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The Curlls of Curllsville
By Hank Hufnagel, June 23 & 30, 2016 in the Clarion News
I was sad to see in the paper last week that Todd Curll had died. I first met Todd
back in 2004 when I was researching Clarion County history for my book "Toby's Curse."
As part of the process, Pam and I had a look at lots of old places around the county
and talked to many oldsters about the history of their lives. In Curllsville, we
were told that the person to see was Todd Curll, which was excellent advice. He was
a genial character. He was a fabulous story teller. We spent an afternoon touring
the old Curll farm and then sat down to hear stories of his family and himself. Here
is what he had to say:
William Curll was the first of my family to immigrate to America. He came across from Northern Ireland with his dad and an older brother about 1795. He was 14 at the time and on the voyage his dad and brother caught yellow fever and died, leaving him an orphan. When the ship arrived in Philadelphia, somebody took him in and raised him up, but I know no details of that. After some years, William got married and moved over the mountains in the early 1800s. He built a log cabin near present day Curllsville, where one of the first roads in the area crossed Licking Creek in what was then Armstrong County.
Back then the stagecoach came down this road about once a week on its way from Kittanning to Brookville, and as the fording of the creek was a kind of half way point, they'd stop and water the horses. There was a pretty good spring just by the crossing and my ancestor William improved it by building a watering trough for the horses. Soon after that the stage coach company started leaving mail with him for delivery to the settlers in the area, and after a decade or more of acting in a volunteer fashion, William was officially appointed postmaster of the place. We still have his certificate of appointment, signed by the Postmaster General of the United States. I think it was because William was an early settler and also in charge of the post office that the town came to be called Curllsville.
The new town was at a handy point along the main road back then, and it began to grow. Curllsville was a mustering point for over fifty years, from just after the War of 1812 until the Civil War, and soldiers would come here to drill and practice with their arms. The farmers in the area were a progressive bunch and in 1850, when horses were frequently being stolen, they formed the first anti-horsethief association in the county. The purpose of this was to reimburse members if they ever had a horse stolen ---- sort of an early form of insurance.
Time passed and my great-great-grandfather, now owner of a farm of 288 acres across Licking Creek from the town, was appointed Justice of the Peace and later a circuit judge. We still have pictures of him, and he was a gruff-looking old bugger. I would sure hate to have been caught stealing chickens and been brought up before him. He would have thrown the book at me, I'm sure.
By the 1880s, Curllsville was a thriving farming community. In addition to the post office, there were harness and buggy shops, blacksmith shops, a tin shop, a doctor, an undertaker, stores and a hotel. When automobiles started to appear in the early 1900s, travel to larger places became easier and Curllsville's businesses began to fade away. Today only a few small stores remain, but the post office is still here and so are the Curlls. I am 83 years old and of the fifth generation of Curlls to live in the area.
One thing the Curlls always seemed to have was a desire to experiment and improve things. William created the first civic improvement when he built that horse trough way back in the early 1800s. My dad was an experimenter, too, and I suppose most people would say I am one as well, though it did get me in trouble with my neighbors one time.
My dad had the first tractor around here, back in 1917. It was an International Harvester 8-16 Mogul and could go 1.5 mph in either forward or reverse. He'd start that thing up and it would crack and snap and miss and let out a big bang and people would start running from all directions to see it go, and they'd look at him trying to plow and say, "Well, C. D. Curll's got himself another plaything, but it'll never replace a good team of horses."
It never did.
My dad also did the first strip-cropping around here, back in the early 1930s --- what's called "contour farming" today. It was during the Depression and there was a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp over in Sligo. They needed something for the men to do so they decided to see if farmers in the area would be interested in laying out strips. They came to see my dad, and finally after listening for a while, he said, "Yeah, let's just try it."
Up to that time our fields had been laid out in square patches, regardless of the lay of the land, and you'd plow around the square, back and forth and at an angle across to work the soil. A square field is nicer to work than a long strip because it's so much easier to harrow, cross-harrow and to cover up your dead furrows… all of which help to keep the field level. However, where our fields went up the hill at the back of the farm, we did have problems with erosion.
