The Ivyside Park Drownings

 

Ivyside Park with pool in foreground

Located in the northwest portion of the city, Penn State Altoona can trace its roots back to 1939, when the Altoona Undergraduate Center opened in the old Webster Grade School building, a four-story structure constructed in 1870 on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 10th Street. A second downtown building, the old Madison Grade School at Sixth Avenue and Seventh Street, was purchased for use as a science center the following year. After the Second World War, as men returned home from the battlefield, both buildings soon became overfilled and admission was limited to students living within thirty miles of the city. The Altoona Undergraduate Center's Advisory Board began looking for a newer and larger space, and the solution to this problem came in 1947 when the Advisory Board purchased a defunct thirty-eight-acre amusement park known as Ivyside.

The Ivyside Park Campus continued to expand over the years, with the Advisory Board purchasing adjacent land as it became available. Today, the Penn State Altoona campus covers over 171 acres and contains over thirty buildings. At the heart of the campus is a reflecting pool, the last surviving remnant of a warming dam which once fed Ivyside Park's massive concrete swimming pool. There is one particularly sad tragedy associated with the old Ivyside pool--a tragedy involving a distraught mother who drowned herself and her two children one spring evening in 1930.

The Early Days of Ivyside

Long before the first concession stand or amusement park ride was built, Ivyside was a popular woodland picnic area and swimming hole used by local church groups, fire companies and other civic organizations. This picnic area was part of Ivyside Farm, which was owned by a devout Christian named Lewis Gwin. A small dam was erected on Spring Run, creating a mill pond, and a large ice house operated by the Gwin brothers (Lewis' grandsons) stood near this site until 1909, when it was destroyed by fire. The earliest reference to Ivyside as a park comes from the Altoona Tribune of July 21, 1897, which listed Ivyside as the site of the annual picnic of the Chestnut Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church. The First United Brethren church picnic was held there the following weekend. By the early 1900s the park featured a baseball diamond and a guest cottage, and was serviced by the narrow-gauge "Wopsy Railroad" (Altoona & Wopsononock Railroad).

 

Advertisement for the 1940 season's opening day

 

In 1923, the growing popularity of the automobile inspired one member of the Gwin family to transform the rustic picnic grounds into a resort. A group of prominent businessmen, headed by Harry C. Gwin, set aside thirty acres, upon which a dance hall, tennis courts and pavilions were erected. The focal point of the resort, however, was an enormous swimming pool. Measuring 620 feet in length and nearly 200 feet in width, the pool boasted a steel diving tower, a white sand beach and an island with seven trees in its center. Nearly three million gallons of water from ice-cold Spring Run were required to fill the pool (the famous outdoor Crystal Pool at Knoebel's, by comparison, holds 900,000 gallons), and to keep the water a comfortable temperature, Gwin (who was a civil engineer by trade) constructed a shallow basin to warm the water before it was released into the pool. Fifteen hours were required to fill the pool, and a full twenty-four hours were required to drain it. Construction of the pool and bath house, which was supervised by John Hammond, required 200,000 feet of lumber, three thousand barrels of cement and 3,500 barrels of shale. At the time of its completion, the pool at Ivyside was heralded as the largest concrete swimming pool in the world.

Although construction of the pool was still incomplete, Ivyside Park opened to great fanfare on June 26, 1924, with buses departing Altoona every hour and employees handing out free coffee, lemonade and lollipops. The pool and bath house opened on August 9. The two-story bath house contained one thousand private lockers on the first floor and a whopping two thousand dressing rooms on the second floor. Six lifeguards were stationed at the pool at all times. By the following year, the park featured a roller coaster named the "Sky Rocket" and a children's "aeroplane swing". It would later add a skating rink, bowling alley, shooting galleries and a merry-go-round.
 

