Byrnesville On A Map

Just up the steps from the backyard of my grandparents house (green lot on the map) was a flat area everyone called the alley. At one time outhouses were up there and it was up there that trash was burned. This was in the 1950's so just 20 years before that the 'alley' was Sarah Avenue, the name of the wife of Thomas J. Byrnes, founder of Byrnesville. It is also interesting to me that James Street was once named St. James Avenue.

It can be seen on the map that the Pennsylvania Rail Road not only ran parallel with the creek Walnut Run out of Barnesboro but had spurs parallel to James Street heading to Spangler and another heading down into the valley crossing Walnut Run and into Barnesboro. I've written elsewhere that when I was small the train still ran on tracks parallell to Walnut Run. Even though those trains used to scare the stuffing out of me, I couldn't help but put nails and coins on the track to see what the train would do to them. I put a red X where I'd put the nails on the track. The blue X is where I used to play on Walnut Run.

So when Edna Francina Byrnes Lantzy said that her 'Dad had two mules that pulled the carts of coal out of the mine. He built a tram down the top hill to the coal tipple into the large railroad cars', she was right. The tram would have run along Sarah Avenue and tipple loaded the cars about where Sarah Avenue and St. James Avenue meet.