Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette BRADDOCK THEN AND NOW: Much of the fighting between the British and the French and Indian fighters took place in an area that's now Parkview Extension, on the site of Lida Stell's North Braddock home. This copy of the Edwin Willard Deming painting "Braddock's Defeat" is usually on display at the Carnegie Library of Braddock.

By Ann Belser, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

There are moments when Lida Stell finds herself sitting on her porch in North Braddock thinking back 250 years to a time when men were fighting and dying on what is now her sidewalk.

"I try to imagine, it was a forest here, and how many men were killed," she said, while sitting in her kitchen looking at a map of the battlefield.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Lida Stell and husband, Roy, on the porch of their North Braddock home, where Lida often sits and ponders the battle that took place there. Click photo for larger image. Related coverage See a map of Braddock's route to defeat A schedule of commemoration events Principal players in the Battle of Monongahela Historians walk Braddock's Road 250 years later

Stell, 84, lives in the two-story frame house where she was born, on Parkview Extension. She arrived in this world in the bedroom on the second floor and married in front of the mantel in the living room, and she has no plans to move.

It was only later in her life that she developed an interest in the history of her backyard, which was the site of the most intense fighting in the second-deadliest battle of the westward expansion of the American frontier.

On July 9, 1755, Gen. Edward Braddock, his British regulars and Colonial militia crossed the Monongahela from what is now West Mifflin to North Braddock, where the Edgar Thomson Steel Works stands.

Following the exact route of Braddock and his men is now impossible. A steel mill, hundreds of homes and railroad tracks block the way. Streams that Braddock forged since have been directed into culverts and buried underground.

But the hills are still mostly there. When one climbs up the cobblestones of 13th Street to the top, the only place to go is left on Crosby Street. The steep hillside from which the French and Indian fighters fired upon Braddock and his men remains, though it is nearly impassible, overgrown with trees and weeds.

In 1755 Braddock was on his way to Fort Duquesne -- where Point State Park now has the footprint of the fort dug into the lawn -- but he never made it.

The story that has survived is based on maps sketched out just after the battle by Pat MacKellar, one of Braddock's engineers. In 1909 engineers at the Carnegie Steel Co. overlaid the battle maps on an 1873 map of the area that showed the topography and the roads of Braddock and North Braddock. Those maps, put together by Thomas F. Graham and L.H. Park, are still copied and distributed by Braddock's Field Historical Society.

Braddock's troops made it across what is now Sixth Street from General Braddock Towers to the old Cochran Pontiac dealership. But the French and Indians, racing up the Mon Valley from the Point, collided with them, and the Battle of Monongahela began. Braddock's forward guards fell back as the rear of his line kept advancing. He and his men tried to organize into proper battle lines to advance on the enemy, but the French and Indians surrounded them, firing from behind trees. According to accounts that have survived from men in the battle, they couldn't even see the French and Indians who were firing upon them.

"I've read some accounts of where the English said they never saw such terrible terrain," Stell said.

In his book "Braddock at the Monongahela," Paul E. Kopperman, professor of history at Oregon State University, said the men in Braddock's army were terrified by the battle cries of the Indian fighters, who were known for scalping their foes. Kopperman, who will speak at a commemoration for the battle on Saturday, said that Braddock's troops panicked.

They abandoned their large artillery, giving the French a chance to seize it and use it against them. The British regulars were huddled tightly, each man trying to get to the center of the mass and relative safety, Kopperman wrote. Braddock, meanwhile, was trying to rally the men and had four or five horses shot out from under him.

As the men bunched together, their bullets began striking their own troops. Kopperman quotes the writing of one soldier who noted that the bullets used by the British were a different size from those used by the French and Indians. After the battle, when the surgeons extracted bullets from the wounded, they found two British rounds for every bullet they found from an enemy fighter.

For three hours the battle raged on what is now Parkview Extension, along Bell and Jones avenues. Men were dying where you can now see Ben Fairless Elementary School. At a nearby Little League field, a plaque and a statue of George Washington mark the area as a historic battlefield.

The French and Indian fighters had both the high ground, on North Avenue and Spring Street and the Grandview Golf Course, and the low ground below, along the railroad tracks and where the Braddock Carnegie Library now stands.

Washington, an aide-de-camp to Braddock, had his coat hit by bullets and had horses shot out from under him, but he was not wounded. Braddock was not as lucky.

At the time of the battle, England and France were technically still at peace. The British did not declare war on the French until nearly a year later, May 15, 1756.

In 1917, a plaque was mounted on a pole on Sixth Street, marking the site where the battle began. It was mysteriously missing for years until one day a janitor at General Braddock Towers found it in a storage cupboard, Stell said. That plaque now hangs on the corner of the building.

As Stell sits in her backyard, she thinks of the events that took place there.

"Even when I am digging in the backyard, I wonder if I will find an Indian arrow, but things have been moved around so much," she said.

Vicky Vargo, interim director of the Carnegie Library of Braddock, which houses a museum commemorating the battle, wishes she had paid more attention to her own mother's stories about the battle.

Her late mother, Ella Vargo, grew up in the Dooker's Hollow section of North Braddock, up the hill from the Edgar Thomson Works.

"I remember my mother saying she used to find Indian arrowheads when they were playing up around where Grandview is," Vargo said.

She was recently in the library, pointing to where her house would be, on the battle map.

Then she pointed out the site where the Mon Valley Initiative is building new homes on Baldridge Avenue, "That's where the French were," she said.

After Braddock was hit, his men -- who were unable to advance, but who had held their ground -- retreated in disorder. They left their ammunition and about 30 wagons of provisions behind for the French and Indians to plunder, including up to 500 cattle and horses, some of which were killed in the fighting.

Braddock was taken by his officers to a stream, which Bob Messner, a local historian, said was probably at the corner of what today is Braddock Avenue and 13th Street in Braddock. There, his wounds were tended before he was taken across the river. He died four days later.

The French and Indians did not pursue the fleeing British forces, but they were ruthless to the wounded left behind.

According to Kopperman, the French and Indians stayed behind in North Braddock, drinking the whiskey in the wagons, taking the several thousand British pounds that were in the general's war chest, and reading Braddock's private papers, which provided a history of the expedition and proof that while the English were claiming peaceful intentions of a westward expansion, they had been preparing for war.

After the battle, some of the British and Colonial soldiers who had been captured were brought back to Fort Duquesne, where they were tortured for hours, then killed.

The death toll on the British side was 606: 456 British regulars and 150 civilian followers. The dead were mostly left where they fell on what is now Bell Avenue and the low-lying areas of North Braddock.

Five years after the battle, according to Kopperman's book, Col. Jehu Eyre of the British army went riding in the area. Kopperman quotes his description of the scene, written 245 years ago:

"When we came to the place where they crossed of the Monongahela, we saw a great many men's bones along the shore. We kept along the road about 1 1/2 miles, where the first engagement begun, where there are men's bones lying about as thick as the leaves do on the ground; for they are so thick that one lies on top of another for about a half a mile in length and about one hundred yards in breadth."

Where those bones once lay in the sun, across the street from Stell's house, she has planted a row of four-o'clock flowers against a crumbling retaining wall. The flowers bloom in the evenings, but she wants the shoots to be tall enough to dress her street up a little for the people who will come to her neighborhood on Saturday, so they too can look around and think what it was like 250 years ago, when so many soldiers fought and died in a war that had not yet been declared.