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| Western Maryland Railway Station Visitors’ Center and Museum, now a de rigueur pitstop for GAPers (click on photos for enlargements) |
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| Just a small part of the elaborate model railroad display at the train station |
Directly across from the train station and only thirty-five feet from the GAP is the Inn on Main, an upscale bed and breakfast catering to GAPers. This is the ideal place to stay if you don’t want to be faced with the prospect of pedaling back up the steep hill from downtown Meyersdale (a 130-foot vertical climb from the corner of Meyers Avenue and Grant Street). The Inn’s motto, according to its website, is “Save your legs and stay on top of the hill. Conveniently located steps from the Great Allegheny Passage Trail.” The Inn has four rooms that go for about 150 bucks a night.
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| Inn on Main, within spitting distance of the GAP. |
Main Street proceeds down the steep hill from here, across the still-active tracks of the CSX Railroad. The Amtrak passenger train the Capitol Limited from Washington, D.C., to Chicago also goes this way (being a Limited, it doesn’t bother to stop in Meyersdale), although since November 2024 it has been temporarily folded into the Floridian, which runs from Chicago to Miami via Washington. Just across the tracks on Cherry Street to the left, a block off Main, is the Levi Deal Mansion Bed and Breakfast, a very upscale establishment favored by affluent GAPers. As we have seen, the mansion was built in 1900 by local tycoon Levi Deal, the great-grandson of Peter Deal, who first developed the area around the Deal Crossroads on the GAP. It has four rooms priced from $189 to $209 a night.
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| Levi Deal Mansion Bed and Breakfast, the self-proclaimed “Gem of the GAP” |
Further down Main Street on the left is the old Methodist Church, now the Cornerstone Apostolic Church. According to its website:
We believe the Bible is the infallible and authoritative Word of God (II Timothy 3:16; Ephesians 3:5; II Peter 3:2) . . . We believe that when a person receives the baptism of the Holy Spirit, that person will speak with other tongues under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:4; Acts 19:6; Isaiah 28:11) . . . We believe that the church will be raptured by Christ and will be with Him forever in eternity. (1 Thessalonians 4:15-18; 1 Corinthians 15: 51-52; 1 Thessalonians 1:10)
If you ride by the church on a Sunday morning and hear a preacher shouting at the top of his lungs and the congregation screaming, crying, and moaning, do not be alarmed. It’s just people getting into that old-time religion.
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| Cornerstone Apostolic Church |
Just across the street from the church is a large white two-story building. Now abandoned. It was once the Hazel McGilvery Hospital. It was here that I was born on Sunday, March 27, 19 – –. My mother distinctly remembered that I emerged into this Vale of Tears just as the Sunday morning bells were ringing at the Methodist church across the street, which would have been around 9:30 a.m. I was just one of the 225 babies born in the hospital that year.
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| Hazel McGilvery Hospital |
Just before the intersection of Main Street and Grant Street is the G.I. Dayroom Coffee Shop (5:00 a.m.–2:30 p.m. with all-day breakfast and a daily lunch special) and next to it the Corner Cup with all the usual specialty coffees (expect nothing but regular perked coffee at the Dayroom; they are generous with refills, however). Right across the street is a small park with four charging stations for electric bikes. I turn right on Grant Street and after .18 of a mile turn left on Broadway. A few hundred yards further on, Broadway crosses the Casselman River just below its confluence with Flaugherty Creek, which GAPers coming from Cumberland will have already crossed ten times since the Continental Divide. The GAP continues through the valley of the Casselman River thirty-one miles to its confluence with the Youghiogheny at the GAP town of Confluence (Turkeyfoot).
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| Confluence of Flaugherty Creek (left) and the Casselman River |
As we have seen, Flaugherty Creek, known first as Wolf Creek or Wolf Run, was named after an early arrival in the area around the confluence of the Casselman River and the creek that now bears his name. One account maintains that he did not settle here but soon moved on: “With the coming of the home seekers these hunters [Flaugherty and Jacob Casselman; see below] followed the vanishing herds of deer and elk into the blaze of the setting sun, leaving us to wonder.” According to another account, however, he did stick around:
The first manufacture of whiskey in what is now the borough of Meyersdale was by an Irishman by the name of Flaugherty . . . Flaugherty was a popular man in his time, and creek named after him has some of the same characteristics of the effects of his brew—it frequently gets on high, gets as full as it will hold and then follows seasons of depression. At all events this is how Flaugherty Creek got its name.
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| Flaugherty Creek flowing through Meyersdale. The retaining walls were built after Hurricane Hazel flooded the town on Oct 16, 1954, resulting in two deaths. Peter Meyers, for whom the town is named, drowned while crossing the creek near here. |
The still was reportedly located somewhere along what is now Keystone Street, which runs over a mile and a half from downtown Meyersdale to Glade City. The site of the still may have been later occupied by the Stahl Distillery and still later by the Buhl and Gatesman Distillery, now long out of business. Although the production of craft whiskeys has become a thing in Somerset County (there’s the Tall Pines Distillery in Salisbury, six miles south of Meyersdale), none is currently produced in Meyersdale (except perhaps for moonshine).
