Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Rechecked 1 November 2026. The survey calls the steps ganister rock, and the county's National Register industrial study ties ganister to the Tuscarora or Oriskany formation; the page no longer says the steps were cut into the mountain. By the Census boundary files the steps and their trailhead are in Brady Township, so the page is now listed there instead of under Mount Union borough.
We also read a posted copy of the trailhead sign and the trail club's 2017 history. The history and the survey disagree on whether the bridge was repaired and on why the steps were built, so both accounts are given. The sign and the history carry the quarrying to 1952, which is hard to square with the 1970s quarry work the survey describes, so no end date is given. One club web page dates the steps to the 1950s, which the other accounts do not support. The step counts come from two news stories and one hiker, not a formal count, and we have not counted the steps or seen the markers ourselves.
Checked and confirmed. · Checked 2026-11-01
Every claim in it has now been read against the books it names and all of them hold, in the wording the original gives them: Welch 1909 for Pollock and for the "good authority" footnote naming John Dougherty, Lytle 1876 for the 1850 laying-out and for the four mountains, and the 1937 sesquicentennial book for both the 1840 date and the postmaster's $6.59. One thing the check added: the 1937 book itself says Pollock was appointed postmaster in April 1833, seven years before the same book says the town was laid out, so even that single source does not settle it. A 1933 newspaper report gives a different day in April 1833, which we have not been able to locate, so the day is left out. Checked 1 September 2026.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Confirmed for what the page now says. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Town of Mount Union, HABS No. PA-5974, has a footnote giving a man's name, then “interview by author, Mt. Union, Pa., June 11, 1991.” That gives the interview and its 1991 date in the survey's own citation. The 1989 date comes from the survey's companion report on the refractories company towns, HABS No. PA-5973, whose interview list has Mount Union entries dated March 1989.
The footnotes also cite correspondence from the same local historian, dated April 9, 1992. That historian held the June 1988 federal contract for the county inventory of engineering and industrial sites, which was published in 1991, and the historian's unpublished 1988 report supplied material for the National Register nomination of the Mount Union Refractories site. What stays open is what the interviewees said. The companion report lists other interviewees by name, and this page does not name them, because we have not checked whether each is still living. The list gives names, dates and places, not what was said.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The channel length, about 3,000 feet, is given in Welch's 1909 history and in the Bellefonte Republican of September 10, 1908, and the two agree. The ten-mile figure comes from Welch alone. We have not seen the Semi-Weekly News article of May 9, 1907, itself. Its headline is quoted in the 1991 county inventory of engineering sites, which cites the article.
We have not found a local account of who did the work on this bridge.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Published without a source list, and the sources are now shown. Every claim in the original text has been read against Welch's 1909 history, and all of it holds, including the sentence about the bank's founding, which appears word for word there. Welch places the bank formerly on the brick corner of Main, or Water, and Division Streets. The 1883 county history puts its banking house at Water and Division, and the 1994 National Register nomination calls Water Street the first location. The bank's move to a third building in 1916 comes from the nomination. Checked 1 September 2026. Rechecked 1 November 2026.
Several points stay open. The 1883 county history gives Adams's birth year as 1830, while the 1909 history, the Pennsylvania House archives and the gravestone give 1836, and Find a Grave's date field gives December 16, 1836, without a source. The burgess year is 1869 in both histories, but the House archives say 1870 to 1872, and we have not seen the borough's own records. The 322-vote majority comes from the 1883 history alone, since the newspaper confirms the election but gives no figure for him. The school board counts of nine and sixteen years were printed 26 years apart and may not conflict.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Rechecked 1 November 2026. The National Register nomination says the theater was built in 1915, but the trade paper Moving Picture World was still calling it nearing completion in December 1916, and the Harrisburg Telegraph reported the opening on Tuesday, 30 January 1917. We follow the opening date and report both building accounts, because the sources do not settle when the building was finished. The 1917 owner and manager was Joseph S. Shapiro, according to newspaper reports of a lawsuit against him. The Telegraph printed his name as Shiparo on 3 February 1917 and as J. Shapiro on 24 February, when it reported the drugstore opened. We found no source that says whether he was related to George Shapiro or to the Joe Shapiro on the 1937 county sesquicentennial officials list.
