Huntingdon

Did you know? Huntingdon tore down a courthouse people loved, and fifty five years later they were still sore about it.

The county's second courthouse went up in 1842 on the ground the present one stands on. The 1937 sesqui-centennial history describes it as "a beautiful colonial structure, with tall white columns across the front and a beautiful white colonial belfry." Then this, from the same page: "Unfortunately that beautiful building, which should have been preserved was torn down and the present one erected in 1882."

Here is how the replacement happened. A grand jury laid out what was wrong with the old building, including that "witness-rooms, jury-rooms, and convenient out-buildings are deemed a public necessity." The grand jury endorsed that report at the January sessions of 1882 and the court agreed.

Several plans came in. The commissioners chose one drawn by M. E. Beebe of Buffalo, New York. Six bids were opened, running from $71,300 up to $93,140.50, and the contract went to Henry Snare and Company at the lowest figure.

That June the county moved its offices into temporary quarters at the Morrison House, on the northeast corner of Third and Allegheny, and began pulling the old building down. By the twenty fourth of November the brickwork on the new courthouse had been carried almost to the top of the second story.

So the building on that corner today is the third one. The one before it had white columns, and at least one man in 1937 never got over losing it.

Which building in this county would you not want to lose? Tell us which one.

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Did you know? The man who helped bring the first national Native American rights organization into being spent the last fourteen years of his career teaching in Huntingdon. His story is more complicated than a post like this usually allows, so here is the whole of it.

Fayette Avery McKenzie was the first American sociologist to specialize in Indian affairs. He taught at the boarding school on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. In April of 1911 he sent invitations, and six American Indian intellectuals came to a meeting at Ohio State University. Dr. Charles Eastman, Santee Dakota. Dr. Carlos Montezuma, Yavapai Apache. Thomas L. Sloan, Omaha. Charles Edwin Dagenett, Peoria. Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Oneida. Henry Standing Bear, Oglala Lakota. What came out of that meeting became the Society of American Indians, the first national rights organization run by Native people themselves. McKenzie pushed for it to be Native run, played down his own title, and worked in the background.

From 1915 to 1925 he was president of Fisk University. He won Fisk its academic recognition and raised a million dollar endowment. He was also forced out. He closed the student newspaper, abolished the student council and banned most extracurricular activities, and students who broke those rules were expelled. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Crisis that no decent Negro should send a child to Fisk until McKenzie was gone. The students protested in 1924 and 1925 and he resigned. There is a scholarly literature on that strike.

He came to Juniata College in 1927, taught sociology, served two years as dean of men, opened the Altoona Center in 1928, and retired in 1941.

Both of those things are true about the same man, and leaving either one out makes him into somebody he was not.

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Did you know? Just before dawn on May 1, 1947, two sixteen foot sheets of steel shifted on an open gondola car of a westbound freight west of Huntingdon. Their ends swung out over the tracks on both sides.

The Pennsylvania Railroad's New York to St. Louis flyer, a sleeper and coach train called The American, was running westbound on the parallel track. It hit the steel, and the steel ripped open the side of the train.

Moments later an eastbound freight struck the steel sticking out on the other side. Its engine and tender came off the rails. All four main tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad were tied up. Three trains, one obstruction, a few seconds apart.

Five people were dead by the next day. One of them was Jean Sims, twenty six years old, of Clifton, Virginia.

Her daughter Penelope was two weeks old. They pulled the baby out of the wreckage wrapped in a towel with her left leg broken, and she lived. The Associated Press found her a day later at J. C. Blair Memorial Hospital here in town, taking a bottle. Hospital attendants told the reporter she was pretty fussy after they set the leg.

Down the hall was Joseph Monaco, a railroad machinist from New Castle, critically hurt on the way home from a honeymoon that had started two weeks before. His bride Mary was hurt less badly. She told a reporter that all she wanted right then was to go home and take Joe with her.

Does anybody have family who was working at J. C.

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Did you know? You can still drive a piece of the 1810s turnpike, and it still has the same potholes people complained about two hundred years ago.

