Respected teacher became guardian of Fort Pitt Block House
On a blustery January morning in 2013, construction workers and preservationists gathered at the Fort Pitt Block House in Point State Park to take X-ray images of the historic structure’s gun loops.
Among them was 86-yearold Joanne Barr Ostergaard of Upper St. Clair, the Fort Pitt Society’s president, a woman with deep roots in Western Pennsylvania who devoted her life to teaching young Pittsburghers about the history of their city and nation. As the Block House — which was constructed in 1764 as a defensive redoubt for Fort Pitt — approached its 250th anniversary, Mrs. Ostergaard was spearheading an unprecedented fundraising and restoration effort.
“She was a dynamo, she had a can-do attitude,” said Maureen Mahoney Hill, a consultant who worked with Mrs. Ostergaard on the anniversary project. “The Block House had never raised money from the public, but they set a $250,000 goal. Joanne just said, ‘All right, let’s get it done.’ ”
Mrs. Ostergaard died of leukemia Wednesday at Friendship Village of South Hills. She was 89.
A member of the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which owns the Block House, Mrs. Ostergaard was part of a long line of women dedicated to protecting the structure. At the turn of the 20th century, when the Pennsylvania Railroad acquired the Point District and threatened to destroy the building, the DAR successfully lobbied the state Legislature for historic preservation laws — long before women had the right to vote.
In 2014, the Fort Pitt Society repaired the structure’s supporting beams and roof, conducted an archaeological dig, built a commemorative garden, and celebrated 250 years with a gala. And it surpassed the fundraising goal.
Mrs. Ostergaard could trace her lineage back to an ancestor who fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, and another who received a land grant for a Pennsylvania farm for service in the Revolutionary War.
Mrs. Ostergaard’s passion for American history was evident to the students in her fifth-grade classrooms in Mt. Lebanon, where she taught for nearly two decades. It also meant that for family road trips with her husband, the late Palle Clifford Ostergaard, and their three children, the route would be planned according to national monuments and historic sites.
On one such trip, Mrs. Ostergaard’s daughter, Judith Shelato, recalled, the entire family piled into their station wagon to drive across New England to see tall ships at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut and the USS Constitution in Boston.
Joanne Barr Ostergaard was born Dec. 6, 1927, in Burgettstown, the only daughter of Charles Frederick Barr and Mildred Evalyn Hindman Barr. When she was 11, her family moved to Pittsburgh, where her father became the principal of an elementary school in Hazelwood that served the city’s growing Eastern European immigrant population.
After graduating from South Hills High School, Mrs. Ostergaard entered Carnegie Institute of Technology at the close of World War II. She took classes alongside GIs who had just returned home and many of Pittsburgh’s jazz greats, her son Paul Ostergaard said. She grew to love the big band sounds of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra. Although she was barred from playing trombone in the high school band because she was a woman, she studied classical piano and graduated from college with a double major in music and music education.
Mrs. Ostergaard continued her piano studies in Fontainebleau, France, through a summer program for Americans abroad. She saw the historic beauty of Europe and the destruction wrought by war.
“She told us how lucky we are as Americans not to have gone through that firsthand,” said a son, Dale Ostergaard.
After teaching music in Baltimore, she returned to the South Hills in the early 1950s, and a friend introduced her to Palle Clifford Ostergaard, a native of Denmark who grew up in Mt. Lebanon.
A Navy radio technician in the Pacific, Mr. Ostergaard studied mechanical engineering after the war and was hired by Westinghouse Electric Corp. to help design a propulsion system for the Nautilus, the nation’s first nuclear-powered submarine. Mr. Ostergaard’s imminent transfer to the National Reactor Testing Facility in Idaho prompted the couple’s engagement. They married in 1954 and moved out West, where their first son, Paul, was born in 1955, followed by Dale in 1956.
In 1960, Mr. Ostergaard was transferred to the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in West Mifflin. Their daughter, Judith, was born soon after, and Mrs. Ostergaard began working toward her teaching certificate. She started teaching fifth grade at Washington Elementary School, and later Foster Elementary School, in Mt. Lebanon. She retired in 1989.
It wasn’t until he served on the Mt. Lebanon school board a few years ago that Dale Ostergaard understood the full impact of his mother’s teaching, he said. Countless former students told him that although Mrs. Ostergaard demanded a lot of them, her classroom remained among their fondest memories.
Mrs. Ostergaard joined the Fort Pitt Society’s board in 2000, was elected president in 2010, and saw the organization through the Block House’s 250th anniversary.
“Not only did Joanne make incredible things happen to the Block House, but she did it with class and style,” Mrs. Mahoney Hill said. “She had no need to be heralded; she did it because she loved it. She would say it again and again, ‘We want the Block House to be strong for 250 more years.’ ”
She is survived by her three children — Dale of Mt. Lebanon, Paul of the South Side and Judith Shelato of Greenville, S.C. — in addition to seven grandchildren and threegreat-grandchildren.
A remembrance service will be held at Friendship Village at 11 a.m. Saturday. Interment at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies will be private. Memorial contributions may be made to the Employee Appreciation Fund of Friendship Village, 1290 Boyce Road, Pittsburgh, PA 15241 or the Fort Pitt Block House.