Laurel Ridge bisects our town, lying between downtown Tyrone and the Tyrone Area School Complex. Its southern end originally was called Mt. Pisgah, but that’s only one of the interesting parts of this in-town forested area.
At the northern end of this ridge is Stony Point, a creation by nature that’s utterly unique as an in-town piece of scenery. This area is near the Stony Point bed-and-breakfast establishment that allows guests to soak in this whole atmosphere.
And surrounding the B&B, and all along the ridge between Stony Point and Mt. Pisgah, is an in-town forest. Not a park or developed area, it’s a forest, complete with deer, many small wild animals, and only a handful of visitors annually.
Midway along the ridge is a borough water tank. At the southern end of Mt. Pisgah is what kids always have called “the lion’s den,” an area with natural outcroppings of stone, where legend has placed “big cats” that scared young kids away.
Underground Lake
In the 1950s, longtime borough councilman Marion H. G. Shirk frequently spoke about “the lake beneath the ridge.” Stories had been passed down from grandfathers to their grandkids about how, before “civilization” came to this valley, the Native American residents of the area used the cave under Laurel Ridge as a hideout and a place to store things they didn’t want to lose.
No one now knows whether or not there was such a cave or where the entrance to this underground world might have been. But it’s perfectly reasonable to conclude that, with the limestone that underlies all of this area, large caverns could have been created as the stone dissolved. After all, if the limestone had not dissolved, this area would be flat and there’d be no valleys.
If indeed it did exist, was this cave one that, 10,000 or 20,000 years ago, the Indians could walk through, like Lincoln Caverns, Indian Caverns, or Ty-Toona Cave, or was it like Penn’s Cave, navigable only by canoe?
Probably, we’ll never know because there are no records on the location of the entrance. Could it have been at the base of Stony Point? A Tyrone native, who often returns to visit, says that at the opposite end, where “the lion’s den” overlooks Hillcrest, there’s a stone formation that, last November, when he hiked there, had a light steam coming from it, and as he reached into the opening, the air was slightly warmer. Several old-timers recall hearing stories about authorities sealing the opening to prevent its use by bad people.
Disturbing the Terrain
Rolling hills always are uniform. As the erosion took place eons ago, this and other hills gradually assumed the rounded shape of a hump, rising up evenly on both sides. But look at Laurel Ridge from Route I-99 south of the Grazierville-Tipton exit. The left side of the photo shows a typical rounded hill; the top is normal. But there’s a “step” on the right side of this hill.
What you see on the downtown side of Laurel Ridge is a very unnatural “step” that hardly could have been created by Mother Nature. It is, of course, the place where Grandview Cemetery is located.
There’s apparently no written record to support the theory, but the physical evidence is absolutely there. This “step” or “bench” must have been man-made — created to form the cemetery’s semi-flat area.
Before Powered Equipment
Back in the early days of Tyrone, using shovels and wheelbarrows along with horses, mules, and wagons, workers must have dug out the eastern side of Laurel Ridge to form a flat place and carried the earth out to the edge of the hill toward downtown.
If you go to the cemetery and look at the upper edge, you’ll see that above the last row of graves, the terrain jumps up steeply as if it were excavated away. In the century and a half since all this took place, trees have grown so towering that much of the terrain change is hidden.
Likewise, if you walk to the “town side” of the cemetery, you’ll see how extremely steep it is, while looking down into the downtown area. It’s hardly a gentle hillside.
There’s a complete history of Grandview Cemetery, but never mentioned is what must have been a massive earth-moving project to create this flat area where so many of our town’s ancestors now lie in peace.
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