Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania · established 1787
Every story we can prove, from all forty-eight of our towns and townships.
A county history you can check. 246 stories, each one carrying the sources under it, sorted into the borough or township it actually happened in. Plus where to eat, what to do, and who plays who on Friday night.
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Songs for the 250th
Written for the anniversary. Nothing downloads until you press play.
Huntingdon County
Pennsylvania turns 250 with the country, and this county has been here for nearly all of it.
Start here
Pick your town.
Eighteen boroughs, thirty townships, drawn at their real boundaries. Click any shape.
The shaded ones already have stories written and sourced. The pale ones have their founding record pulled from the county histories and are waiting on the rest. That distinction is on the map on purpose: a gap you can see is a gap somebody can fill.
Boundaries are the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 cartographic boundary file for Pennsylvania county subdivisions, filtered to Huntingdon County. 48 of 48 municipalities currently have at least one story.
The photographic record
Photographs, and where they came from.
72 plates, nearly all of them Library of Congress survey photographs. Every one is of 16 municipalities, because that is where the picture research has been done so far. The other forty-seven have their record in print, not in pictures, and that gap is worth closing.
Mount Union BoroughA Question We Cannot Settle, and Maybe You CanThis stone house stands on West Water Street near Division. The federal survey records it as the John Sharrar House and dates it to about 1841. The…
5 sources
Mount Union BoroughThe Brick Office that Became the Red CrossLook at the sign in the yard. This little brick building on Market Street was the General Refractories Company office. When the company closed its…
5 sources
Mount Union BoroughKistler, the Village that Was DesignedMost company towns were laid out by engineers with almost no thought given to how they would feel to live in. Kistler was different. In 1916 the…
4 sources
Mount Union BoroughThe Mailbox Made Out of the TownWhen the last of it was over, the town went and got the bricks. A committee collected brick and some of the most elaborate shapes from all three…
4 sources
Mount Union Refractories beehive ovens · Library of Congress / HABS-HAER (Nancy Shedd) · see all 72 photographs →Best sourced
Stories with the deepest record behind them.
Mount Union BoroughA Question We Cannot Settle, and Maybe You CanThis stone house stands on West Water Street near Division. The federal survey records it as the John Sharrar House and dates it to about 1841. The…
5 sourcesBroad Top City BoroughBroad Top StrikeDid you know? By July 11, 1920, about three thousand bituminous coal miners in the Broad Top field were idle. The Associated Press carried it out of…
4 sourcesHuntingdon BoroughHuntingdon's Grand Courthouse Towers OverDid you know? Huntingdon tore down a courthouse people loved, and fifty five years later they were still sore about it. The county's second…
4 sourcesMapleton BoroughBorn on the RailsDid you know? Mapleton was named by a railroad company, for trees. The 1966 centennial history puts it plainly: when the Pennsylvania Railroad was…
3 sourcesShirleysburg BoroughPurdue's FounderDid you know? The man Purdue University is named for was born in Huntingdon County, and he had to quit school at twelve. John Purdue was born…
3 sourcesTodd TownshipFirst U.S. Coke SmeltingDid you know? There is a furnace site on Big Trough Creek with a real claim on American industrial history. John Savage of Philadelphia leased the…
3 sources43 food and drink businesses and 105 things to do, each with an address, a telephone number where one is published, and a link back to the Visitors Bureau listing it came from.
Sports Six districts, one college, five national titlesWho plays in which conference, which municipalities each district draws from, and the volleyball programme at Juniata College that has won five NCAA Division III championships.
From the photographs
Plates from the Historic American Buildings Survey and the town's own 1909 history. See all of them, with credits.