The Rook neighborhood of Green Tree began at the turn of the 20th Century when developers sold lots in a 28-acre area first called Ellisdale on land that had been Bell and later Silk family farmland near the site of the Wabash Round House. The original Ellisdale area lay between Noblestown Road and the railroad yards of the present-day Wheeling and Lake Erie Railway and included five streets named for Scottish towns: Hawthorne, Rothesay, Brunswick, Hanover, and Kenmore. At about the same time, George Jay Gould sought to connect Pittsburgh to the Wheeling and Lake Erie Railroad through the Wabash-Pittsburg Terminal Railway, overcoming opposition from rival railroads with support from Pittsburgh Dispatch publisher Charles Alexander Rook, for whom the principal rail station and yard were named. Rook Station and Yard, built on about 56 acres bought from Anna Silk, opened in 1904 with a roundhouse and turntable, and the new line reached it from downtown Pittsburgh by crossing the Monongahela River and passing through tunnels under Mt. Washington and Green Tree. A 1905 schedule showed daily passenger stops at the Green Tree platform near the tunnel entrance on Mansfield Avenue, and many residents used the station until passenger service ended in 1931. The nearby Ellisdale community grew to house railroad employees who often worked on a two-hour call system, and the whole area came to be known as Rook. The original development had about 300 lots, and Rook became known as a self-contained, family-oriented community. Ellisdale School opened in 1915, closed in 1937, and was torn down in 1954; during World War II, young women organized the Rook Service Club and sent the Rook Recorder newsletter to local servicemen, while a veterans memorial facing Hawthorne Avenue recorded 500 names of railroad employees who served.