by Hannah Allman Kennedy

Imagining and Remembering the Past

In my novel, And It All Came Tumbling Down, published by The Watershed Journal Literary Group, protagonist Amy Ireland recounts childhood memories growing up in the fictional town of Haven, Pennsylvania. She, with her parents and twin sister, often explored the neighboring ghost town of Black Gold Cross, a defunct oil boomtown with overgrown streets and rickety extant buildings, one with a large granite stoop in front, which to the young girls “was perfect for jumping off and pretending, for a split second, to fly.” The girls’ father, Peter, had a love of history and a gift for seeing into the past. He encouraged his daughters to listen to the stories that the land could tell. “If you look hard enough,” he told them, “the past is still alive, all around you. You just have to be looking for it.”

Of course, there is no such place as Haven, Pennsylvania, and as far as I know no oil boomtowns named Black Gold Cross. These places are composites of areas and experiences I had growing up in Venango County. While Haven is based on my hometown of Oil City, PA, and Black Gold Cross on the nearby ghost town of Petroleum Centre, I employed much of my own imagination in the fictionalization process.

Like Amy, I too grew up exploring the vast wilderness of rural Pennsylvania. Every Sunday my parents, avid hikers, led me and my younger siblings out on adventures to Oil Creek State Park, a natural area between Oil City and Titusville, on the site of what used to be the Pre-Civil-War era town of Petroleum Centre (if you can’t tell from the name, oil was the main industry). The town is surrounded by hills, once stripped bare for oil and lumber, now thickly forested and tattooed with hiking trails.

The main streets of Petroleum Centre are still there, a small grid of dirt and gravel. So is one extant house and a newer train station that serves as a visitor center for the park, and which still receives train passengers for tours. Remaining also is the stoop on one corner, which glitters in the sunlight and is the perfect height for a small child to use as flight training. However, unlike Black Gold Cross, Petroleum Centre is mostly gone, with various signs and pictures denoting what used to be. 

From a young age, this place held my intense fascination. I’ve always loved history and felt a pull toward the past. As I grew, I read old books about the Oil Region, and learned that much of Petroleum Centre was still standing well into the twentieth century, but that the extant buildings became a safety issue, and were torn down. This upset me greatly, because I so dearly wanted to see what it had been like. 

From then on I, like Amy and her father, grew obsessed with looking for the past all around me. Being the millennial that I am, I used a variety of methods in my research, combing through old books, various websites, and Google Earth to explore the region. What I found fascinated me. I learned that the grounds of the Izaak Walton League outside Oil City, where my siblings and I attended youth field days each summer, was the site of an amusement park called Monarch Park (the pond we fished in was where the carousel used to be). I found out that Oil Creek, which feeds into the Allegheny River, which in turn flows down to Pittsburgh, were both so slicked with oil during the rush that they often caught fire, and in turn caught surrounding towns on fire. I learned that a certain young actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth lived in the area briefly before getting his big break in a more well-known role. 

These stories stuck with me as I grew, and eventually, as I began to write. While I didn’t set out, at first, to tell a story about a Northern Appalachian ghost town, these and other little details so naturally filled the world of my story about Amy and her family, that I soon realized how important it was to let the Oil Region and the Pennsylvania Wilds be the backdrop, to let them be as significant to the story as they were to me. In fiction, a writer gets to explore reality by using unreality, bringing together people, places, and experiences and synthesizing them to discover deeper truths and patterns within. 

Luckily, the benefit of being a fiction writer is also that you can make up stuff. And so, in my story, the ghost town that Amy grows up visiting is still standing. She can look inside and go inside the Civil-War-Era buildings. For Amy, unlike for me, they had not yet come tumbling down. It was cathartic, in a way, to write about this imaginary ghost town which mirrored the ghost towns I grew up visiting. It was gratifying to use my imagination to inhabit a world I had missed because of silly things like space and time.   

As Amy’s father goes on to tell her, “You have to listen, then you notice what’s going on, and then you can remember what used to be.” Imagining is often the first step toward remembering. And, in my opinion, imagining is also the first step toward envisioning something new. When we do this, we honor our beloved places, from ghost towns to small towns to cities, and everything in between.

• Find out more about And it All Came Tumbling Down