WELCOME TO WADDLE, PENNSYLVANIA

Thomas Stevenson had been waiting for this day for as long as he could remember. It was his sixteenth birthday, March 23, 1918, which meant he could finally start working at the McNitt-Huyett Lumber Company with his father and four older brothers. Almost every man who lived in his beloved hometown of Waddle either worked at the lumber company or for the Bellefonte Central Railroad that ran right through town to State College and Bellefonte. He crawled out of his small bed in the attic of the Stevenson farmhouse that his family had lived in for years, pulled on his boots and headed down the steep stairs to the kitchen where his mother was preparing breakfast. 

    He sat at the table in the kitchen with his father, Frank Stevenson, his uncle, John Stevenson, his brothers, Frank Jr., Eddie, Christopher, and James, and his two younger sisters, Eleanor and Louise. His mother, Matilda Stevenson, placed hot coffee and eggs in front of them. They eagerly wolfed it down before grabbing their coats and pail lunches from the rack by the front door and headed out into the early spring morning. A few flakes of snow fell from the gray sky as they trudged down the winding road through the mud and slush to the sawmill about a quarter of a mile southwest. 

The residents of Waddle had suffered a tragedy recently. Andy McNitt, one of the owners of the sawmill, and Thomas’s father’s best friend, had boarded a train in Bellefonte to his native Philadelphia about a month earlier. He hadn’t been seen or heard from since. The police and private detectives suspected foul play since Andy was known for carrying large amounts of money with him, but they had come up with nothing. The case was as cold as ice. It had taken a large toll on Frank Stevenson, who saw Andy as a brother and had been close to him since Andy had moved here from Philadelphia to start the sawmill with his brother and business partner. 

    As they approached the sawmill, the anticipation was building inside of Thomas. His brothers were teasing him and telling him what to expect his first day on the job. The sawmill sat in a large field next to the railroad in the center of a horseshoe curve where the tracks doubled back and went towards State College. The men reached the sawmill and immediately began to get to work. Thomas followed his family into the big warehouse and followed suit when they grabbed axes with wooden handles and saws. He looked around and saw about 45 men milling around, all of whom he recognized as neighbors, cousins, and friends. After a quick speech with instructions for the day from the foreman, everyone started towards the Pine Barrens, where the sawmill had been logging for the entirety of its career. The crew trekked down Molly Stone Road, named for the only person who lived on this road on a small farm. 

    Thomas ended up at the base of a large pine tree with his 23 year old brother, Frank Jr. Feeling confident, he gripped his axe with both hands and swung at the trunk of the tree. A large crack split the air and Thomas stumbled backwards, landing on his rear in a puddle of half melted snow and mud. When he got his bearings, Frankie was howling with laughter and he could see his uncle and Eddie laughing a couple yards away at a tree they were already half way done with cutting down. His axe was laying at the base of the tree with the wooden handle snapped in half. Thomas’s face flushed pink with embarrassment as he stood up and brushed himself off.

“Tommy, you have to use a saw on a tree of this size”, Frankie snickered. “Go grab another axe out of the supply wagon, then I’ll show you how to actually use a saw.” He nodded, kicked some snow and dirt over the broken axe and bolted over to the wagon to get another axe. 

    After what seemed like hours of sawing trees down, cutting them into a manageable size, and loading them onto the wagon, a loud whistle pierced the air, indicating that it was time for lunch. He grabbed his lunch pail and sat on a tree stump with some other boys around his age. Thomas had been recovering from a sore throat and had been taking a medicine that came in a little glass bottle. Today was the last day he had to take it so he pulled it out of the tin pail, uncorked it, and downed the liquid. He winced and tossed the bottle over his shoulder, where it landed under a bush. He gobbled down his sandwich and a thermos of hot coffee and got back to work. 

    At 5 o’clock, Thomas and the other Stevensons all returned to the sawmill after finishing another long day of work. They put their tools back and started down the winding road to Hoy’s General Store. A lot of the men stopped by there on the way home after work. The General Store was run by the Hoys, a prominent family in the community. Not only was it the main place people did their shopping, it was also the post office, the barber shop, and a gathering place. They had a big wood stove that was always going. The best thing was to go in there after a long, cold day of cutting trees down in the woods and warm up near the fire, talk to your neighbors, and buy yourself a piece of candy for a penny. When the Stevensons arrived there, the place was packed with other sawmill workers and people doing their shopping. Thomas went up to the counter,  bought a caramel from Mr. Hoy, and stood by the fire listening to the men laugh and tell stories. It was Saturday, so there was no work the next day. Thomas found himself a little disappointed by this. He had enjoyed his first day of work and was eager to get back out there. Eventually, Frank Stevenson stood up and announced that they should be getting back for supper or Mrs. Stevenson would blow a gasket. Once they finished a very short walk back home, Thomas stopped by the big red barn next to the house to feed their animals. The barn cats rubbed up against his legs as he poured feed into the horses´ and two dairy cows’ troughs. 

    Thomas kicked the sludge off his boots at the front door of their two story, white farmhouse and stepped into the house. He was greeted by the delicious smell of beef stew cooking on the stove. When he entered the kitchen, his two younger sisters were finishing up the assignments they had gotten at the one room schoolhouse they attended down the road and his mother was spooning stew into bowls. The Stevenson family enjoyed a pleasant evening eating the homemade stew and sitting by the fire. Eventually, Thomas found himself falling asleep in his chair and went upstairs to bed. 

