Harmar
Campbell’s Run Road
Harmar road. Thirteen-bends legend
Campbell’s Run Road is in Harmar, and it is the road people mean when they talk about the thirteen bends. A driver counts the curves on the way up and reaches thirteen. At the top the car turns around. On the way down the count is twelve. The story that accounts for the missing curve is an orphanage that stood somewhere along the road, burned, and killed the children inside. People are told to dust the inside of the windows with baby powder. The powder is supposed to bring the children’s handprints up out of the glass. The same road is told other ways. In one version a man killed a girl at each bend. In another, a car of teenagers died there in the 1950s.
On 31 October 2003 the Tribune-Review followed the road to the end of it. Past the last house the pavement stops, and an old dirt road goes on toward the mines. Tom White, then at the Heinz History Center, told the paper there was no record of an orphanage in Harmar. Bill Steenburgh, a Harmar officer, said the fire in the local memory was a barn on the hillside, used for a time as a dance hall, that burned in the 1940s. Pittsburgh City Paper made the same drive on 4 October 2023. The road is private, and it ends at a mine.
The orphanage was not on Campbell’s Run. The only boys’ home in this set of stories was on Coulterville Road, in the old patch called Alpsville, south of McKeesport. It was a summer house for kids from the city, next to a church. The house was torn down. It did not burn. Renzie Road and Happy Hollow Road, in Elizabeth Township, were later given the same tale, bends and fire both.
The Harmar story was already being told before any of us drove the road. We did not start it. From 2001 to 2005 we were part of what kept it going. We took people up and let them see the handprints.
Baby powder is the method the story names. We used the oil from a hand. Before the car filled, we washed the inside of the windows and pressed a sliver of a palm to the glass, narrow so the mark would not look like a grown man’s. Oil left that way cannot be seen while the window is dry. It shows when the glass fogs, the way a fingertip shows on a cold mirror. Four to six of us rode up, boys and girls, with the windows shut. Most of the boys knew the prints were there. The girls did not. Breathing fogged the glass, the small hands came up, and the girls were frightened. They had been told the dead children would do that.
In the early 2000s the township closed the road. The reason it gave was drug dealers. That was a lie. The road is steep gravel, and it winds, and the neighbors were tired of kids driving it. We are why it closed. What we were doing up there was the prank.
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