Photo by Greg Reedy

Bob Imhof works at North Central as a Procurement Outreach Director (PTAC). He also is active with the Ridgway Heritage Council and Ridgway wrestling.

By Greg Reedy
Sports Editor

Bob imhof's interests are wide, varied and connected.
From wrestling to history to community involvement, Imhof has documented and explored his interests.
Imhof works at North Central as a Procurement Outreach Director (PTAC). He also is active with the Ridgway Heritage Council and Ridgway wrestling.
He always has been interested in history.
"It was something I was just naturally good at in school," Imhof said. "It just seemed to come very easily with memorizing certain things. I jokingly tell people I can't draw a straight line with a ruler, yet I can visually memorize almost anything I see, I can tell where you it is. My brother is the same way, he's an author."
One part of history Imhof spoke about was the interpretation of it.
"I always tell people history is open to interpretation," Imhof said. "It depends firstly upon who wrote it, what point and time they did write it and what their relationship might have been to the history they are documenting. As much history as I have read, very often I find conflicts, to be perfectly honest about it, between what one person said and what somebody else said, what the dates are. History is what it is. None of us have the luxury of going back and reliving it. All we can do is take it from a person's point of view and their documentation and say it's pretty close or that's what the family said anyway.
"There are a lot more people interested in history than you would believe," Imhof said. "Most of us when you say history in high school would say, 'Oh, God, I got to take history, that's disgusting.'  It isn't so much specifically the history of the great tanning industries which were all over this part of Pennsylvania, it became more the fact that someone's great-grandfather grew up in that town and worked in that building. That's the connection where you pull people into history. It's their personal relationship to it at some level."
As Imhof enjoyed history more and more, he began to research history in railroads.
"As that love of history progressed further on, I tied in railroading history because my grandfather was a railroader on the Pittsburgh Shawmut and Northern which in its day was a very significant railroad to this part of Pennsylvania," Imhof said. "By that extension, I started going into the history of all the narrow gauge railroads, the lumbering railroads which many people view as the mass great extractions that took place. Each of these are interconnected with my natural aptitude, things I enjoy. Being involved in history led me to the Heritage Council which focuses on economic development strategy, revitalization of the town but also relates to the history of our town. Why is Ridgway here? Why did it become such a major industrial area like it did? That always takes you back to the history part of it with Ridgway being located here because of the river."
Imhof specifically enjoyed researching the importance of the railroads to Ridgway.
"The significance of the railroad system here, certainly until Oct. 17, 1864, the area here was very dependent upon the river with extremely sub-standard and non-existent roads for moving goods and services in and out of this area of Pennsylvania and Ridgway as a town," Imhof said. "When the connector was finally finished, then known as the Philadelphia and Erie railroad, which became part of the much grander Pennsylvania railroad system, when it was completed across the plateau, which is where we are, it really began to create greater markets for what was going on here already, had been going on for when the town was originally founded in 1824. You're looking at a space of 40 years there where Ridgway didn't develop very much. It had a very minimal, gradual increase. The mechanism for moving everything was the river. Most of the markets we had were downriver, being Pittsburgh and beyond. Once the railroad was built, then you had markets that were back to the East Coast in Philadelphia, the areas all the way coming across up through Sunbury in Northumberland County and across all the way to the Port of Erie. As they describe in the history books, essentially you're connecting two coasts. When you say that, people think Pacific to Atlantic, no, Atlantic to the coast of Lake Erie."  
As a part of Ridgway Heritage Council, Imhof is looking to better the community of Ridgway.
"As a non-profit corporation that looks at revitalization and doing things that will hopefully benefit our community, one of the other avenues we pursued is looking at the history of the town and why it developed and how we can express or let people that come here to visit and even local citizens understand in greater detail how significant Ridgway was as a community at one time," Imhof said. "That's the history connection that you invariably look at. But if you document or you have a good feel of where you came from, you might have a good idea of where you're going. What we're seeing is some of the people have a really strong feeling about architecture or the history of the town, railroading. There's a whole group of different subjects within this history that Heritage Council looks at. It's a way of in some respects, marketing Ridgway as a community."
One project which interested Imhof was investigating stone quarries in the land within the triangle of Ridgway, Johnsonburg and St. Marys.
"I just spent most of the summer and even some of the early fall exploring the area up behind where the high school is," Imhof said. "If you were to use (Route) 120 from Ridgway to St. Marys, (Route) 255 from St. Marys to Johnsonburg and (Route) 219 from Johnsonburg to Ridgway, it's a triangle with those three highways. You take all the land that's in between it, I spent most of the summer exploring it, documenting it and there's just an inordinate number of stone quarries or sites where you can tell that our pioneer ancestors and even somewhat more modern people were utilizing the tremendous sandstone outcroppings on these hills that were buildings of every type you can imagine. I found some stones just about a month ago that were cut to almost the size of my desk. They didn't move them for some reason. It's an amazing operation all over the hills of Ridgway."
Imhof did specific research on the quarries.