The Huntingdon, Cambria and Indiana Turnpike Road Company was incorporated March 20, 1810, after attempts in 1806 and 1807 to get a turnpike from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh had failed. Then nothing happened for years. It took a meeting of citizens in the Huntingdon County Courthouse in January of 1814 to finally raise enough interest, and stock went on sale that April.

By 1821 the road ran complete from Huntingdon to Blairsville, seventy seven miles. It cost more than the subscribers had paid in, so the managers ended up issuing scrip to pay the contractors.

Here is the part worth knowing. A three and a half mile stretch of it still exists, crossing Warrior Ridge between Huntingdon and Alexandria. The state's survey of historic engineering sites calls it "extant and in relatively unaltered condition," mostly unpaved, steep and sharply curved, and "perennially marked by the potholes, ruts, washouts, and dust or mud of which eighteenth-century travelers complained."

East of the ridge it runs past the Pulpit Rocks.

Two centuries on, the road is still bad in exactly the way the people who used it said it was.

Have you driven that stretch over Warrior Ridge? Tell us what it is like now.

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Did you know? In 1932 Nancy Slaughter Lee became the first African American student to graduate from Juniata College, and she did it in her own hometown.

She was a Huntingdon native and a graduate of Huntingdon High School, the daughter of Levi and Anna Bertha Slaughter. She enrolled at Juniata after finishing high school in 1928, and she was part of the Day Students' Club all four years she was there.

Her senior portrait in the 1932 Alfarata is the first image of a Black student to appear in any Juniata yearbook.

Juniata College spent this past February telling her story week by week out of its own archives, and it is worth following.

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Did you know? A two time Caldecott Medal winner was born right here in Huntingdon.

Chris Raschka was born in Huntingdon on March 6, 1959. The Library of Congress has it in his authority record, which is about as official as a birth fact gets.

He won the Caldecott Medal twice, for The Hello, Goodbye Window in 2006 and for A Ball for Daisy in 2012. Before either of those, Yo! Yes? was named a Caldecott Honor Book in 1994. The Caldecott is the top award in American children's illustration, and most illustrators never get near it once.

Being straight about the rest of it: he did not grow up here. His family moved to suburban Chicago, and he spent part of his childhood in Austria, where his mother was from. Huntingdon is where he started, not where he was raised.

Still, somewhere in this town there is a hospital record with a future two time Caldecott winner on it, dated March 6, 1959.

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Did you know? Horace Porter was born right here in Huntingdon back in 1837. He was a Civil War Medal of Honor recipient, earned it at Chickamauga for rallying fleeing troops while the lines were breaking, and then became the personal secretary to President Ulysses S. Grant. After the war, Porter served as U.S. Ambassador to France from 1897 to 1905, shaping American diplomacy in Europe. From a Pennsylvania boy to the center of national power.

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Did you know? The courthouse in Huntingdon exists because a grand jury said the old one was unfit, and the county then took the cheapest bid on the table.

A grand jury report laid out what was wrong with the old building, including that "witness-rooms, jury-rooms, and convenient out-buildings are deemed a public necessity." The grand jury endorsed the report at January sessions, 1882, and the court agreed.

Several plans came in. The commissioners picked one drawn by M. E. Beebe of Buffalo, New York. Six bids came in at the letting, running from $71,300 all the way up to $93,140.50, and the contract went to Henry Snare and Company at the low figure.

In June the county moved its offices into temporary quarters at the Morrison House, on the northeast corner of Third and Allegheny, and started tearing the old building down. By the twenty fourth of November the brickwork on the new courthouse had been carried almost to the top of the second story.

That building is still standing on that corner today.

What is the building in this county you would most hate to lose? Tell us which one.

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Did you know? The keyboard player on those Mannheim Steamroller records was born in Huntingdon.

Jackson Berkey was born here on May 24, 1942. He took a master's in piano performance at Juilliard, studying in the studio of Josef Raieff, and had sessions with Vincent Persichetti and William Schuman. He made his Town Hall debut in New York in 1969. In 2009 Steinway named him a Steinway Artist.

