquired and were on file in the Owen Library, and then entered those data in a 35-column set using FilemakerPro on seven networked MACs in a UPJ computer lab in the basement of the Owen Library. After the usual startup crashes and other maladies, this system allowed teams to enter data into the set from multiple stations at the same time, and to move easily between data entry and original sources. It should be noted that FilemakerPro is not the only software that allows this, and our selection of this software was somewhat last-minute. It happened to be the one piece of software we had in our software suite at the time the Minersville site was approved for 1995, and we adapted our project to that.

 

[7]   The 1890 manuscript data were mostly lost in a fire, causing all demographic studies from the 1860-1920 period to confront the various methodological implications of the data gap. Students had to attempt to bridge that gap using other sources of data, such as city directories and Sanborn Fire Insurance maps. Students also had to uncover and discuss the interpretive implications of the different surveys, styles of collecting manuscript data, and methods of classification of data (e.g. country of origin) from the different census years, as well as wrestling with handwriting styles from the earlier periods. Census data were cross-referenced against city directories from 1869, 1876, 1889, 1901, 1905, 1911-12, 1920, 1925 and 1927 using where possible Sanborn maps from 1881, 1896, 1913, and 1935.

 

[8]   Again, the implications of how city directories were compiled and the degree to which residents, especially in immigrant neighborhoods, willingly or accurately complied with self-reporting had to be discussed. Students found however that city directories were a far more reliable cross-referencing source than has been indicated by the literature, especially if they could be checked against appropriate Sanborn maps (see note 7 above). Church records, as we have all experienced, are extremely difficult to access.

 

[9]   In many cases, “cemetery records” were drawn from six ethnic-discrete Catholic church cemeteries dating back to the 1880s, some of which offered only fragmented documentation of parish memberships and some family genealogies. For data on the earliest neighborhood residents, we had to rely on fragmentary church and county death and estate records for cross-referencing until later in the period (after 1900) when commercial funeral operators began to take over most of the burial responsibilities in the community. Newspaper obituaries from the earlier periods are also fragmented and rarely representative of a neighborhood’s resident population. Johnstown had a number of native-language newspapers of various duration, but all - including the Freipress, the German language newspaper which served the first German and other European immigrant enclaves in the Johnstown area during the canal period - have been lost.

 

[10]   In both years, our required reading included representative readings on general methodological issues [selections from Barzun and Graff, The Modern Researcher (1992); The Encyclopedia of Social History (1994); Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (1976); and a number of articles on using census data as a source of reliable social indicators], immigration patterns [selections from Bodner, The Transplanted (1985); Diner, Erin’s Daughters (1983); Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will (1983) and other studies] and project design [such as Zunz, The Changing Face of Equality (1982); Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle (1987); McIlvain’s “Twelve Blocks” study of Pittsburgh, and Borshert’s “Alley Life”].

 

[11]  This was a particularly valuable exercise from the standpoint that local history professionals were much more perspectived in the nuances and implications of student findings and conclusions, and could lend more detailed expertise on local history than students possessed.

 

[12]   In 1995, visiting scholars included Hasia Diner (University of Maryland), Candace Falk (University of California-Berkeley), Janette Greenwood (Clark University), Susan Smulyan (Brown University), and Camile Wells (University of Virginia). They each conducted a morning or afternoon workshop on methodological approaches to gathering and interpreting selected types of primary data, based on their own research experience, and discussed various research problems students brought to the discussion from their own projects. One of the scholars attended one of the presentation sessions, and provided the same kind of constructive critique as local scholars.

 

[13]   Copies of the 1995 (Cambria City) and 1996 (Minersville) Student Field Reports are available in the exhibition area at the Social Science History Conference in conjunction with the presentation of this paper.

 

[14]  As illustration, two students used their own primary data to complete and present undergraduate theses on ethnic group persistence in Cambria City-Minersville. One of those returned to Johnstown twice more to collect more data which she has incorporated into her masters thesis in public history. Another student changed his thesis topic from regime persistence in Japan to a biographical essay on a Cambria City tavern based on the model of commercialized leisure drawn from the work of Barrett and Rosenzweig.