The idea behind the strips was that there would be lots less erosion if the fields were long narrow and followed the contour of the hill. We tried the experiment in 1935 when I was 15-year-old, and it was a big job since we had to tear out the old rail fences that separated the fields and then lay out new strip fields along the contours. When we started laying out the strips, people would stop as they were driving down the road and look and wonder and say, "What in the world in Clare Curll tryin' to do now?"
When it was explained to them they'd say, "My God. You can't farm that way, going around the corner of the hill. You can't angle the harrow and there's too much of a dead furrow. Oh, you can't farm that way."
Well, they had a point. Plowing throws the earth a little to one side, and so if you start on the outside perimeter of a field and go round and round throwing the earth out, you're left with an empty furrow at the center when you are done --- this is the dead furrow. With square fields, you just throw in instead of out the next time and that covers up the old dead furrow, leaving a new one around the edge of the field. If you throw in one year and out the next, the field stays pretty much level. The problem with the strips was that the dead furrows were very long and when you threw out, a lot of ground ended up on the next strip. We experimented though, and learned that the ideal way to plow these strips was to always throw the ground up the hill. That way gravity was on your side, and the ground would tend to work back down.
As I said earlier, we were among the first to try this strip farming idea, and it did require some figuring to get it working well, but that just made it more interesting. Our strips were 125 feet wide, which is a little wide by today's standards, and each strip was worked every other year. That meant that if we were working one strip, the adjoining strips up and down the hill were left alone to grow grass. We kept at it and had some problems, but in the end the strip farming idea worked out OK.
My dad died in 1966 and I was the son that carried on the farming tradition. The Curll farm is 288 acres and starts at Licking Creek just across from the village and goes on up to the top of the hill. We had a small field up there in the old days, about 40 acres, and if you were to walk up that way in those times you would have crossed 3 or 4 coal seams, same as nearly any other hill in this part of the county. The coal companies had been stripping hills such as ours since the 1940s, and about 1970 I went in with a couple of my neighbors and we leased the top of the hill for stripping. Abby Mays started the work and used the most modern techniques of the time. The first thing he did was put large bulldozers up there to scrape the topsoil off into piles that would be restored when the coal had been removed, then he started the draglines to chewing the top off the hill.
They were up there for six or seven years in the 1970s, taking out the coal and hauling it away in trucks on a road down the back side of the hill. Their operations didn't disturb us too much, and I used the money from the monthly royalty check to fix up the farm. We got about 30 cents a ton for the coal they took out. If I had waited a few more years, I would have gotten five dollars a ton, but I couldn't have known that back then.
The miners took the top couple of seams of coal, but left the bottom one, what they call the "Clarion Coal," as it was too high in sulfur. Maybe that's the reason that in all those years our water quality was never affected by what they were doing up there.
When the mining operations were finally complete, they brought the bulldozers back, smoothed the top of the hill and spread those piles of topsoil back over the land. The removal of all that coal meant that the hill was now flatter, and what with that and the removal of some woods, the hilltop field was now closer to 100 acres than the 40 acres it had been when they started. The only problem was with the topsoil. When they had scraped it up originally, they hadn't really done a good job --- they hadn't gotten enough of it piled up. Now, when they spread it over this bigger area it ended up being only about 3 inches deep, and I knew the new land up there wasn't going to amount to anything for farming purposes.
The fact of our stripping the hilltop didn't cause much comment from our neighbors. Some of them were in on it with me, and many others in our area were doing the same thing --- it was a common operation back then. It was the next thing I did with that hill that raised the ruckus.
Sligo is just three miles down the road from us, and was the first place they stripped around here, way back in the 1940s. Back then there were no laws about returning the land to its original contour or putting the topsoil back, and so, even today, there are places around Sligo that look more like the mountains of the moon than former farmland. About 1980, C&K Coal Company started spreading some sludge down at Sligo and I got kind of interested in it. I went to some of the meetings they had to explain what they were doing, and I listened to their pro and con talk about it. A little after that I mentioned to one of my neighbors, a good friend of mine, that I had a notion to try some sludge up on my hill to see if it would grow grass.
"Oh my God, you wouldn't do that would you?" he said.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Those people down in Philadelphia all have AIDS, and if they bring that Philadelphia sludge up here and spread it around, it'll grow grass, and the deer will eat that grass, and we will shoot a deer and eat the meat, we'll all get AIDS!"