The park as it appeared in 1930

First Fatality

The first drowning at the Ivyside pool occurred on June 27, 1925, when eight-year-old James McCauley sank into the water without a sound or a struggle. It was a strange death, as the child's body was lying at the bottom of the pool and showed no signs of cramping. This led physicians to believe that the boy must have suffered heart failure before drowning. A similar death also occurred in July of 1926 when 24-year-old Virgil Martin died while diving into the deep end of the pool. However, considering the vast number of swimmers and bathers who visited the park, tragedies at Ivyside were far and few between. But, of the small number of tragedies which took place at Ivyside, none were as sensational as the deaths of Katherine Stehman and her two young children in May of 1930.

The Ivyside Murders

A.R. McGee, a driver for the Logan Valley Bus Company, was working the evening shift on Thursday, May 29. At 9:55 that evening, McGee stopped at Eleventh Avenue and Twelfth Street. A woman dressed in black boarded the bus with her two small children and took a seat among the twenty or so passengers. At the next stop at Twelfth Avenue and Sixteenth Street, McGee noticed that the woman was sitting contentedly, writing a note onto a piece of paper while her children happily munched popcorn. The bus driver, being of an observant nature and having driven the same route for years, was curious, as most of the passengers were regulars on his route. He knew their names and faces as well as those of his own family, but he had never seen this woman before. The three strangers finally descended from the bus at the Ivy Park station, the mother leading her children by the hand into the darkness. McGee concluded that the woman must be visiting a relative near the park. He thought no more about the matter until the following morning.

It was sometime around 7:30 on the morning of May 30, 1930, when a group of boys playing around the breast of the park pool stumbled across a woman's coat, hat and umbrella. Nearby they found a child's tam-o-shanter bonnet, partially filled with popcorn. The curious boys made a closer inspection and discovered a pocketbook containing two handwritten notes. Both notes were identical, and both were addressed to the same man, John Stehman. But it was the content of the notes which caused the boys to run away screaming for help, for the note read: I have drowned myself and two children. John, I hope you will forgive me. Please notify my relatives. I have $10 in a savings bank in Altoona. I love you.

The boys' alarm was heard by workmen at the park, who rushed to the pool and quickly located the body of a woman in five feet of water. The body of a boy was found shortly thereafter at a depth of three feet. Though it was obvious the victims were dead, the workmen immediately summoned a physician, then resumed their search for the third body. 

The search was still going on when Coroner Chester Rothrock reached the scene. Rothrock ordered several rowboats to be placed into the pool, but, despite several hours of searching, the second child's body could not be found. At around noon, John Stehman was located at his brother's house on Sixth Street. He soon arrived at the park and identified the bodies as those of his 37-year old wife Katherine and their four-year-old son, John Kenneth. Their daughter, two-year-old Katherine Edwina, was still somewhere beneath the cold water. 

1938 aerial photo of Ivyside pool. The warming dam still remains on the Penn State Altoona campus.

 

Coroner Rothrock instructed park workmen to drain the pool. The gates were thrown open and the water rapidly flowed out, but the immense size of the pool made this a painfully slow process. Gordon Smith, one of the lifeguards, made repeated dives into the deeper waters, but the painfully cold water soon brought an attack of cramps. Another lifeguard attempted the same method, but he, too, was seized by cramps. As the water slowly drained, the two lifeguards armed themselves with rakes and dragged the bottom of the pool from a rowboat. It wasn't until 1:30 in the afternoon when Gordon Smith found the body of the missing girl in the deep end of the pool. Held clenched in her hand with the chill of death were a few kernels of popcorn.

By this time, word of the tragedy had spread throughout the city and hundreds of curiosity seekers had surrounded the pool when limp form of the little girl was finally dragged to the edge by the lifeguards' numbed fingers and lifted from the water by park workmen, who immediately covered the body with blankets and carried it away from the gawking onlookers to the bath house. Undertaker Otto Gilden took charge of the bodies and removed them to his funeral parlor at Eighth Avenue and Thirteenth Street.

