Steel City Blitz
For those of you that have followed our WPIAL coverage on Steel City Blitz for a while, you’ll recall my project of attempting to visit every high school football stadium in Western Pennsylvania. This is a first-person account of my family visiting different towns and stadiums throughout the region and the things we learned about the areas. After not being able to make it to any games last year, the Tour of the WPIAL got back on the road this year. The South Park visit was our 11th trip. You can check out the summaries of our previous visits to Rochester, Southmoreland, West Greene, Sto-Rox, Laurel, Belle Vernon, Seneca Valley, Dormont Stadium (to see both Keystone Oaks and Bishop Canevin), and Laurel Highlands. We also visited Mapletown in 2022 but I never got around to writing a summary of that visit. Last year our only visit was to South Park. This year, we finally got out to a game at the newly renovated Jim Garry Stadium, home of the two-time defending WPIAL 1A Champions Fort Cherry!
WPIAL Championships: 2 (2023, 2024)
PIAA Championships: 0 (Lost in 2023 State Championship Game)
Municipalities: McDonald Borough, Midway Borough, Robinson Twp, Mount Pleasant Twp
McDonald Borough spans the Allegheny County and Washington County line, while the other three municipalities that make up Fort Cherry are fully located within Washington County.
The school district is named for the historic “Cherry’s Fort” a family-owned frontier fort that was built by European settlers in the early 1770s. The fort was established by Thomas Cherry in 1774 after his family moved to the frontier from northern Virginia where the profitability of his tobacco farm was significantly impacted by the British Credit Crisis of 1772-73. Cherry purchased three tracts of land in what is now Mount Pleasant Twp. The Fort itself was established at the outset of Lord Dunmore’s War between English colonists of Virginia and Native American tribes of the Ohio valley to serve as refuge and protection for the settlers of the area. Cherry’s Fort was a triangular arrangement of three log buildings connected by stockade walls. Many of the frontier forts back in pre-revolutionary era were not staffed by soldiers but rather the frontiersmen themselves served as “rangers.” Unfortunately, the Fort itself was lost to the passage of time, but the Historic Fort Cherry Association has done excellent work cataloging accounts and parsing out historical facts. Mount Pleasant Township was established in 1806. Interestingly, next year (2026) when the Township celebrates its 220th Anniversary, they will open a time capsule that was buried in the lobby floor of their municipal building when it was built in 1976.
McDonald was originally settled by John McDonald in 1775 as a trading outpost. In the 1860s to serve the local mining communities a railroad connection was made through the town and it was incorporated into a Borough in 1889. Shortly thereafter, oil was discovered and the town saw a...
