A red, white and blue rewind
Despite mixed mood, country celebrated bicentennial with fireworks, fanfare
Just 536 days before the United States celebrated its 200th anniversary on July 4, 1976, President Gerald Ford stood in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives and said something Americans were not accustomed to hearing from their commander-in-chief.
“I must say to you that the state of the union is not good,” Ford said, pointing to the millions of Americans out of work, an economy that was limping through a long recession and inflation that seemingly couldn’t be brought to heel.
Then there was the lingering hangover from Watergate, the scandal that led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation, and the bitter taste left by the Vietnam War, which officially ended in April 1975, three months after Ford’s downbeat State of the Union Address. The mid-1970s may have been the era of wide lapels, garish plaid, platform shoes and disco, but Americans as a whole may not have been ready to celebrate the bicentennial with total abandon.
Still, the celebrations went ahead. And it was a big deal.
More than 1 billion bicentennial quarters were put in circulation by the U.S. Mint. Commemorative plates found their way into American homes, as did miniature replicas of the Liberty Bell, bars of soap, pins and an avalanche of other trinkets. On July 4, 1976, which fell on a Sunday, NBC-TV offered live coverage of events around the country all day, as did CBS-TV, which bounced between the Grand Canyon, Guam, Independence Hall in Philadelphia and New York Harbor, which was filled with more than 200 vessels.
Planning for the bicentennial had started years before, and Uniontown had its own bicentennial commission. On that Fourth of July 50 years ago, skydivers leapt out of planes over Bailey Park, and in Marshall Park, a “Uniontown U.S.A.” program happened, with Mayor Robert Jones citing a proposed downtown mall as being a top priority.
An estimated 3,000 people traveled to Fort Necessity in Farmington the day before the Fourth of July to see reenactors and hear “the rattling musket fire” and “patriotic music,” as Uniontown’s Evening Standard put it, marking the 222nd anniversary of the battle at the fort.
Connellsville had a “Grand Finale Day” on July 3, 1976, with the dedication of a new city hall, and in Brownsville celebrations happened Saturday and Sunday at Nemacolin Castle, with a variety of arts and crafts displays. Redstone Township had a horse show and Uniontown’s Morning Herald and Evening Standard jointly published a special 55-page bicentennial edition.
An editorial in the Morning Herald said the Fourth of July “is being celebrated throughout the land this weekend, but with added emphasis, as Americans mark the 200th anniversary of their country’s birth.”
It continued, “There is, really, only one way we can adequately observe America’s bicentennial, and only one enduring legacy we can leave to future generations. This is by each American in 1976 making a declaration in his heart of renewed devotion to the ideas that motivated the Americans of 1776.”
The festivities were marred by a couple of mishaps – a 14-year-old boy drowned in the Youghiogheny River and a 29-year-old Millsboro businessman was killed in a boating accident on the Monongahela River.
The Greene Academy in Carmichaels, a portion of which was built in 1790, was rededicated during the bicentennial weekend. It began its life as an Episcopal church, and a service like one that would have unfolded in the late 1700s was held.
The Greene County Historical Society was open throughout the weekend, Mt. Morris had a parade the day after the Fourth of July, and officials at Ryerson Station State Park near Wind Ridge were bracing for crowds of campers.
To the north, in Washington County, there was a fireworks show at what was then called Franklin Mall and later became Crown Center. A replica of the Liberty Bell had pride of place in Canonsburg’s Fourth of July parade, and parents of babies born at hospitals in the county on July 4, 1976, were given specially designed birth registration notices that had the signatures of Gov. Milton Shapp and Lt. Gov. Ernest Kline.
At the same time, six people were injured in separate car accidents in Peters Township that weekend, and Washington police kicked off Fourth of July early that Sunday morning by raiding a home in Washington’s West End that had been functioning as a speakeasy. Nine officers confiscated alcohol and arrested a 57-year-old man.
And on that Fourth of July 50 years ago, Ford again talked to the country. At the National Archives in Washington, D.C., which houses the original Declaration of Independence, Ford said the United States was special “because it is one of the only nations on Earth to construct a successful democracy.”
He continued, “Here as the Declaration asserts, the people govern. And here, as the Constitution shows, the people choose to govern through a system of laws that accords equal rights to every person, regardless of race or religion. As the American experiment took hold, others tried to become democracies; more often than not, they failed. So that today America is one of the only nations to carry that torch into the future.”