Broad Top City

The founding record

Broad Top City, a borough in the southern part of the county, was laid out by the Broad Top Improvement Company in 1854, while the Huntingdon & Broad Top railroad was under construction, and it was incorporated on August 19, 1868, with Paul Ammerman as the first chief burgess. The failure of the railroad company to extend the line to Broad Top City prevented its attaining the proportions its projectors expected, though it is a mining town of some importance and in 1910 reported a population of 478. Cassville, located in the Trough creek valley, south of the center of the county, was laid out by Benjamin and Robeson Chilcott about 1796 and was first known as Salisbury or Chilcoatstown. Three buildings stood upon the site when the town was laid out. William Lovell was the first tavern keeper and Robert Speer the first merchant. In September, 1830, Dr. Robert Baird and Andrew Shaw laid oat an addition and the lots soH readily at from forty to fifty dollars each. A tannery was started in that year by Lemuel Green, and two potteries , one operated by Jacob Greenland and the other by E. B. Hissong , were started a few years later. In 1849 a public meeting was called to consider the advisability of applying to the proper authorities for the incorporation of the place as a borougii. Some objected to the name of Salisbury and a committee of three was appointed to select a new name. John W. Jordan, ed., History of the Juniata Valley and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1913) · character 223,618 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.