Still open: the Mount Union Times of 2 February 1917 would give a fuller account of the opening, but no archive we could search holds that issue. The date the powder works began is also still open. The powder works figures are newspaper reports from March and November 1916, and the page presents them as reports. The 1970 closing year and the marquee rest on the nomination of January 1994 alone, and we have not traced what became of the building after that.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Rechecked 1 November 2026. The National Register nomination and two Historic American Buildings Survey records date the mural to 1936, the year cut into the building. The federal record of completed murals, now in the National Archives, gives its completion as November 27, 1937, and the State Museum of Pennsylvania's catalog also says 1937, so this page follows 1937. The building survey dates the demolition of Ganister Hill to the early 1950s.
A display at the post office, as the Living New Deal quotes it, says the commission came in the spring of 1937. We did not see the display. The commission file is listed in the National Archives catalog but has no digital copy. That the painting is still on the wall rests on the State Museum's study, read in a copy archived in 2016; we did not visit the building.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Corrected again. An early version of this page called 1908 the year the main line was Mount Union's front door. A later correction said the station was a junction, not a main line stop, and that it stood on the old right of way. That reading borrowed a sentence about the 1914 freight station. Welch's December 1907 piece and the county's 1991 inventory both point to a passenger station on the new raised track, with waiting rooms on both sides and a subway under the tracks. Which trains stopped here is not settled: the nomination says express trains bypassed the town, and we have not seen a timetable or site plan. The curves are open too. We cannot say how Welch's two, the engineering record's series and the Bellefonte paper's sixteen fit together, and we have not checked any of them against a map or survey. The timing of the new line is open as well: the engineering record says 1906, Welch's December 1907 piece has the Mount Union tracks still to go into service, and the Bellefonte paper in September 1908 called the stretch it described about completed.
Still documented: the ganister before the rails, the 1899 Haws plant as the first works in the country built purely for refractory brick, and the October 1915 report of the railroad's spending, the new tower and the double siding to Mapleton. Also open: the day the station opened. Welch's piece says the tracks would go into service "on Sunday next," but it does not give the date, and it says in one place that the station had been built and in another that it was being constructed. We have read Welch's reprint, not the 1907 newspaper. The 1976 demolition is from the county's 1991 inventory; no other record of it has been found.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
A frequency claim stays out, and now there is a reason rather than a shrug. An earlier version of this page said dozens of trains a day passed here. That was removed for want of a source, and the district's National Register nomination has since been checked for one. It gives no train count. It does explain the arrangement: the high line viaduct of 1906 and 1907 carried the main line over the old canal bed, and the old right of way became a transfer siding for the East Broad Top. The nomination's sentence that places a building beside that right of way is about the 1914 freight station. Welch's December 1907 account describes a new passenger station on the new raised track.
Unchanged, because both are documented: the ganister before the rails, from the two plant nominations, and Welch's account of Dibert and Haws coming to look at the mountain. Still open: which trains stopped at this depot. No timetable has been checked.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The Mount Union Times printed the history this site relies on, and its editors, A. S. and C. H. Welch, wrote it. The title page reads "Printed at The Mount Union Times Office." Welch's closing pages say the sketch began as a newspaper serial, with the first installment printed in the Times on 10 September 1909, and that it grew into a book. The paper's early years come from Africa's 1883 county history, as Welch reprints it on pages 303 to 306. A Bellefonte newspaper noticed "The Mount Union Times" on 21 March 1873, which fits the restart that February. Welch's 1909 book of poems says the paper was "established in 1876." Welch's history and Africa's account both date the first Times to about 1867, so we do not know where the 1876 date came from.
