History & local legend
The sandstone house above Tenmile Creek near Clarksville was the home of United Mine Workers reformer Joseph 'Jock' Yablonski, his wife Margaret and their daughter Charlotte. All three were murdered there in December 1969 after Yablonski challenged the union's leadership.
The house had already been the scene of a fatal confrontation. On January 30, 1939, when it served as a boarding house, Pennsylvania State Police Corporal George Dewey Naughton was killed while approaching an armed man barricaded upstairs. A local historian later recalled seeing a bullet scar in the stair rail.
After the Yablonski killings, stories circulated about screams, gunshots and blood appearing on the walls of the boarded-up house. A contributor recalling those rumors in 2010 described them as stories told in the community, rather than encounters the contributor had personally witnessed.
Sources
- Ten Mile Creek Country, the writer’s interview with a relative who witnessed the 1939 standoff and his own recollection of the staircase
- Society of Architectural Historians, Yablonski House, description and ironmaster’s house history
- ExplorePAHistory, Joseph A. “Jock” Yablonski historical marker, family and 1969 assassinations
- 2010 message board contributor listing and disputing the house rumors
- Ten Mile Creek Country, Caldwell’s 1876 Clarksville town plan and the long-disappeared bridge into Corbett’s Mill
