Borough · Huntingdon County

Birmingham

1 story on file, each with its sources. 0.1 square miles of land in the ridge and valley country of central Pennsylvania.

89

Population

0.06 sq mi

Land area

965 ft

Elevation

Borough

Type

The founding record

Birmingham was incorporated as a borough by act of the legislature on April 14, 1828, and the first election was ordered to be held at the house of Mary Jordan. The records of that election have been lost, so that the names of the first borough officers cannot be ascertained. The earliest records available are for 1831, when John Owens was the chief burgess. Birmingham has never come up to the anticipations of its founder and in 1910 had a population of only 196. On July 4, 1878, a soldiers' monument was unveiled in the old Methodist cemetery. It is about twelve feet in height, with a medallion profile of Abraham Lincoln, the inscription "With malice toward none, with charity for all." It is surmounted by an "Angel of Mercy" and cost about $800. John W. Jordan, ed., History of the Juniata Valley and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1913) · character 222,862 of the scanned text

Quoted from a work published before 1929 and therefore in the public domain in the United States. Spelling and punctuation are as printed, including nineteenth century spellings of place names. Scanned text carries optical character recognition errors; the character offset is given so the passage can be found and checked in the original.

1 story

Stories from Birmingham

Did you know? A Huntingdon County town was once sold off by lottery, and the lottery is a big part of why it never became the city it was drawn up to be.

On December 13, 1797, John Cadwallader laid out Birmingham on the north bank of the Little Juniata, about three miles below where Tyrone sits now. The county history says it was laid out "for a manufacturing town, at the head of navigation." Three hundred acres. Streets from sixty six to two hundred feet wide. Two lots set aside for a school house and a library hall, and four lots promised to any established religious society that wanted to build a church and a burial ground.

Then came the part that sank it. The lots were sold by ticket. Ten dollars for a town lot, five dollars down. Which lot you actually got was drawn by ballot, overseen by five freeholders who had to swear or affirm to act impartially before they could start. People in eastern cities bought in without ever standing on the ground.

The history is blunt about what the plan hid. It was "made to look very attractive to a people who knew nothing of the steep hills and ravines included within the limits of the plat." When buyers came to see what they had drawn, a good many found their lot "perched upon a steep hillside or in the bottom of a deep hollow," and they walked away from money they had already paid.

The great city never came. The village is still there.

What the fact check changed. ONE CLAIM CUT, and it was the whole hinge of the original post: "Then the Pennsylvania Railroad built its great hubs at Tyrone and Altoona instead." Africa 1883 does not say that. What it says is general and hedged: "the proximity to other points more advantageously located has since the completion of the railway built them up while Birmingham has steadily declined." It names no hub, no Altoona, and it puts the railw…

Sources

History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania, J. Simpson Africa / Louis H. Everts, Philadelphia (1883)

Read the full story, with 3 passages quoted from the county histories →

Where it sits

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