    On Sunday morning, all of the residents of Waddle flooded to the Waddle Methodist Church that stood next to the Stevensons´ farm. In a way, it was the epicenter of the town, with the large steeple visible from a distance away. The pastor started preaching and then everyone stood up to sing a hymn. When the pastor got to the sermon, he began speaking about how it is important to understand our mark on the world and how to make the most out of your time on Earth. This struck a chord with Thomas. In his sixteen years of life, he had barely left Waddle, with only the occasional day trip to State College or Bellefonte. He began thinking of how he had impacted his community and the world around him. That’s when it struck him. Though he hadn’t left the humble town of Waddle, his actions still had an impact on his community and the world. He began thinking of what would be his physical mark on the world in the future. Then the axe he had broken the day before came to mind. Possibly, he thought, someone might find the remnants of that axe and wonder how it had gotten there. What was the story behind it? Who had left it there? He had heard of something called archaeology in a newspaper and vowed to look more into it when church was over for the day. 

    After the last hymn was sung and the last prayer was said, Thomas made a beeline for the barn where his father kept all of the old newspapers from the months before. He frantically dug through the large pile until he found what he was looking for. The article read, More Discoveries at The Palace of Knossos! Thomas read every word of the article and found himself engrossed in it. He knew then that he didn’t want to be a sawmill worker for the rest of his life. He wanted to be an archaeologist. Thomas neatly folded the article and tucked it in his pocket and went back to the house for dinner. 

    Over the next few months, as spring turned to summer, Thomas’s fascination in archaeology and all things related only grew. He saved up his wages from the sawmill and on Sunday afternoons he would purchase a train ticket to State College or Bellefonte to find all the books and articles he could about his new found passion. He sat for hours reading about archaeological sites around the globe and reading about how the work was actually done. He knew it would be difficult to save enough money to be able to attend the Pennsylvania State University to get his degree in archaeology, but he was willing to work as hard as he needed to to achieve his dream. So he worked at the sawmill until it closed in 1919 and then did odd jobs around Waddle. When he was nineteen, he had finally saved up enough to put himself through college. So he enrolled at Penn State and began his official education in archaeology. 

    In May of 1925, Thomas Stevenson walked across the stage at his graduation from Penn State with a degree in archaeology. It was a small class of his major, as archaeology was still a budding field. His whole family sat in the audience, bursting with pride, as he was the first in his family to graduate from college. The past four years he had studied and worked hard to do well in his classes and make enough money to pay his tuition. It had all paid off because here he was, a college graduate in a field that he absolutely loved. He couldn’t wait to get out there and start discovering. 

    Thomas’s career blossomed after he obtained a full-time position at Penn State as a professor. He loved sharing his extensive knowledge about archaeology and how to conduct in a way that was respectful to the past, yet allowed them to learn about it. He conducted archaeological digs in countless areas of Pennsylvania, but his crowning achievement was his involvement in the excavation of Akrotiri, Thera, a Greek island that had been devastated by a volcanic eruption thousands of years previously. This was in 1967, towards the end of Thomas’s lengthy career. He was 65 years old, but he refused to retire until he felt he had accomplished enough. When he finally did retire in 1969, he returned to his beloved hometown of Waddle. Things had changed a lot since he was a young sixteen year old boy working at the sawmill. The town had started to decline and people had moved away. All that remained were the buildings and the memories of the people and businesses that once thrived there. Thomas would take long walks around the town, down Molly Stone Road where he had worked in the Pine Barrens, cutting down trees. He remembered vividly his first day of work when he had so confidently swung his axe into a tree, snapping the handle in half. He knew that the axe head was still there somewhere, along with the small glass bottle his cold medicine had been in. But he decided to leave them there, preserving the context and hoping that one day someone else would find them and use their own imagination and interpretation of how those artifacts had gotten there. 

    Thomas Stevenson lived out the rest of his days on the Stevenson family farm until he passed away in 1978. He had never married since he considered himself married to his career, but he was surrounded by countless nieces, nephews, and other family and friends. He was known as the kind, intelligent patriarch of the community who would tell the children stories of his adventures around the world. The stories he would tell inspired a few of the children to pursue careers in archaeology and anthropology themselves. 

    In 2002, twenty-four years after Thomas had passed, the road that had previously been known as Molly Stone Road was renamed Michael Road and a new neighborhood was starting to be built along it. The Fitzgerald family had purchased a lot along this road and started clearing the land to build their new house. Kevin Fitzgerald was cutting some shrubs back and moving some rocks in the front yard of the property when he saw something strange sticking out of the dirt. He crouched down and pulled it out. In his hands he held an old, rusty axe head. 84 years after Thomas had left his discarded axe head in the woods, it was found. A couple years later, in 2011, when the Fitzgerald children were grown, they were putting a new garden in the front of the property. 10 year-old Erin Fitzgerald was digging around in the dirt when a small glass bottle appeared. She immediately grabbed it and rushed to show her mother, who was working a few feet away. It was a miracle that it hadn’t broken at all in its 93 years under the ground. These artifacts became precious items in the Fitzgerald household, with the glass bottle sitting on the kitchen windowsill for years to come, which looked out on the exact spot where Thomas Stevenson cut down his first tree on the job. 

    Thomas Stevenson couldn’t have known that his actions on March 23, 1918 would have an affect on a young girl, almost a century in the future. He would have been thrilled to know that that little girl, Erin Fitzgerald, was pursuing a career in archaeology because of her exposure to it at a young age. He couldn’t have known that those artifacts, a rusty old axe head and a small glass medicine bottle, would become staples in one of her final projects her sophomore year in a Public Archaeology course at Gettysburg College. But here we are. All Thomas had wanted was to preserve the material history of the world and teach the coming generations to respect it and learn from it. He achieved that goal during his career, after his career, and well after his death.