Lunch & Learn: All about the Great Allegheny Passage

Bill Metzger will speak and sign books at a Lunch & Learn at Laurelville Retreat Center in Mt. Pleasant Twp., on Sunday, April 24, at 12:15 p.m. Cost is $15 per person, pre-registration is required by April 19. Spaces are limited to 75.

In 2021, Bill published the "Great Allegheny Passage Companion," which will be available to purchase. Today, the Great Allegheny Passage is mostly a tunnel of trees running through the mountains along a beautiful clean river. It wasn’t always that way. What’s now the trail corridor was once a railroad serving the most industrialized area on earth with coal mines, steel mills, and furnaces and factories of all sorts. The sky was dark during the day, glowed orange at night, and the rivers were nothing more than open sewers. Before that, Native American villages going back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, were situated along the Passage along with fossil-bearing rock formations dating to when dinosaurs were frisking about. You’ll even pass petrified prehistoric worm poop, 80-yard-long football fields, three ancient earthquake faults, and the place where a philandering president carried out his clandestine trysts. All these stories and more are in the "Great Allegheny Passage Companion," accompanied by detailed maps, historic and contemporary photos and informative illustrations. A reviewer said the book is, “written with masterful, humorous, tight writing, betraying decades of research.” As Bill says of his work, “You’ll have fun and learn stuff.” ###