Aug 21, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 4 min read

You may have heard of house music, the electronics-driven rhythms that have kept people dancing for decades.

The Rev. Alexander Blaine Brown took a different approach.

In the mid-19th century, perhaps while he was serving as president of Canonsburg’s Jefferson College, the clergyman and educator decided to compose an ode to his home on Old Oak Road in Peters Township. As the chorus goes:

Where-ever I may roam / Whether near or far from home / Back old Mount Blaine to me shall roll.

The tradition he started rolls on into the 21st century.

“For some reason, this house has always been inhabited by people with musical talent,” Daniel Zajdel, who owns the home with wife Laura, said. She is a Bethel Park native who sang with the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh for three decades, and their son Carson has earned three degrees in music-related studies.

Brown’s sons, all six of them, made a name for themselves vocally and instrumentally performing back in the day as the Brown Brothers, or on occasion, a Band of Brothers. Their abilities apparently came from their mother’s side of the family, too.

The former Elizabeth Finley Nevin was related to Robert Peebles Nevin, who wrote the campaign song for James K. Polk’s successful presidential bid. Ethelbert, Robert’s son, became one of the most esteemed American composers of the 1800s, with the U.S. Postal Service honoring him with a commemorative 10-cent stamp in 1940.

Mount Blaine actually came close to having another connection to a U.S. president. Alexander Brown named the home after the family of his mother, Mary, who in turn was related to James G. Blaine.

And as you know from American history class, Blaine lost the 1884 election to Grover Cleveland, with the candidates separated in the popular vote by less than a percentage point.

The Zajdels, who bought Mount Blaine in 1986, started researching their home’s background a year or two later.

“We knew we had a historic property here because of what the former owners had told us, but we didn’t know the details until we started digging into it,” Daniel said, and that was without the convenience of the Internet: “It meant physically going to the college library at Washington & Jefferson,” Daniel recalled, “and it meant going to the recorder of deeds office and looking through old indexes.”

It also meant him using vacation days for research, with county offices being open only Monday through Friday.

Newspapers helped, too. Zajdel said he was unaware of the Ethelbert Nevin link until he read an essay about it in the Observer-Reporter by local historian Harriet Branton, who died in June at age 92.

The Zajdels have been told some memorable stories over the years about their house’s past, including one that is supported by the final verse of “Mount Blaine,” the song:

Scores of love have here been plighted / Hands and hearts have been united

“Because the people who lived here were Presbyterian ministers, what we heard was that when the interurban trolley was put in, people would get off this stop at the bottom of the hill and walk up the hill to get married at this house,” Daniel reported. “The other one, which is unverifiable – again, it’s the Presbyterian minister connection – is that this house was a stop on the Underground Railroad.”

Whether the Browns actually helped slaves reach freedom always will be a matter of conjecture. What is certain is that four generations of the same family owned Mount Blaine for more than century, until its sale on Dec. 14, 1946.

Perhaps Alexander’s descendants had his song in mind when they signed the final papers:

Here new songs have had their birth / Sacred, solemn, some of mirth / To meet the moods and needs and tastes of varied kinds.