Quote of the day:

This recipe is certainly silly. It says to separate two eggs, but it doesn’t say how far to separate them.
—Gracie Allen

I’m not sure when I first heard about what I’m calling Richland’s Urban Legend, but I’m sure it was shortly after we moved to the borough in 1957. 

My recollection is that I’ve heard it phrased in a couple different ways, and I recall one time when I mentioned it to my mother, she corrected me. My mother was always correcting me, which is where I picked up my tendency to correct other people.

In case you were wondering about that.

Now you know.

My recollection is that back in those days, the 1950s and 60s, Richlandites tended to claim that Richland was the only town in the country that had railroad tracks that cut through the center of the town.

I was kinda dubious at the time. For one thing, the railroad didn’t really cut through the “center” of the town. There was maybe a quarter of the town on one side and three quarters on the other side. But OK, perhaps at one time it was the center. 

I think my mother corrected me by saying that no, it was that the railroad tracks ran through the intersection of Main and Race Streets; that was what was so unusual or possibly unique.

Still, how could anybody possibly know that Richland was the only town in the country where a railroad ran through the center (or sorta the center) of the town? Or if my mother was right, that it was the only town where the tracks cut through the intersection of two streets? And even if it had been true at one time, how could anyone be sure that some other town hadn’t bypassed Richland and built a railroad that did the exact same thing? 

And I mean, why would anybody care? It seemed such a piddling little thing to become a source of town pride.

But time passes and I forgot all about it until I saw the claim pop up in the Wikipedia article on Richland. And then Rob Weinhold repeated it in his book.

So I added it to my (long) list of things I wanted to write about.

Naturally over the course of time, the claim has evolved. No longer is it enough to say that Richland is the only town with railroad tracks that bisect the town. Richland’s Urban Legend has changed with the times.

Here is how the Wikipedia article on Richland puts it:

Richland has an active railroad crossing intersects the town square. The two streets that comprise the square, Main Street and Race Street, are the only streets linking the northern and southern portions of the borough. As a result, that crossing can divide the entire town. This quirk has earned Richland mention in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! books and on the televised game show, Jeopardy!.

There’s even a source for it: 7 Wonders of Lebanon County

Alas, that web page is no longer active, but the Wayback machine has it archived, and checking that we find that Richland’s claim is not one of the seven wonders but it’s number 48 on a list of also rans. Here is how it’s phrased there:

48. Richland: the only town in the country that has a Railroad crossing that cuts its town in half and intersects the town square. Listed in Ripley’s Believe It or Not books and it was also a Jeopardy question.

I’m still doubtful about the basic claim that Richland is the only town in country that is bisected by a railroad, but notice how the story has grown.  Now the railroad intersects the town square.

Wait. Richland has a town square?

Huh.

But putting the basic claim aside for a moment, there are now two additional appendages that perhaps can be verified: that the claim is listed in Ripley’s Believe It or Not books and it was also a Jeopardy! question.

According to Wikipedia there have been dozens of Ripley’s Believe It or Not books published over the decades, and I don’t have the stamina to check them all out, but I do have a question. Does anybody seriously believe that the Richland claim about the railroad intersecting the town square is so unbelievable that it deserves a place in one of those books?

The Jeopardy! question is a bit easier to track down. As it happens there is a fan-created site that archives all the Jeopardy! Trivia, including the players, the clues, and the questions. It’s the J! Archive. And it’s searchable!

All one has to do is type “Richland” into the search field and press the Search button and:

I don’t see anything about Richland, Pennsylvania in there. Do you?

Even without the evidence of the J! Archive, the idea of the Richland Urban Legend being a Jeopardy! question doesn’t pass the sniff test. That show revolves around trivia that well-informed, well-read folks are likely to know. Who, other than somebody from Richland, is going to know about Richland’s Urban Legend? Where, other than the Wikipedia article and that 7 Wonders of Lebanon County website (and Rob’s book), is anyone likely to encounter that little “fact”?

So it was never a Jeopardy! question. I think it’s highly unlikely that you’ll find it in any Ripley book (but if you do, please let me know and send me a jpg). 

And what about the claim itself of Richland being the only town bisected by a railroad intersecting the town square? I’m still doubtful, but until someone can show evidence of another such town, I guess I’ll have to leave that claim as not proven one way or the other.

Still, I have one more question. How did the legend begin?

While there’s no way to know for sure, I can take a wild guess. Probably at some point in Richland’s past—it would have been before 1957 when we moved there, and I’d guess probably a few decades earlier, because my mother seemed to know it as something she had learned in her childhood—some worker from the Reading Railroad would have been in town and casually mentioned that he had never seen railroad tracks that crossed the intersection of two streets like those tracks crossed the intersection of Main and Race Streets. And the story grew from there.

Somewhere along the line it expanded to include dividing the town in half (which it never did) and that being easier to understand, that’s how it was often repeated. Or at least that’s how I recalled it.

Then in recent decades, as the story was repeated a few dozen more times, it developed those Jeopardy! and Ripley appendages. Anyone who has ever played that children’s game Telephone will understand.

As far as Richland having a town square, before the automated railroad gates were installed sometime around 1959 or 1960, the intersection of those two streets did form more of a square, but when the automated gates were installed, they cut back the curbs and rejiggered the townscape, so it no longer has the feeling of a town square. At one time there had been a grassy area next to the intersection, but they paved paradise and now it’s a parking lot, and the only thing left is that evergreen tree that presumably still gets decorated at Christmas time.

I wonder if that’s still the same evergreen tree that was there when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s?

Note: the pictures in this post are ones that I took in 2013 on a visit to Richland with my aunt and uncle Jane and Allen. They’re the only ones that show the railroad tracks in the background. I didn’t specifically take a photo of the actual intersection as I didn’t anticipate needing one at the time.