His own catalog describes him as featured keyboardist with Mannheim Steamroller. It also lists over four hundred published titles of his own writing: choral and vocal works, chamber and instrumental pieces, band and orchestral writing, concerti, and works for chorus and orchestra.

So the man at those keyboards has several hundred pieces of his own out in the world under his own name.

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Did you know? We shared a while back that Huntingdon was named for an English town and not for a countess. A reader sent us back to the books. The reader was right and we were wrong.

Rev. William Smith had the town laid out in 1767 and gave it the name Huntingdon in honor of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, in England, who had been a large donor to the College of Philadelphia, later the University of Pennsylvania, where Smith was then provost.

The 1883 county history states it carefully. It says the name is believed to have been given by Dr. Smith in her honor, in grateful remembrance of her donation. The 1909 Historic Huntingdon states it outright, and prints her portrait at the front of the book, under the line that both borough and county are named in her honor.

So the countess story stands, and it stands on books that have been on shelves in this county the whole time.

Thank you to whoever sent us back to check.

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Did you know? When Huntingdon's first courthouse went up on Third Street, the man who laid out the town paid for its bell himself.

Dr. William Smith bought it from the Philadelphia bell founder Samuel Parker and presented it to the borough. The receipt survives, dated April 5, 1798. The bell carried his name cast right into it: "Cast by Samuel Parker, Philada., 1798. William Smith, D. D., to the borough of Huntingdon, Juniata."

That bell called the county to court for decades. And when the old Third Street courthouse finally came down, the town did not scrap it. They lifted it into the cupola of the school house, and it went right on ringing, calling children in to learn instead of calling men in to be judged.

It rang until a frosty morning, December 12, 1861, when it cracked while calling the schools.

The founder's bell spent its whole life calling this town to something better.

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Did you know? A Juniata College graduate shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.

William Daniel Phillips graduated from Juniata in 1970. He went on to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and in 1997 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu, for developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.

To be straight about it, he is not a Huntingdon County native. He was born in Wilkes-Barre in 1948 and grew up in Camp Hill, outside Harrisburg. What this county can claim is the college that graduated him, and that is a real claim.

A small college in a small county has a Nobel laureate on its rolls.

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Did you know? Huntingdon sent the same man to Congress for twenty two years, and he never came home from the job.

Richard Murray Simpson was born in Huntingdon on August 30, 1900. He entered the U.S. House on May 11, 1937 and served without a break until January 7, 1960. In 1953 he became chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and at the time of his death he was the ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee, which is about as much leverage as a member of the House can hold.

He died in office on January 7, 1960, at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, several weeks after brain surgery.

Twenty two years, and the last day of them was his last day.

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Did you know? Huntingdon once built railroad cars, and the best part of the story is that the works had already failed once.

In 1872 Orbison and Welch opened the Huntingdon Car Works at the northwest edge of the borough, turning out two or three freight cars a day. They bought their wheels from somewhere else. After about two years, operations were suspended. The place went quiet.

Then in July of 1880 two brothers, J. G. and M. C. Blain, bought the dead plant. They enlarged it to four times its old capacity and built their own foundries so they could finally cast their own car wheels, which is how it became the Car and Car Wheel Works.

By the time the county history was written it covered ten acres and ran on a two hundred and fifty horsepower steam engine. Four hundred men worked there. The payroll was fourteen thousand dollars a month. They went through ten thousand tons of iron and ten million feet of lumber a year, cut at their own mills in this county and dried on the property.

Two brothers bought a shut down factory and turned it into the biggest employer in town.

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Did you know? A man born right here in Huntingdon, Brigadier General David McMurtrie Gregg, helped hold the Union right at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, the final day of the battle. While most folks remember Pickett's Charge, they miss the cavalry fight that happened about three miles east of town that same afternoon. On what is now called East Cavalry Field, Gregg's division and George Custer's brigade collided with J.E.B. Stuart's horsemen in a long mounted battle that came down to hand to hand fighting. Stuart never got around behind the Union line. A Huntingdon native was in the middle of one of the most important cavalry actions of the war, and most people here have no idea.

