Vets to receive old school property

By Mary Grzebieniak

The veterans group has been trying to get the property for about 10 years.

HILLSVILLE, Pa. — Mahoning Township is working out the details of giving a local veterans group an old school property on Erie Street in Edinburg as a long-awaited site for a veterans memorial and possibly a public picnic area.

Tom Duncan, president of the Edinburg Veterans Memorial Association, attended Tuesday’s meeting of the Mahoning Township supervisors along with several members of the group, which he said numbers about 100.

Duncan noted he has presented the association’s articles of incorporation to Township Solicitor Louis Perrotta, who promised to work out details of an agreement for the property. Though issues such as maintenance and insurance will have to be determined, supervisors indicated they are agreeable to giving the approximately half-acre property to the group.

The township owns the property, which includes an old two-room school building that housed the former Edinburg Elementary School until 1972.

The veterans group plans to use the property as the site for a new Mahoning Township World War II Memorial. The former memorial, which listed the names of all township residents who served in the war, stood for years in a small grassy area at the intersection of U.S. Route 224 and Pa. Route 551. However the memorial was destroyed when a truck hit it Oct. 8, 2003. There is insurance money to replace the memorial, and it will be ordered once there is a definite place to put it, Duncan said.

The school building that stands on the site is unusable because it contains asbestos, and there are sewage issues that will not be resolved until the new sanitary sewer line is built, Supervisor Francis “Poncho” Exposito said after the meeting. But Duncan said his group will not use the school building but has plans to possibly erect a picnic shelter on the property and make it available to the community.

Duncan said that the effort to obtain the school property as a memorial site goes back 10 years. At that time, he and other members of the veterans group contested Union Area School District’s sale of the school property. The school district agreed at that time to deed the property to Mahoning Township which has maintained it ever since.