This is the first in a series of pieces about my hometown, Aston Township in Pennsylvania. Outside of my high school literary journal, there isn’t a whole lot of writing about our sleepy burg out there – and it’s my intention to finally change that. I aim to intertwine recollections, lazy memories, my personal experiences and our town’s unique history together to form something that anyone from Aston could pick up, read through and feel some restlessness in their internal bips and boops. I’ll try not to get too sappy on ya’.
Aston, PA – Recollections of Butt Ln.
The time between my high school graduation and when I packed my things and moved to college was a strange time. Having been drunk on the overdue sense of belonging that being a high school senior had brought, I was soaking a new kind of experience, previously alien to me – confidence. My chest puffed itself out naturally, and I strode my weathered streets with an emotive twizzler of pride and nostalgia. For the first time in my life, I loved this place.
My peers were never much for this town. There were those that appreciated the proximity our homes had to highways, the Granite Run Mall and drug dealers; and there were others that dreamed of excitement, honking horns, hurried shoe-steps and drug dealers. Even still, there were groups of them that felt nothing but contentment, resentment, entrapment or collusion. As far back as middle school, I remember my own wavering sense of pride and embarrassment about living in our mill town turned suburb. On some days, I would defend its merits; others, I would heap the shame onto it. It really depended on who I was trying to impress.
One thing was always unwavering, though – I had always loved our town’s unique seat in history. Once a mill town settled along the banks of Chester Creek (or, ‘crick,’ depending on who you ask), this creaking, grinding, popping and churning place was one of the very first towns founded in Pennsylvania. I recall discovering once that Aston (among others) is older than the state of California. It’s a bit to chew on.
As such, Aston is firmly tied to the moorings of antique America: manufacturing, raw goods, pocked highways, bizarre politics and disgruntled workers. It maintains some of these artifacts, still – old growth forest, fieldstone mansions and meandering familial legacies. One such family is noted for their benevolence towards the early history of my town. Honest to God, they were the Butt family. Like a clear-shot into another time, the Butts were as much a part of our town as the burger joint that has been sitting on the corner of five roads for as long as I can remember.
They were members of the area’s Methodist church, they helped build the countless mills and dotted our landscape with their tracts of land. Perhaps it speaks volumes about human legacy, but after the town’s border restructuring following World War 2, their names were reduced to nothing more than the dusty mortar that holds many of our ancient buildings still together.
The GI Bill saw an explosive growth of housing in our hilly burg. Contractors found themselves scrambling to flatten land fast enough to entertain the sudden influx of able men rolling back from overseas. There, the Butt family’s most enduring legacy was conceived: Butt Lane. It’s nothing but a sleepy, windy residential access road that runs behind a shopping center – a cultural icon of my youth. The most important thing about this road, though, was the fact that it was very much a legal road. Perhaps doing a disservice to the memory of our town’s benefactors, this ‘Butt Ln’ sign turned their lives into an admittedly hysterical gag.
This affected me profoundly. Mostly because, well, I wanted that sign. So, one evening, my good friends swiped the sign for me. I was overjoyed to have such an important piece of my town with me – mostly because of how amazing it is to have hanging up in a private collection.
I heard that the sign gets stolen so often and its thieves so determined, the township simply stopped bolting the signs in with irreversible safety bolts – they just started screwing them in with a phillips-head.
As I drove off to Pittsburgh with that sign pressed firmly under my arm, I was glad that there was still a humanity to that place. ‘It’s just buried over,’ I thought as I proceeded to bury it over once more.