The purchase date is not settled. Welch's history has A. S. Welch buying in with two partners in 1892, and A. S. and C. H. Welch buying Charles Stratford's interest in September 1900. The 1909 book of poems says the Messrs. Welch purchased the paper in December 1899. We give both, and we have not seen a deed or a notice of the sale.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The school dispute, Davis's objection and the borough's purpose come from the federal survey, Historic American Buildings Survey PA-5976. The survey quotes the company president's letter and says he had the town incorporated to block the school. The 1930 federal census gives the incorporation as 1925, and the survey dates the school fight to 1924, citing a September 1924 Mount Union Times headline, "Kistler Will Become A Borough." We have not seen the Mifflin County court decree or that newspaper.
The state's school report for the two years ending May 31, 1926 lists Kistler Borough's application for a new school district as heard and denied on February 5, 1926. That complicates the survey's account that incorporation separated the school administration from the township. We have not found what happened after that date or when Kistler began running its own school. The survey says the store was demolished in 1990, and the 1991 county inventory's photograph caption says it was razed in 1991. The title keeps the survey's year. The community building's 1933 fire belongs to a different building and is not told here.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The February date and Mussemeelin's own account come from Thomas Cookson's letter from Lancaster of 22 April 1744, printed in the Pennsylvania Archives. Africa's 1883 county history gives the same February date and the deposition sworn at Paxton on 19 April 1744, and it prints Shickalamy's statement at Shamokin on 2 May 1744 that Mussemeelin had killed all three himself. The Provincial Council minutes of 25 April 1744 report the letter's claim that three Delaware Indians did the killing and name two of them. This page follows the documented account. Welch's 1909 town history tells it differently, saying that Armstrong's wife and children were murdered in 1752 and that he lived to avenge them. That is the "Captain Jack" legend, which Lytle's 1876 county history headed "A Popular Error."
The trial and execution rest on David C. Hsiung's 1998 article in Pennsylvania History, which quotes the Pennsylvania Journal and Gazette notices of 15 November 1744. We read those notices in his article, not in the newspapers, and we have not found a court record of the trial. The Council minutes of 24 August 1744 give the Governor's word that the man would be tried in six weeks or a little more, but not the outcome. Lytle's history says there is no statement as to whether he was tried, convicted or punished. The 1744 papers spell his name several ways, and this page keeps Mussemeelin. A 1944 newspaper gives the date as 9 April 1744. We have not checked that date against its source, so this page does not use it.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
We read the federal survey, the 1991 inventory and the National Register nomination at the page. The sale date and the building date stay open because those sources disagree, and the deeds and tax records named in the inventory, which we have not read, may settle them. The survey and the inventory call these one and a half story houses, while the nomination's building list gives eight of the nine as two stories. The count of nine dates from the early 1990s, and we have not checked how many stand today.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The quoted phrases come from the festival's own history page as archived on 2 November 2012, except the March 2023 announcement, which the Daily News quoted on 29 March 2023 and Jesus Freak Hideout reproduces, dated 28 March 2023. The official creationfest.com post was not reached. The venue was placed by coordinates rather than by the postal town: the Agape buildings sit at 40.280, -77.922, which the Census geocoder returns as Huntingdon County, Cromwell township, unincorporated, near Shirleysburg, not in the borough.
The years not held rest on the organizers' history entries for 1995 and 2006 and on the Daily News of 29 March 2023 for 1995, 2020 and 2021. The 1979 reservation at Agape Farm, the move to Muddy Run Park and the 1985 traffic come from the organizers' own history page, and no record from those years has been read.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The same three errors as the sister page, which had been corrected while this one was left alone. A correction that reaches one page and not the other is not a correction, and every page on this site is now searched for each refuted claim.
WRONG, now fixed: “a coal freight”. Every contemporary account calls it a fast preference freight. The coal belongs to a victim rather than to the train — Chester A. Minds was a coal operator in the Clearfield region.
Number changed to the one a source actually gives: the page said “Seven of them were members of a single family”. The Evening Public Ledger says Minds “and six members of his family” died. The Harrisburg Telegraph's list of identified dead in that party runs to nine. The sources do not agree on a count, so the page now quotes the one that names its own figure and attributes it.
