Incensed borough residents, though, drove the hooded marchers out of town in a violence-filled show of resistance in which Klansman Thomas Rankin Abbott of Washington County was killed. Craig wrote in a 2005 essay published in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies. “The original planning for the event, which involved an initiation ceremony of 1,000 new members and burning a massive cross, also included a late-night parade in regalia through the streets of Carnegie,” John M. And the Klan had a particular bias against people of that faith. 25, 1923, Evans and his minions targeted a community within walking distance of Forsyth Farm that had a strong concentration of Catholics, many of whom served as local leaders. In between pulling teeth, Evans (1881-1966) served as imperial wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and his presence helped ignite what would result in a successful short-term propaganda tool for his group of white supremacists. As the sun set on a summer Saturday a century ago, a dentist named Hiram Wesley Evans arrived at a Scott Township farm where as thousands of men already were gathered.

Peters township public library