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FAYETTE CITY, Pennsylvania — “I grew up here,” says Don, a 57-year-old man at the bar after a Tuesday of digging ditches and mowing lawns. “It’s the black hole of Pennsylvania.”
Don isn’t talking just about Fayette City, this tiny dying town on the Monongahela River. He’s talking about this whole corner of Pennsylvania, this part of the Monongahela Valley, and mostly about Fayette County.
“This is a s***hole,” says Ashley, a bartender in Uniontown, the county seat. “It’s scary.”
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER TRUMP IN STEEL AND COAL COUNTRY?
You wouldn’t call it a hole of any sort if you were just passing through on the highways. In fact, this is beautiful country. The Monongahela River winds through the hills and bluffs. While you drive around the county, the sights often take your breath away.
This is where Frank Lloyd Wright built Fallingwater, his legendary home. When Pittsburgh industrialists Willard Rockwell and later Joseph Hardy wanted to build a resort — Nemacolin, it’s called — they chose a Fayette County mountainside.
When steel and coal were king, this area was the beating heart of the American dream. Good jobs were plentiful in the mills. Small towns swarmed with families. Downtowns bustled, and churches burst at the seams.
Now it’s gone: the mills, the flower shops, half the churches. The Community Center of Fayette City, where today’s middle-aged residents recall Girl Scout meetings and summer theaters, is abandoned and crumbling.
“Most of the buildings up in town need to be torn down,” says Vicky Prokopovitch, proprietor of the Pitt Stop convenience store at the end of Fayette City’s Main Street.
And the less visible absences are just as profound: Marriage and work are less common here than in the past and less common than in neighboring counties, while crime and drugs are worse.
“Something left here,” sighs Don, at the bar down the road, meditating on the tales of Fayette City’s golden days.
It’s no mystery on one level: The steel jobs left. The Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Company shuttered the Allensport mill, right across the river from Fayette City, in 2008 after decades of a slow death. Bethlehem Steel closed its Monessen plant a few years earlier.
“That’s where everyone used to work,” Prokopovitch says.
But many other parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard by the steel industry’s woes, including Pittsburgh itself. Most of those places have recovered at least a bit and found new footing. Not Fayette County.
“I don’t think it’s ever going to happen here,” Don says. Prokopovitch and her friend Cathy at the Pitt Stop convenience store in Fayette City agree — they have no hope for the future.
And you’ll hear the same talk at Smitty’s Bar and Restaurant down in Uniontown.
So, why does this one county lag behind the rest of the state and have so much more suffering?
‘The poverty side’
The story of Fayette County doesn’t end with the economy, but that’s a good place to start.
More than 12% of Fayette County families live in poverty. That’s 50% higher than the statewide level. Among Pennsylvania’s 31 counties with populations above 100,000, only Philadelphia has a higher percentage in poverty.
Here’s another measure: The average income in the state is about $69,000. In Fayette County, it’s $51,000. Only two large Pennsylvania counties are poorer than Fayette by this measure.
Economic woe isn’t surprising in a place where the steel mills closed down. But here’s a stat that might surprise you: The unemployment rate is about 5%, worse than the statewide average today but historically very good.
But the unemployment rate doesn’t tell you everything, because people not seeking work don’t count as unemployed. Fayette has the lowest labor-force-participation rate of any large county in the state, minus Centre County, where Penn State’s massive student body, who, as full-time students, are not full-time workers, throws off the number. In other words, Fayette County leads the state in men and women who aren’t even looking for work.
Sheryl, a woman in her 20s, sits on her front stoop on Millview Road on Wednesday morning. She’s double-hatting: babysitting a toddler and working as the caretaker for a woman the age of her own mother. “A lot of people around here get mainly SSI and stuff like that,” referring to Supplemental Security Income, or disability pay.
Likewise, 1 in 4 residents of the county is on food stamps, a higher proportion than in any county besides Philadelphia.
In bordering Washington and Westmoreland counties, the food stamp rates are about half the rate in Fayette County.
Prokopovitch worked for 20 years in the Belle Vernon Area School District, which has consolidated over the years as the population has shrunk. The district straddles the county line with Washington County.