"I photographed it and GPSed it so I have almost all the details," Imhof said. "I have all the trails marked and anything I consider a very specific feature. I’m not a geologist by training. I’m making observations of things that I see and it’s amazing that those stone formations are around here."
Imhof said since he knew it was there, it was logical for him to investigate.
"It just seemed to me that it was a logical extension of the railroads which were built using stuff," Imhof said. "I thought 'OK, where did it all come from.' I knew it was there because I grew up in Ridgway. We always knew about these quarries and these stone outcroppings. I never had gotten into the sense of literally taking the geographic area and documenting it."
Imhof spoke of what the pioneers dealt with.
"It’s like I’ve told people, our pioneer ancestors came here in the late 1700s, they had three things in great abundance, they had lots of trees because it was like an unbroken forest for almost hundreds of miles, they had lots and lots of river because we do have an amazing watershed on this plateau, I think people tend to take it for granted at times, and we had a whole lot of rock," Imhof said. "They had all these wonderful ideas about turning this into great farming areas and it just didn’t work with very rare exceptions over toward St. Marys."
Imhof said the area today is much different than what it was in the past.
"I tell people you can’t look at his landscape and think that’s the way it was when Mr. Gillis and Mr. Ridgway came in the 1800s," Imhof said. "It’s dramatically different than what it would have looked like then. But it did have these assets that are still here. The watershed for great water supply, stone for building and tremendous forests of almost entirely conifer. The forests right now are almost the exact opposite of when the first pioneers came to Pennsylvania. In those days it was 80 percent conifer and 20 percent hard and soft wood. That 80 percent, about 20 percent was white pine which Mr. Ridgway liked because he was a work merchant seaman, that’s how he made all his money in building ships, the white pine trees were major components in ship mass and decking and stuff like that. Now our forests are 80 percent hard and soft wood and 20 percent conifer. So it’s almost completely flipped in the space of 200 years."
In addition to history, Imhof is heavily involved with working to make Ridgway a better place to live.
"It’s just being involved in a community. It’s being willing to take the time to look at the things that you like, the things that attract you personally and say I can be part of something great or has a positive benefit to your town," Imhof said. "We have recognition as a wrestling community; we have recognition as a pretty forward thinking historic community. All these are sort of tieins to how to make it better. It’s a quality of life issue. If you work on these things and because of everything I work on in my office with Pennsylvania Wilds and Lumber Heritage Region, all that stuff, it is to look at community development with better jobs and a nicer community to live in. You work on these individual things, it’s not only to develop some tourism industry but it’s in the long run to develop a more significant quality of life for those that live here. If all this work that I do never brings another tourist here but it increases the quality of life and the sense of place that the people in Ridgway have, then I will have accomplished my job."
Ridgway is also a National Historic District.
"Because we have a national historic district for one thing, we've gone through a substantial amount of effort to kind of lay out what is classified by the National Park Service as the Historic District of Ridgway with its architecture and almost 700 contributing properties which is pretty big for a town this size, that's actually a very, very large historic district," Imhof said. "Having that designation from a visual point of view gives people a feel for people really care about this community and about the history that developed it as a town. A lot of this goes in an indirect sense toward marketing and the recognition of the town for its accomplishments or history."
Imhof spoke about how he balances his time.
"You just work a lot, that’s all. You just learn how to do it," Imhof said. "It’s like in the modern world, everybody has to learn how to multi-task. I know Europeans look at us like we’re crazy because we work so many hours. Having spent time in England and France, you get comments from Europeans. They get six weeks of vacation over there. With what we have developed within our economy, you have to find ways to pay for that stuff. You may work more than one job. In my case, my work outside of working here at the office isn’t stuff I get paid for nor would I want to get paid for it, it’s for the satisfaction you gain from doing something and saying I was involved in that."
One project Imhof is excited about is working on the train station.
"We’re working on the train station right now; we’ve been given a little bit of latitude by the railroad with Michelle coordinating a lot of this as Main Street Manager with their real estate manager to work on it," Imhof said. "It’s a major asset to our town visually."
Imhof is grateful for what the Allegheny National Forest brings to this area and to him.
"I have my occasions of solitude. If I didn’t have these woods, I’d be crazier than I am already. That is my therapy is to spend time in the woods," Imhof said. "The forests around this community are the history of it. It’s the reason people came here. It’s a different structure to the forest now than it was 200 years ago but it’s still that visual element you can look at. In many respects, I don’t think people really understand the amazing asset that in and around this community. I understand the argument from the other side. This land is an amazing asset to us if we learn to utilize it."
Moving forward, Imhof would like to see more community involvement from everyone to better this area. He said anyone can by extremely useful.
"All you have to do is willing to work, be willing to part of the process. I would love to see more involvement, we need more involvement. It can’t be done all by the same group of people. Everybody’s important. It takes everybody to do this stuff. I can’t do it all myself. I would love to have more people be a part of this community and the vision because it’s their community as much as mine."