Elizabeth Township
Dead Man’s Hollow
Trails in Elizabeth Township
Dead Man’s Hollow is about 450 acres along the Youghiogheny, south of McKeesport, in Elizabeth Township, Liberty, and Lincoln. Allegheny Land Trust owns it. The ground was a quarry and a clay pit, then the Union Sewer Pipe Company, from the late 1880s until a fire in 1920. Kiln rings, a wall of the boiler house, and a drainage tunnel down to the river are still in the woods.
The name is usually pinned to a story from the 1870s, boys coming on a body in a noose. The Land Trust’s notes, taken from Karen Frank’s 2003 book Dead Man’s Hollow: An Oral History and More, say that hanging is not in the written record. Other deaths are. In 1905 a man was crushed by an elevator at the pipe works. In 1880 a storekeeper was shot while chasing robbers into the hollow, and the young man later hanged for it at the county jail said, at the end, “Goodbye, murderers, goodbye.” In 1883 workmen were killed trying to thaw frozen explosives over a fire. A snake forty feet long turns up in the telling. Emilie Rzotkiewicz, of the Land Trust, has said that one may have been started by moonshiners who wanted the hollow left alone. A tale of hidden bank money gets told the same way.
The Boston trailhead is on Donner Street, and from there the walk to the pipe-works ruins is about three quarters of a mile. Other lots are at the end of Scene Ridge Road, by Catfish Pond, and at the end of Calhoun Road. Hunting is allowed in season.
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