We are at the half way point of our week’s vacation at Treasure Lake, located just outside the town of DuBois, Pennsylvania. DuBois, pronounced du boys, has lost what may have been the French pronunciation over the years….or maybe it has always been called du boys.
This area of Clearfield County was, and still is heavily forested and a good percentage of the early population was from France and was engaged in logging and lumbering. The town’s namesake, John DuBois, a descendant of French Huguenots, had a prosperous lumber mill among other enterprises. In fact, he owned the acreage where present day Treasure Lake is located. He purchased the land and gave it back to the citizens of DuBois as a place for recreation.
The pace of life in this community, which is plunked down in a richly forested area and is flirting with the Allegheny National Forest to the northwest, is quiet and calming. It is a retreat from the sometimes frenetic life in the city where we live. There aren’t even many places for me to get “connected,” which is the reason I have been out of circulation for a time.
Our condo abuts one of the golf courses and wild life is present everywhere, seemingly undaunted by humans.
We find time daily to get out and about after a leisurely morning. So far our destinations have included walking the streets of DuBois and Clearfield photographing the turn of the century homes and buildings, wandering the cemeteries in DuBois and Frenchville, photos of ancestral homes for my cousins, swimming and having some delicious dinners out.
Dubois Cemetery--How nice to supply a port-a-potty!
Over the years American Bridge has been responsible for designing and building hundreds of bridges and buildings in the United States and abroad. Some of the more notable are: the cable for The San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, The Verrazano Narrows Bridge in New York, the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower and the Mackinac Straits Bridge. These were all designed and constructed during his years with the company. 
A local Pittsburgh project that my grandfather worked on was the Civic Arena which had a motorized, retractable roof of fabric-coated plastic. During the early 1950’s, my aunt can remember her father working on the design of the Civic Arena every night at home. He had some form of blocks that were made to copy the drawings on paper and spent hours working with the blocks trying to figure out how to keep the roof of the circular building up. 
My Grandfather Hughes was employed by American Bridge his entire working life. He retired in 1961 after 48 years of service. He worked hard for two families during his lifetime. As a teen he added to the family earnings and once married he supported a wife and three children. My grandparents enjoyed a relaxing life after all the work years in warm and sunny St. Petersburg, Florida paid by a retirement plan provided by the company. 
