Clarks Summit's Forgotten Village
As I do every morning, today I glanced at the local newspaper’s website. Cool, the Sunday local history piece was about ghost towns. It begins:
Old-timers say that if you take a walk in the wooded area near Maple Avenue and South Abington Road [in Clarks Summit, PA], you might catch a fleeting glimpse of a shadowy figure toting a rifle. […] Locals know it as the Forgotten Village.
Wait … what?! I lived in Clarks Summit for two decades, a fanatic for all things abandoned and nearly forgotten, and this is the first I’m hearing of it?
A Google search had nothing to offer.
In search of more information I emailed my mother, who grew up across the road and north a block. It was a long shot, since my mother is not really a fan of poking around in abandoned places.
But she surprised me. She recalled walking there as a little girl with her father, entering the woods just past the old Lithuanian cemetery, and coming across decaying structures and—she’s almost positive—a still-standing bungalow. That would have been in the mid 1950s.
This “forgotten village” was a source of stories, devised by junior high school boys, about crazed men with guns “back in those woods.” The newspaper article refers to it as a possible late 19th century Russian settlement, but my mother has no memory of that.
Of course I intend to investigate the area for myself, but please contact me if you have information, memories or stories about Clarks Summit’s “Forgotten Village.” All possible sources of information are most welcome!