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Did you know? When Pennsylvania opened the Juniata canal, the boat that did it started from Huntingdon.

On November 27, 1832, the packet boat John Blair ran from Huntingdon up to Hollidaysburg, and that run officially opened the Juniata Division to traffic. The division climbed 584 feet across the 127 miles between Duncan's Island on the Susquehanna and Hollidaysburg.

The canal survey is candid about how it was built. Only four of the locks on this division were solid cut stone. Seven were rubble stone laid in mortar. The remaining seventy seven were wooden frames, planked watertight with boards four inches thick, held up by dry masonry and packed at the ends with mud and clay to keep the water in.

And it did not work right away. The record says that after the opening "it was subsequently discovered that some of the workmanship along that section was faulty and certain locks and several of the aqueducts had to be rebuilt before full operation was possible the following year."

So the famous first run out of Huntingdon was a ribbon cutting. The canal itself needed another year of repairs before it could really do the job.

Tell us the spot.

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Did you know? One of the oldest surviving photographs taken in the United States was made by a man born in Huntingdon.

Joseph Saxton was born here on March 22, 1799, and went to work at twelve as an apprentice to a watchmaker.

In the fall of 1839, when the daguerreotype was only months old, he pointed one out the window of his office at the Philadelphia Mint and caught the cupola of Central High School and part of the State Armory building. Accounts put the day at either around September 25 or October 16. The first mention of the picture in print came on October 24, 1839, in the United States Gazette.

He spent the rest of his working life in government service. He ran the making of machinery at the Mint, then served as its curator of weights and measures, and from 1843 until he died he was superintendent of weights and measures for the United States Coast Survey.

A watchmaker's apprentice from Huntingdon made one of the oldest pictures this country still has of itself.

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Did you know the Pulpit Rocks between Huntingdon and Alexandria are a National Historic Landmark, and that what happened there was an idea?

They are weathered pillars of Oriskany sandstone sitting on layers of limestone, about fifty feet tall and set about ten feet apart, wide enough for a person to walk between. The stone was laid down roughly 390 million years ago, when this was the floor of an inland sea.

Pennsylvania set up its Geological Survey in 1836, and the Huntingdon area was one of the first places surveyed. John Frazer, one of the geologists on that team, looked at the rock here and worked out that the accepted wisdom was wrong. Everyone believed a single layer of sandstone and conglomerate ran under the ridges. Around the Pulpit Rocks it was clear there were several layers of sandstone with thick beds of other rock in between.

That one correction immediately made sense of what surveyors had been finding over in New York and Virginia. When the Survey published its first major report in 1858, a watercolor of these rocks was in it.

The site was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1993. Juniata College owns part of it, its geology department still teaches there, and a plaque marks the spot.

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Did you know? Huntingdon once turned out paper tablets by the trainload, and it started with one man selling stationery on Penn Street.

In 1869 J. C. Blair opened a small retail stationery trade on Penn Street, between Fourth and Fifth. He did well enough that he stopped buying the goods he sold and started manufacturing them himself.

By the time the county history was written in 1883, one hundred skilled workers were on the floor, and the history says the only limit on the business was what those hands and his machinery could do in a day. Two years earlier, in 1881, Blair had bought the old Presbyterian Church building at Penn and Sixth, fitted it up as a factory, and christened it the Keystone Building. Fifty feet by seventy, four stories.

A man bought a church and filled it with tablet machinery.

Does anybody still have a J. C.

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The Huntingdon County Library has been a free door for generations.

Story hours for the little ones, computers for the job seeker, a warm quiet room for a veteran or a student who needs to think. It's downtown, it's free, and it belongs to all of us. A town with a good library is a town that believes in its own future. That library says yes to you.

Walk in this week. Get a card.

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