Prokopovitch says you could tell by sight which students were from which side of the county line.
“You got the poverty side and you got the hoity-toities, or whatever you want to call them,” she says.
This divide is true on all sorts of indicators. Fayette County stands above, or below, its neighbors and most of the rural counties in Pennsylvania. And it’s not just about economics.
No job, no family, no community
Kevin Crossland sits at the breakfast counter of Mark C’s, an old Steelers-colored diner on the edge of Uniontown, and proudly tells me the term he introduced to the locals: “Firstmas.”
“Happy Firstmas,” he tells his buddies on the first of each month, when they get their disability checks. “It’s the only holiday the government celebrates 12 times a year,” he chuckles. Around Uniontown, he says, “You can see everybody like, ‘Oh my God, Happy Firstmas.’ You know, Walmart’s packed. Everything’s out. The restaurants are full. So we call it Firstmas.”
The food stamp numbers, like the men and women not even in the labor force, are the quantifiable signs of collapse.
Walk the streets of downtown Uniontown, and you see the other signs: Idle men, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s on the stairs of public housing near Gallatin Avenue, a few blocks from stores with “help wanted” signs. Talk to employers — Don, who does landscaping; Crossland, who maintains rental homes; funeral directors — and they’ll tell you how hard it is to hire anyone, especially on the books.
“Under-the-table is everything here,” one employer says. “The minute you mention a W-9, they walk away,” because an on-the-books job would cost them their disability or unemployment checks.
The working men and women I talk to admit to feeling like chumps at times because their neighbor gets by on giving occasional front-porch haircuts and otherwise being idle.
But it’s clear that the unemployed men of Uniontown or nearby Connellsville are not thriving.
A Fayette County man is 10% less likely to get married than the average Pennsylvania man, and much more likely to get divorced. Last year, for instance, there were 631 marriages and 361 divorces in the county. That’s 57 divorces per 100 marriages — by far the worst ratio among the state’s large counties.
“The road across from me,” Prokopovitch says, “we call it Divorce Lane. Everybody on that road has been divorced.”
Family life here is pretty tough. Conversations about the areas typically turn to all the family or kid activities that have disappeared.
“We used to have a drive-in,” says Cathy, a middle-aged woman drinking coffee at Pitt Stop. “Where the Walmart is, that used to be Super 71 drive-in. … Then, as kids, we also had a roller-skating rink on 906 — Piggly-Wiggly. … Ice skating at Rostraver Gardens.”
Crystal Pool in Uniontown, the go-kart track in Uniontown — all gone.
“There used to be all this stuff,” says Shannon, a retired and disabled lady sitting on a stoop on Millview Road. “There’s not much for kids up here to do.”
Ashley, the bartender at Smitty’s, is raising three children here, and “I don’t let them do anything,” because of safety concerns. “Some kid O.D.’d on fentanyl at a high school football game.”
Ashley does plenty with her children. “We hike. We fish. But I don’t let them do anything without me.”
Sheryl says it’s a fine town as long as you don’t let your children out after dark, and they stay away from Gallatin Avenue, which is a couple of hundred yards from where she is babysitting. “That’s where you find your prostitutes and stuff.”
It’s when you talk about family that the conversation turns dark, and folks start to mention Child and Youth Services.
At one point, Ashley leans over the bar and asks me, “Did you hear what happened to that 9-year-old girl?”
She’s not the first one this week to ask the same question in hushed tones. Talk to anyone for long enough in Fayette County, and they’ll mention “that 9-year-old girl,” Renesmay Eutsey, whose body was found last week in a trash bag in the Youghiogheny River.
Valley of Death
Eutsey was reported missing on Sept. 3. Her biological mother had placed her and her two siblings in the care of a relative, Kourtney Eutsey. Kourtney and her wife, Sarah Shipley, lived in Dunbar Township, just outside of Connellsville, which is one city over from Uniontown.
Renesmay Eutsey died on Sept. 2, and the couple tried to bury the body, not wanting officials to see her horrible burns. Soon, they decided to put her corpse in a trash bag inside a tote bag and toss her in the river.