CUT for want of a source: “photographers sold real-photo postcards of the wreck across the state.” Real-photo wreck postcards were an ordinary trade in 1917, but nothing opened here says it happened for this wreck, and “across the state” is a scope claim needing its own source. No source was found, which is not the same as finding it untrue. Rechecked 1 November 2026 against the Interstate Commerce Commission's report of 6 April 1917, which gives the time of the collision as about 12.08 a.m. and the findings now summarised on this page.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The employment figures, the building's dimensions, and the 1971, 1974 and 1978 dates come from Nancy S. Shedd's inventory of the county's historic engineering and industrial sites, prepared for the National Park Service in 1991, pages 161 to 163. The survey also explains why the workforce was female. Two other sources date the Genesco takeover differently. The National Register nomination for the company's factory in Baltimore says L. Greif & Bro., Inc. and all 13 of its factories were sold to Genesco in 1959, and Genesco's company history dates the purchase to 1960.
What stays open: we have not found a record that explains the survey's 1971 date for Genesco. The survey's header also gives a construction date of 1919, while its history says the factory opened in 1920. The story follows the history.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Corrected, and one claim in the original was simply wrong.
WRONG, now fixed: the original called it a 'coal freight'. Every contemporary account calls it a fast preference freight. The coal in this story belongs to a victim, not to the train: Chester A. Minds was a coal operator in the Clearfield region. That is the likeliest route by which 'coal' migrated onto the freight.
CUT for want of a source: the original said 'photographs of the wreck were sold as postcards across the state.' Real-photo wreck postcards were an ordinary trade in 1917, but no source opened here says it happened for this wreck or that they sold statewide, and 'across the state' is a scope claim that needs its own source. No source was found for it, which is not the same as finding it untrue. It stays on the list of things to look for.
CUT: 'the deadliest day in Mount Union's history.' A superlative needs every rival counted and none has been. What the record does support is the Evening Public Ledger's own description of the crash as the most disastrous the Pennsylvania Railroad had suffered in years.
Tightened: the original said relief crews came 'from the Altoona shops.' The sources say a relief train set out from Altoona carrying Superintendent N. W. Smith of the Central Division with doctors and nurses. Altoona is sourced; the shops as the specific institution are not.
Numbers the sources disagree on, therefore left out: the infant son is 'Chester A. Minds, Jr., two weeks old' in the Harrisburg Telegraph and 'Owen Minds, aged three weeks' in the Democratic Watchman; Maud Minds is 28 in one and 35 in the other. The death toll is 'at least twenty' (Harrisburg Telegraph, AP), 'twenty persons, nineteen passengers and a porter' (Evening Public Ledger) and 'nineteen people instantly killed' (Democratic Watchman). The Ledger's precise formulation is the one used above because it accounts for the difference.
Confirmed: the date and the 12.08 a.m. time; Mercantile Express as train No. 6, out of Altoona at 10.35 p.m. by the Democratic Watchman's account (the ICC report gives 10.46 p.m.); the express standing at Mount Union station with brake trouble while the crew tested airbrakes; dense fog; the rear sleeper split; all the dead in the car Bellwood; Chester A. Minds of Ramey, Clearfield County coal operator and Penn football star, bound for his wife's father's funeral; the powder-plant accommodation train pulling out just before; the Altoona relief train at one o'clock with Superintendent N. W. Smith, doctors and nurses, more physicians picked up at Huntingdon; and the carload of coffins strewn over the wreckage. Blame was placed at the time on freight engineer A. T. Cook of Harrisburg, who said the block signal at MU tower showed white; the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Public Service Commission both investigated.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Welch's 1909 history, page 650, places the Crum building on the corner of Jefferson Street and Railroad Avenue, on the site of the former Broad Top House. Welch gives the hotel's date as 1858 on one page and 1859 on another, so the lede says the late 1850s. The barber's room and the real estate and insurance office are also from Welch's history.
