Bean Hill's Past, Present, and Future

It’s black leather and measures five inches by nine inches, with a firm clasp along the top rim and is filled with a host of things depicting the life of a teen age girl in the 1950s.

The dusty clutch bag was found secreted away in an opening of an interior wall of Canary Labs, a state-of-the-art computer services business.

Started in 1985 by Martinsburg residents Ed and Gary Stern, Canary is described on the company web site as a time-series data base built for industrial automation. Canary develops “solutions from the end user’s perspective.”

For the locals, they are the Stern boys who write computer software and saved the Brownstone building on Bean Hill.

Officially known as the Morrison Cove High School, the striking structure sitting high on the hill outside Martinsburg has had a colorful past beginning with the inception as an educational facility around the start of the 1900s.

Initially to be a teachers college and/or a university, the two-story building plus basement and attic was well on its way to completion when funding dried up and things came to a halt. Around 1917, a new owner stepped in and it opened as a vocational school in 1918.

A few years later it evolved into a high school operating until spring of 1960 when Central High School was completed and was utilized as a junior high for nine years till the Spring Cove Junior High opened.

Save the Brownstone

Efforts to save the Brownstone over the next decade and a half were nearly as colorful as the first 20 years when it was being developed.

But after its educational use appeared exhausted and bowing to public pressure over cost concerns to maintain the aging old girl, the Spring Cove School Board in 1977 offered it and just under eight acres for sale at public auction.

The board rejected the highest offer at $15,000 from school alumni and a group calling itself Cove Educational and Professional Associates (CEPA).

The high bidder’s plan was to use the building as a vocational-technical center but the money apparently wasn’t enough for a board majority sparking suggestions that the district may, at some point, have use for it.

In December 1977, the board decided to keep and renovate the gymnasium annexed to the brownstone in 1938, a move that came after CEPA rejected the boards asking price of $25,000 for the original portion of the complex.

Nearly a year later, records show, the school board voted to demolish the school at a cost of just under $15,000. This prompted immediate court protection with a class action suit filed in Blair County Court by nine alumni.

A preliminary restraining order was issued by Blair County Judge Robert Campbell followed by a 40-day extension in the hopes both sides could reach an agreement.

At about this time the state’s historic preservation officer toured the building and Cove High was named to the Pennsylvania Inventory of Historic Places, preventing its demolition.

Canary Labs moves in

Fast forward a number of years and the school came into the hands of the nonprofit alumni association and eventually sold to Martinsburg natives Ed and Gary Stern for use as a business enterprise.

Their father Paul Stern, now 101 of Agway Road, was a 1939 graduate of Cove High, but the move had little to do with sentiment.

Ed Stern recalls its was 1985 when he and brother Gary decided high tech was where they wanted to be and the most logical location was Philadelphia.

After getting Canary Labs off the ground, despite being forced to move every couple years, they started looking toward home.

Suitable rental property was a problem but after talking to Dick Metzler of the nonprofit alumni association which had sold shares years ago to make the acquisition, the Cove High building started looking pretty good.

“We bought all the shares, we paid $75,000 and everybody got their money back,” Ed said.

Canary initially rented two rooms but the potential for expansion was the motivation needed to ignite the business.

The purchase marked just the beginning of the financial outflow which reached more than $600,000 to replace the roof, windows and renovate the interior.

The horse hair plaster was replaced and the 20-foot-high ceilings were lowered to 15 foot.

“It took us a while but it’s completely refurbished,” he said. “We have room for growth.”

A costly endeavor was removal of the connecting hall linking the old building to the gymnasium, which remains property of the school district.

The goal was to keep all parts of the brownstone exterior looking the same, and undamaged brownstone from a burned out church in Huntingdon was the answer. The gaping hole left when the hall was removed was filled in at the northern end with a period style door and the salvaged brownstone.

Now at 25 employees, Ed thinks growth to about 50 would feel comfortable and Canary is viewed as an up and coming tech business by many across the network.

“We are a very valued company, we get three to five concrete calls a week wanting to buy us,” Ed said.

What Canary is doing is a lot more than software development. It’s about data collection and storage.

A company is having a quality issue they can’t solve and Canary starts monitoring humidify or any number of factors that impact on production. Be it oil, gas or fracking production problems, or the manufacture of quality widgets, Canary collects data and starts looking for an answer.

Rising quickly on the horizon is Canary’s work for the U.S. Department of Defense.

“We’re one of the best in the world at storing data,” he said.

The forgotten purse

But enough about 21st Century interests, back to that purse which remains as one of Canary’s collectibles.

It contains a drivers license in the name of high school student Helen Louise Black, an identification card listing her height at 5’2” and weight listed as “guess,” a vehicle registration card and miscellaneous items including facial powder, pens and pencils, handwritten notes, aspirin, nail file and a key.

Folks from Canary speculate that most likely someone was playing a prank on Helen and hid the purse in a small wall opening.

As a side note, 1954 graduate of Bean Hill Jack Kauffman of Martinsburg recalls that the cafeteria staff played on the nickname given the old school.

“The Friday lunch menu was baked beans and hot dogs,” he wrote in a letter to The Morrisons Cove Herald.