With a host of plans for the log house at Shields Farm, the recently formed Delmont Historical Society will hold a Sept. 19 cleaning day to spruce up the inside and outside.
Society member Vicki Walters said the public is welcome to come help clean the house’s interior, as well as help prepare to plant a colonial garden in the spring of 2021.
“Considering how hot and dry it was this summer, it’s probably good that we didn’t plant it this year,” Walters said.
The garden will be installed along a roughly 80-foot walkway behind the house on East Pittsburgh Street.
“We’re going to do the ‘rain garden’ area, dig up where the herb garden will go and get it mulched,” Walters said. “That way, in the springtime, we can build our boxes and get going.”
One of Walters’ daughters is a landscape engineer, and has designed the “rain garden,” where an 18-inch hole, filled around with a mixture of soil and sand, can help filter storm water that runs across the property down into the ground. It will be surrounded with a variety of plants “that don’t mind getting wet,” Walters said.
The area will also include a garden made up of plants used historically to dye things like clothing, as well as a medicinal garden.
Borough Councilman Dave Weber also asked if the historical society could catalog the antiques in the house, however Walters was able to track down a list of the items inside, which include old farm and kitchen implements like a sauerkraut cutter (which looks like a large version of a kitchen mandoline slicer), an antique butter churn, a spinning wheel and more.
The cleanup will start at 8 a.m.
Other ideas society members have proposed include installing historical plaques on borough buildings like the log house and the former Shields tannery just down the hill — which operated from 1826 to 1870 when the area was still known as Salem Crossroads — and potentially adding some of its historic properties to the Westmoreland County Historical Society’s annual house tour.
Westmoreland County Historical Society Executive Director Lisa Hays said, while her group is planning a virtual event in lieu of the annual house tour this fall, “we hope to save the Delmont area for 2021.”