The National Register nomination for the Mount Union Historic District places the building between 1900 and 1941, when fire destroyed it, and says it was built of locally made concrete block. The 1941 fire comes from that nomination, and we have not seen a newspaper report of it. The nomination and Welch both place the building across from the Beers Hotel. The sources differ on the cross street: Welch names Railroad Avenue on page 650 and Pennsylvania Avenue on page 452, and the nomination uses Pennsylvania Avenue. The year the building went up stays open.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The Red Cross passages rest on two sources. Page 30 of the county's 1937 sesquicentennial souvenir book speaks of the Red Cross across the county, right after naming its two chapters, and gives no figures for the Mount Union chapter's work in the 1936 flood. Page 6 of the 1993 Historic American Buildings Survey cites the Mt. Union Times of September 1924 for the Americanization program.
The 1993 survey dates senior citizen housing and a medical center on part of the plant site to the 1980s. A 1991 National Park Service inventory instead says the site was cleared in 1956 for a federal housing project. We have not settled between the two accounts.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
We checked the 1937 book's banking pages, the 1990 survey photograph and its index, the 1994 National Register nomination, Welch's 1909 history, the 1883 county history and two newspaper items. The book says the Huntingdon banks stayed open. Of the Mount Union banks it says only that they were in fine condition. The 1932 reopening rests on one short newspaper item, and we have not found a notice saying when or why the Central National Bank closed.
What stays open is the name. Welch's history calls the bank the Central Bank, and a January 1916 Harrisburg item calls it the Central National bank. We have not found a charter or notice that says when the name changed. Welch also spells the first name of Noble, the later occupant of the old building, both Lewis and Louis.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Rechecked 1 November 2026: the line saying postcards of the wreck sold across the state had no source and is cut, as it was from the main story.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Refuted, and refuted by this site's own sourced page before any outside source was opened.
The original called 1936 "the most destructive flood ever recorded in the Juniata Valley." Our page on the gage records for this same flood already carried the Geological Survey's gage records and says the opposite: on two of the four Huntingdon County gages the June 1889 flood was higher. Aughwick Creek at Orbisonia, 18,400 second feet in 1889 against 16,400 in 1936. Standing Stone Creek, maximum known stage 9.38 feet on 1 June 1889. Two pages on one site were making opposite claims about the same flood, and only one of them had a source. That is the cheapest fact check there is and it should have been run first.
Causation softened. The original said the flood "hit so hard, across so many towns, that Congress passed the Flood Control Act that same year." The Act is real and was signed on 22 June 1936. The Corps of Engineers' own published history of the law credits the floods of 1935 AND 1936 together rather than 1936 alone, but every route to that document could not be opened here, so it is not cited: a source that was not opened does not go under a sentence. What IS opened and cited is the contemporaneous report of the $320,000,000 omnibus bill naming Pennsylvania among the states with emergency projects that could not wait. So the page now says the flood reached far enough to move Washington, which the record supports, rather than that it single-handedly caused the Act, which was not shown.
DATE. The flood keeps St. Patrick's Day in its name, and the naming is right, but readers should know the crest came on 18 March: on the county's gaged creeks between about midnight and 9:30 a.m., and on the Juniata at the mouth of Aughwick Creek, about three miles below the Mount Union railroad bridge, at noon. The Survey's crest table gives no hour for Mount Union itself. The month is used rather than a bare 17 March so this page and the gage page cannot be read as contradicting one another.
WHAT STAYS OPEN. The week after the flood. We looked for whether and for how long the town lost its water, whether the National Guard was posted there, and when the railroad tracks reopened. What we could read does not say. The 1936 book on the Guard names units at Lewistown and other river towns and gives none at Mount Union, which does not settle it either way. A local paper from that week would.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Rechecked 1 November 2026: the movie house was built in 1915 by the National Register nomination's account and opened on 30 January 1917 by the newspapers' account. This page had given 1915 as the year it opened.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Welch's 1909 history, pages 406, 407 and 531, is the source for T. C. Peduzzi's early life, his 1906 arrival, the Lusardi store and the Stratford Building. The Mount Union Historic District nomination dates the corner building. A Harrisburg Telegraph notice from October 1919 reports the sale of the store. Carl Peduzzi's dates come from the Gettysburg Times, the Gettysburg College catalog, a 1937 souvenir book and a Find a Grave transcription of his obituary.