When A.R. McGee learned of the triple tragedy at Ivyside, he contacted Coroner Rothrock and told him about the mysterious passengers he had picked up the night before. McGee went to the Gilden funeral parlor and identified the three victims as those who had boarded his bus the Eleventh Avenue and Twelfth Street bus stop. Based on McGee's timeline, the coroner concluded that Katherine Stehman, after removing her hat and coat and placing her belongings on the breast of the dam, walked to the pool's diving board with a child in each arm. After dropping her children into the water, Katherine stepped off the diving board and into eternity. Oddly, though two night watchmen were on duty until midnight, neither had seen anyone enter the park, nor had they heard a sound-- not the sound of children laughing or crying, not a cry for help, not even the sound of a splash in the darkness.

Establishing a Motive

Upon being questioned by the coroner, John Stehman was able to shed some light on the mystery of Katherine's rash behavior. At 7:30 on Thursday evening, just a few hours before she boarded McGee's bus, Katherine had appeared as a plaintiff before Alderman Robert A. Conrad of the Fourth Ward, having accused her husband of assault and battery and non-support. The children had accompanied Katherine to the hearing, along with her attorney, John Haberstroh. Alderman Conrad concluded the hearing by referring the case to the county court, instructing John and Katherine to appear in Hollidaysburg at nine o'clock on Monday morning. 

According to Alderman Conrad, Katherine Stehman wept bitterly during the hearing, declaring that she had no food left in her house. Her husband had left home after their last quarrel, taking up residence with a brother on Sixth Street. John Stehman neither protested his innocence nor admitted his guilt, but, for some reason, his wife found life too unbearable to make it through the weekend and apparently didn't hold out much hope of a Blair County judge ruling in her favor. Katherine, who was married previously to a railroad policeman, was no stranger to tragedy; her first husband, Joseph Lintner, had been killed in an accident seven years earlier at the Ninth Street rail yard. One can only imagine the emotional stress which must have accumulated inside of her for years, finally reaching the point where death seemed to offer the only relief from her burden. In her mind, Katherine no doubt believed that she was saving her children from a cold, cruel world which had gifted her nothing but sadness and pain.

Penn State Altoona

The Funeral and Aftermath

After Coroner Rothrock announced that no inquest would be held, the bodies of Katherine and her children were placed in three white coffins and remained at the funeral home until Sunday evening, June 1, when they were shipped on the 6:42 train to the home of Katherine's mother in Lancaster. it was reported that over three thousand people filed through the doors of the Gilden Funeral Home to view the bodies. On Monday, June 2, funeral services were held at the Groff Funeral Home in Lancaster, where hundreds more paid their final respects to the victims of one of Altoona's most heartbreaking tragedies. Afterwards, their bodies were laid to rest at Lancaster Cemetery. John Stehman, who was also a native of Lancaster County, never remarried and died in 1960. His bones repose not alongside his wife of children, but in a solitary grave at Rose Hill Cemetery in Altoona. 

As for the fate of Ivyside Park, the gilded dream of Harry C. Gwin died in 1946, one year after the death of the park's long-time manager (and Gwin's business partner), E. Raymond Smith. In August of that year, Smith's widow reached an agreement to sell the land to the Altoona Undergraduate Center. After the sale was finalized, the park's Sky Rocket roller coaster was torn down and its wood sold by the school's advisory board. Yet, one chilling reminder of the 1930 triple tragedy-- the old warming dam of Ivyside's world-famous swimming pool-- still remains as a focal point of the Penn State Altoona campus.

 

Sources:

Altoona Tribune, July 21, 1897.
Altoona Times, Sept. 25, 1909.
Altoona Mirror, July 12, 1923.
Altoona Tribune, June 24, 1924.
Altoona Tribune, Aug. 8, 1924.
Altoona Tribune, March 19, 1925.
Altoona Tribune, June 29, 1925.
Altoona Mirror, May 31, 1930.
Altoona Tribune, May 31, 1930.
Altoona Tribune, June 2, 1930.