I looked at him and said, "My God, buddy. That's stretching the theory of plant osmosis clear across the state."
I had a fellow from DER come in one day to talk about my idea, and we went up top of the hill and had a look around. There wasn't much growing up there, just weeds and briars, and in some places the topsoil had washed away to show the rock or old overburden underneath. We looked around a bit, talked a bit, and finally the DER man said, "Why don't you contact the people down in Somerset County who are putting sludge on old strip jobs. "
I decided I would, and so I called them up. What this outfit was doing at the time was manufacturing this sludge, spreading it on old coal fields and roughing it in, leaving the rocks and everything there, and then just letting something grow on it to keep the erosion down. I told them that I didn't want to fool with the idea at all unless spreading the sludge on my high field would turn it back into farm ground. I told them that after the sludge application we would have to smooth the ground up and pick the rocks off so that I could get around on it with haybinds, rakes and tractors, otherwise I might just as well not fool with it at all. They came up and had a look around and at the end of the tour agreed to the experiment, though they had never done anything like it before and said, "We don't just know how you want this done. Will you help?"
"Yeah. I'll help," I said.
So they said, "Well, we'll pay you."
I laughed and replied, "Well that's a pretty good deal if you'll pay me for working on my own farm."
So they paid me $7 an hour to pick rocks, and I picked a hell of a lot of them. I went home every night hardly able to move I was so stiff and sore. They had a crew of fellows here from Pittsburgh who were putting on the sludge. They used a heavy-duty deep tiller to rip up the ground about a foot deep, then they would mix about an inch of sludge with that and level the ground up again. I had a little trailer and we hooked that up to their tractor and there were a couple of kids with the crew that helped me. Together we would pick the big rocks, anything bigger than a mush ball, off the field when they were done with it. I'd go along driving the tractor, and I'd stop and jump off and throw in a half-a-dozen rocks while these kids were throwing rock into the trailer from behind. They'd get kind of caught up and then I'd pull ahead and stop, and we'd do it again. One time I heard one of them say to another, "How old is that old fella?"
"They tell me he's in his 70's," his buddy replied.
"Well, he's working the Hell out of us!"
So I slowed down a little bit after that as I didn't want to work these kids too hard, you know.
The sludge came from a plant in Pittsburgh where they used a complicated series of belt presses, whirligig pumps, and agitators to create the stuff. Part of the process involved mixing in a high-quality high-magnesium lime that made the sludge get hot and it would still be warm when they trucked to the hill in trailers. It took about 10 trailer loads to treat one acre, and on a cold morning the steam would just be flying off of sludge, which of course didn't help the odor any. This was back in the infancy of the sludge making process and I don't believe it smells as much anymore, but the stuff we used had a definite septic tank odor to it, and that is where I ran afoul of my neighbors.
If they spread the stuff on a bright sun-shiny day, and spread it evenly, the sun would dry it, and the smell left overnight. But, if it happened to be damp and rainy, the smell would stick around for two weeks. My wife and I would go out sniffing at night and checking the direction of the wind --- worrying if the odor would be bothering the neighbors. A lot of people did complain and since it took a good while to do the entire 100 acres, they were unhappy with me for quite some time. Once we got the job done and the sun came out, though, the smell was gone in just a day of so.
When the field was finally ready, I seeded it and then packed it smooth with a harrow field cultivator fixed up with a couple of cultipackers, and a few weeks later the grass came up. We had places up there where it seemed like there was nothing but black slate, not much topsoil at all, just pure black slate, and I thought, "Well, if it grows grass on something like this it's pretty good stuff." Well, you know the grass came up on the rocky parts just the same it did on the rest. I was amazed.
We had measured the water quality for a year before we began, and then every couple of months for the next four years, checking a whole bunch of springs and streams. The sludge application never affected any of them.
That was 12 years ago, and although we do still dig up a big rock every now and then, my God, we've taken more hay off that high field than the rest of the farm all put together.
The uproar over the sludge experiment has long since died away, but I do still sometimes wonder what innovation or improvement of mine or another generation of Curlls will start the old town of Curllsville buzzing yet again.
Todd Curll, May 3, 2004
Todd Curll died June 13, 2016 at the age of 95. He and his wife Arlie McDowell Curll are buried in the Sligo Cemetery.
Old News of Clarion County