Micah Leith- Award-winning Reporter/MMJ

Franklin Township Iron Senergy Park is located at 252 Jefferson Road Iron Senergy, a company that is based in Louisville, Kentucky, and operates longwall mines in Waynesburg, donated land that was previously being leased to Franklin Township. The park is located at 252 Jefferson Rd. “We had entered into a lease agreement on that park facility years ago with the other mining company that had owned those assets. And so that lease continued on whenever Iron SenergySynergy acquired all of it,” Corbly Orndorff, chairman of the Franklin Township supervisors, said. “That included the mining firm, their two active mines here in Greene County, the other facility and the one in the township and their surface rate surface things. So they reached out to us and said that they really wanted to go ahead and make this a long term, long term commitment.” According to a press release, Iron Senergy “strives to give back to the communities in which we live and work.” The company’s w...

  The very first thing that greets you when you walk into the building that Hilltop Packs and Hilltop Packs Coffee Company share is a wooden cutout of bigfoot holding a stand that dispenses hand sanitizer. The walls are filled with pictures of owner Ben McMillen on numerous hiking trips, various wooden coffee-related decorations, and a Hilltop road sign that McMillen said was sourced from a yard sale, although McMillen doesn’t know where in the US it was originally from. Overlooking it all is a wooden silhouette of a bear next to a display featuring one of Hilltop Packs’ signature bear bags, a bag that backpackers use to store food high in the trees to keep bears out, and the smell of coffee permeates the air. The atmosphere is an eclectic mashup of the two businesses that inhabit the building.   Although Hilltop Packs and Hilltop Packs Coffee Company occupy the same building on East Greene Street in Waynesburg, the two businesses are technically separate entities...

Originally published here . Faithful to the end. That’s how Dr. Carolyn Thyreen described the life of her husband, Timothy R. Thyreen, who served as president of Waynesburg University for 23 years and chancellor for nine. Chancellor Thyreen passed away at his home on May 16. He was 78 years old. During his tenure as president, Waynesburg constructed 12 new buildings and transitioned from college status to University status. For people that were close to him, however, the biggest accomplishment of his presidency was not a physical one; it was a philosophical one, a spiritual one. “He was challenging the students to make a significant difference with their lives through their education. And that meant serving God and serving people and that is the restoration, the bringing back of the Christian mission was what he was certainly the most pleased with,” Dr. Thyreen said. -- THE MISSION -- Chancellor Thyreen speaks at his inauguration, becoming the universi...