A walk in the neighborhood can be quite enlightening.
Deborah Rust was taking a stroll around the Traditions of America Richland active adult community when she encountered fellow retiree Bob Graham, commenting on keeping the grass alive in summer heat.
“After we talked a little bit more, he said, ‘Oh, ma’am, I have watered a lot of things in my day. I used to be the night watchman here at Pittsburgh Cut Flower,’” she said. “Well, that led to a lot of discussion.”
For more than a century, the property off Bakerstown Road that now is the site of their neighborhood served as the base for a large-scale horticultural operation. Graham and two other Traditions of America residents, brothers Frank and Keith Sakelhide, are former employees.
Rust arranged for them to give a community presentation about Pittsburgh Cut Flower, with about 45 people attending and many more wishing they could have made it.
The company was founded by Swiss immigrant Fred Burki in 1884. Among its employees were migrant workers from Puerto Rico and wives of coal miners from Culmerville.
The Sakelhide brothers and Graham eventually joined the crew.
“They all worked there from the time they were school age up until high school, and then they all became very successful men,” Rust reported, with Graham having a career in technology, Keith Sakelhide in law and Frank Sakelhide as a teacher, at one point serving as president of the Moon Area Education Association.
As part of their Pittsburgh Cut Flower presentation, the trio talked about performing maintenance jobs.
“In the summer, they had to whitewash the greenhouses, and it was extremely hot. And then they would have to gas the greenhouses with nicotine to the soil, and wear gas masks,” Rust said, referencing a practice that supposedly would help plants grow at a faster rate. “When they had to paint or repair the glass, they wore stilts because of the height of the greenhouses.”
She said they expressed fond memories of their co-workers from Puerto Rico:
“They’d talk about playing baseball with these migrant workers, and how good they were. They actually had a field on the other side of Bakerstown Road, the north side.”
Pittsburgh Cut Flower closed in 1991. The property remained idle for more than 20 years as the greenhouses collapsed.
Meanwhile, Sewickley-based nonprofit Allegheny Land Trust attempted to buy the property to preserve as green space. But according to Rust, a New York real estate broker purchased 104 acres in 2016 and partnered with Traditions of America to develop a 55-and-older community that today consists of 163 households: 121 single-family homes and 42 duplexes.
“It’s an amazing group of people from all over the United States,” she said.
The portion of the property where Burki lived, at the intersection of Bakerstown and North Montour roads, eventually became the home of Brian and Nancy Newhouse. A 2022 Pine Creek Journal article written by Brian on behalf of the Richland History Group states:
“Flowers grown in Bakerstown were taken to the Gibsonia train station to ship to the Pittsburgh Cut Flower distribution center, on Liberty Avenue in the Strip District, for wholesale.
“In these years of booming business, Cut Flower was one of the largest employers in Richland, employing about 200 people.
“They grew roses, carnations, mums and many other flowers and greens. At its peak, it was the largest cut flower business in Pennsylvania, producing 2.5 million roses per year.” …
“Pittsburgh Cut Flower also was referred to as ‘Crystal Farm,’ because when frost was on the lighted greenhouse campus, it glistened like a crystal city. It has been said that commercial airline flights often used the light emitted from the greenhouses as a landmark night beacon as they approached Pittsburgh Airport.
“But in the mid-1970s, as transportation became better and faster, it became significantly cheaper to import cut flowers from a warmer climate than to grow them in the northern states.”
According to Newhouse, Fred Burki’s last direct male descendant, son Albert, died in 1982.