Both women have been charged with criminal homicide, and questions are arising about how long Kourtney Eutsey and Shipley abused and neglected the children — and why CYS never intervened.
The local district attorney says the tale of abuse goes back further: “There has been a long, long history of family issues involving drugs, sexual offenders, deplorable conditions. It’s pretty clear, from at least what I’ve seen, that there have been years and years of failures with the family with this child.”
“A lot of people around this area have gone through a lot of trauma,” Sheryl says from the stoop on Millview Road.
Smitty’s is the place where, years ago, I first came face to face with the rural plague of deaths of despair. I drove to Fayette County ahead of the 2016 election because it showed up in my research as the county with the greatest drop-off in religiosity, both protestant and Catholic. I figured, correctly, that this would be a hot spot of President Donald Trump’s surge in Pennsylvania.
I underestimated the extent of Uniontown’s pathologies. At one point, I was giving a hard time to Dave, a customer who told me he was on disability because his back pain precluded even sitting at a desk for half an hour. “You’ve been sitting at the bar for an hour and a half,” I prodded him.
“I’m numb right now,” he said, staring straight at me, “because my son just died.”
It was an overdose. Those aren’t rare here, though Prokopovitch says Fayette City doesn’t have too many addicts now because they all died a few years back.
Crossland, the local landlord, points to drugs as the reason he can’t retain workers. “I know too many people that think that’s the only way, you know: get up and smoke one,” and get on welfare.
“One of the rarest things in this valley is clean piss,” Don says.
Mike is drinking at Smitty’s in Uniontown on Tuesday night. He grew up here, got married, had two children, and got a job in the mines. Then, his wife died.
“She drank herself to death,” he tells me.
Before COVID-19, Fayette County had a premature death rate of 677 per 100,000. That’s 43% higher than the statewide average and 20% higher than neighboring counties Washington and Westmoreland.
“For every person we get over 80, we get three or four ages 30 to 60,” a local funeral home director tells me.
On drug overdose deaths per capita, Fayette is among the five worst of the 31 large counties.
Some locals will tell you it’s not too bad. Crossland argues that it’s a great place to live, but he also told me that he packs heat when it comes time to confront a nonpaying tenant.
“It’s the same as anywhere,” Sheryl says.
But it’s not.
Uniontown has a violent crime rate of 12.6 per 1,000 residents. That’s almost five times the state rate, and it puts Uniontown in the worst 1% of cities. Philadelphia’s violent crime rate is 9.9, and Pittsburgh’s is 5.8.
It’s one more score where Fayette County is a black hole.
Why Fayette?
What is it about this county that makes it stand out in all the worst ways?
It’s “the mentality,” Don says from the bar in Fayette City. “The mentality will never leave here.” What is that mentality, I ask. “I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. The work ethic?”
When you ask locals for an explanation, most just describe the county as stuck. Bad things happened in the past, and it created a culture of drug abuse, neglect, and laziness. Now that culture, that mentality, dominates.
The closure of the mills, by this telling, dug a hole, a “black hole” or a “s***hole,” and nobody can climb out of this valley of death.
Welfare is probably the most common culprit in my conversations with locals. One local businessman says Fayette County makes it easier to get benefits such as disability, food stamps, and housing assistance. Eligibility rules are uniform throughout the state, but the locals who work say that the county is more liberal in practice than others.
Stay out late enough, earn the trust of the locals, and folks will start talking about corruption. Nobody will badmouth the local politicos and kingmakers on the record, but they’ll tell stories. “The same guy painted the lines on the roads for 50 years,” one local woman said. “There was no bidding on the job.”
The insiders entrenched themselves and enriched themselves and did nothing to help this part of the valley climb back up.
All of these explanations are true. None allows for an easy cure.
The state pumps money into redevelopment here. A few years back, folks were talking about Uniontown gentrifying. No more.
Trump keeps promising to resurrect the steel industry here. That’s not happening.
Sometimes, when the social fabric is thin and when the economy hangs on just one or two pillars, a place is vulnerable. And sometimes when such a place gets knocked down, it takes more than a couple of generations to get back on its feet.