Still open. The nomination dates his arrival to about 1905, where Welch gives 10 April 1906, so the page follows Welch. Guido Peduzzi's obituary says the family came to America about 1901, while Welch has T. C. coming in 1890. The page keeps Welch's date, and we have not seen passenger lists. Nothing we read ties the 1919 sale to the nomination's "for decades," and we do not know who ran the store from 1919 to 1937 or when the counter closed. A 1989 federal survey lists an interview with a Carl Peduzzi, but nothing we read ties it to this Carl, so the page leaves it out. A Find a Grave memorial for an Antonio Peduzzi with the same birth date gives a death in 1917, but it is not tied to T. C., so it is left out too.
Checked, confirmed and corrected. · Checked 2026-11-01
Checked against J. Simpson Africa's 1883 county history and Charles Welch's 1909 town history. The 1845 preaching, the 1849 frame church, both building costs, the corner, and the organization on May 2, 1865, with fourteen members, all hold, and Welch gives the 360 members and the new church of 1908. The first post said the church was formally dedicated in November 1867. An earlier check found no month and removed the clause, and that check was wrong: the 1896 centennial memorial of the Presbytery of Huntingdon and Welch both date the dedication to November 1867, so the clause is back.
Still open. Africa dates a remodeling and rededication to July 9, 1882, while the 1896 memorial dates it to July 9, 1883, and we have not settled the year. Accounts also disagree on when the Sabbath school began, from about 1862 to the spring of 1866. James A. J. Postlethwaite's paragraph rests on the memorial, Welch and Africa. None of them calls him the first elder, so the story does not. We have not found whether the gymnasium plan in Welch's history went ahead. Africa, the 1896 memorial and Welch do not say what the 1866 and 1867 church was built of, so the story no longer calls it brick. The 1994 National Register nomination differs with itself on that point. Its text describes a wood frame church with a large wooden bell tower, moved behind 22 East Shirley Street, while its building list enters the motorcycle shop building at that address as brick, built in 1873. The material and the date of the move stay open.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The 1937 date comes from a federal record of completed post office murals, now held by the National Archives. Its sheet for Mount Union reads Paul Rohland, Mural, completed November 27, 1937. The State Museum of Pennsylvania's study also gives 1937. Two later sources say 1936: the 1994 National Register nomination for the historic district and a Historic American Buildings Survey report. That same 1936 appears on a tablet on the post office building. We follow the record made at the time.
The Living New Deal, quoting a display at the post office, says the commission came in the spring of 1937 and that Rohland traveled to Mount Union in May for his initial sketches. A National Archives case file on the Mount Union post office is listed in its catalog with no digital copy, so we have not read it, and it could show when the commission was given. We have not seen the mural in person. The State Museum's study, archived in 2016, places it at the post office.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Confirmed 2026-10-30 against the sources listed: the factual sentences were matched to passages in their sources. Where sources disagreed on a number, the number was left out. Rechecked 1 November 2026. The page spelled the company Etna, as the 1994 district nomination and some 1915 papers do; the Harrisburg Telegraph of July 1915, 1916 and 1919 names it the Aetna Explosives Company, and the page now does. The closing is now given both ways: the Harrisburg Telegraph of 2 January 1919 says the plant had shut down on Tuesday evening, and a 1991 National Park Service survey says it closed on November 11, 1918. The 1916 shutdown and reopening, and the December 1918 layoffs, come from the Harrisburg Telegraph. We found no closing order from November 1918 in the Telegraph issues we searched. A Telegraph item of January 17, 1919, offers for sale a large Aetna plant near Newton Hamilton. It may be this plant, but we could not confirm that, so it is not used. The sale of the Mount Union land to Hercules Powder rests on the 1991 survey alone, and no deed has been seen. Whom the plant served is given in each source's own terms, because they differ: the Telegraph of 14 July 1915 says the Allies, the 1991 survey says European armies before the United States entered the war, the National Register nomination says federally sponsored, and the Telegraph of 29 July 1916 reports a United States government order. None names a particular foreign buyer. We have not seen a contract or shipping record, so how much powder went overseas, and whether the 1916 order was filled, stay open.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The tannery figures are Africa's 1883 county history word for word, and every detail of Franz Heidel's crossing is in Welch's 1909 history, including the storm. The 1873 purchase by the Fausts and the 1878 fire are in both histories. Africa adds the 1876 sheriff's sale, which Welch dates to the same year. The earlier text said the tannery gave way to three brick plants and an explosives factory. Welch shows the tannery running until 1908 and operating as the Mount Union Tanning Company in 1909, so that sentence is gone. The population more than tripling between 1900 and 1910 comes from Jordan's 1913 History of the Juniata Valley and Its People, page 91, which gives 1,086 for 1900 and 3,338 for 1910.
