鈥楾he best of both worlds鈥�
Uniontown mom enjoys getting away to mountain farm
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one in a monthlong series of profiles of the people who live and work in Washington, Greene and Fayette counties, in celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary.
Some people find the perfect getaway and want to gatekeep it.
When Samantha Morgan talks about the flood of people to Ohiopyle State Park and the mountains, she sounds proud that more people have cottoned on to the place she’s been coming to since she was a child.
“I love this area, and I love Uniontown, Hopwood,” she said. “It’s up and coming and growing, and I mean, look at the traffic up here. It’s insane. Ohiopyle’s not a hidden gem anymore. Everybody kind of knows about it.”
Morgan spends equal time in both. The Uniontown mother travels between her home in Uniontown and the farm she and her husband, Levi, bought nine years ago.
While they plant corn and beans, the 550-acre farm is mostly a place where they can hunt whitetail deer and turkeys, fish in the ponds and watch the kids run around playing.
“It’s not like an operating farm where I’ve got like a whole bunch of cows and stuff like that, so just a lot of land to play on,” she said.
Her boys are growing up as hunters, and have taken down a couple of deer on their own.
It makes sense. The marksmanship is in their blood.
Before becoming a stay-at-home mom, Morgan also spent years as a professional archer. Morgan started shooting at 8 years old, when her father bought her her first bow.
“I wasn’t a girly girl. I was an outdoors girl, and he took note of that,” she said.
They’d drive or fly to competitions around the country. It was through the archery circuit she met Levi, who she’s known since she was young and went on to become her husband.
It’s a love that even managed to pull her away from Fayette County for a time — for six years, when she followed Levi to his home state of North Carolina.
They lived in the western part of the state — more rural than the coast, with scenery and mountains that reminded her of Pennsylvania.
But it still wasn’t.
So after six years, she and Levi moved back to Pennsylvania, where they’ve been ever since.
“I tell people that I lived around Asheville, and they’re like, ‘What, you like it better here?'” she said. “I do. I don’t know. There’s just something about it.”
She and Levi have four children, ranging from 3 to 13. To raise her kids, Morgan left behind archery and the traveling it required. She now spends that time encouraging her children’s own talents, from baseball to football to basketball.
But that hasn’t stopped her from pursuing new interests.
Her mid-afternoon stop at Fuel Coffee Shop in Farmington showed the rewards of both her family life and her spare time — children coming to say hi and customers who finally put a face to the name behind the “cute and high-quality” cream with a personalized scent they bought at a Hopwood coffee shop.
“I take my labeling seriously,” Morgan said. “I’m a little bit of a psycho with it.”
She started making tallow cream last year as an alternative to “toxic and junk” commercial skin care products.
“I just one day was playing around and was like, ‘I really want to try to make this and see how it does,’ and surprisingly it did really help,” she said.
Soon, Morgan’s opening a storefront of her own in Hopwood.
That will still mean trips to Farmington and the area around Ohiopyle. She spent much of her childhood there getting ice cream, feeding geese, playing frisbee, going on picnics or playing in the Youghiogheny River, back when she was younger and could tolerate the cold water (“Now I’m not getting in it,” she said).
Pennsylvania as a state, and the region where she lives, are “very underrated,” Morgan said
“If you get out of downtown Uniontown and just get out and enjoy the outdoors and the scenery, it’s gorgeous,” she said. “And there’s a lot to do around here. I know a lot of people don’t like to think that, but there is. There’s a lot to do.”
It’s close to bigger cities, whenever she needs to travel there. And it’s compact enough that she can make daily runs between two places she loves.
“We’re up there all the time, and hopefully one day maybe build a house up there, but right now we’ve kind of got the best of both worlds,” Morgan said. “We have a really nice house in town, and we get to come up and escape to our farm.”