What stays open: Welch gives 1863 on one page and 1865 on another for Bare's sale to Hoffman, so the story gives no year. Africa gives 1860 for the second tannery in one passage and 1869 in another; the story uses 1869, which Welch gives. Welch names C. Greene & Sons as the 1908 buyer on one page and the Mount Union Tanning Company on another. The story names C. Greene & Sons, as Welch's biography of Richard J. Faust does. We have not seen the deeds, and this check did not settle when the tannery closed. The oak extract plant's 13 acres, its third rail, its location and its daily work all come from Welch's 1909 history, the only account of them we found. We have not seen the Barnes deed, and this check did not settle when the plant closed. Africa writes the firm as A. D. Faust & Son, singular, and Welch gives the same name until the father's death in 1884. Checked 1 September 2026.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The 111 residences in the story are the Sanborn Map Company's count of 1919. The 1991 federal inventory counts ninety four dwellings standing today. The difference is ten four family buildings that were not on Nolen's plan, set apart at the south end and torn down in the 1930s, plus seven houses lost later. The inventory also lists twelve four family buildings as built, not ten, and we have not found a source that explains the gap. The architects are spelled Mann and MacNeille, as the survey's title block prints it. The 1991 inventory spells it MacNeill.
The earlier version gave the survey's wording to Nolen as his own philosophy. In his book New Towns for Old (1927), pages 73 and 74, Nolen writes that the company endeavored to provide good houses and to cultivate a spirit of citizenship. The book prints "expresses" where the survey prints "express," and the story follows the book. Still open: the survey counts African American families among Kistler's "foreign" residents, but Nolen's Kistler chapter does not mention them. The inventory cites a 1924 Mount Union Times article, "American Red Cross Americanization Program," for Kistler's activities. We have not seen that article, so this story does not say the Red Cross worked in Kistler. No source we opened says how residents received the programs. We have read the survey's account of the photographs, not the photographs, and we have not checked the deeds behind the 1949 date.
Checked, confirmed and corrected. · Checked 2026-11-01
Published without a source list. Both men are in Welch's 1909 history at pp. 512-513, with the dates, the trades and both addresses as the original gives them. Checked 1 September 2026. The post said Alley Kasan came from "a village near Beirut". Welch's 1909 history, the book the original is drawn from, says he was born in the vicinity of Beirut and places his birthplace "about a day's journey from Beirut in the region of the Lebanons"; it never calls it a village and a day's journey is not near. Corrected to what the source says. 1 September 2026. Checked again 1 November 2026. The dates for the Welch building and the place of the Beers Hotel come from the National Register nomination. The merchants born in Russia, their dates and the spelling of Willer were read from the printed pages of Welch's history, pp. 404, 407, 418-419, 478-479 and 531. How long these shops lasted is still open.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
A false claim removed. The original said this 1879 engraving showed the valley "before factories and railroads filled" it. By 1879 both railroads had long since arrived. Lytle's 1876 history records that the Pennsylvania Railroad was completed in 1850, twenty-nine years earlier, and that Mount Union was laid out that same year. Africa's 1883 history records the East Broad Top opened to Three Springs on 1 July 1874, five years earlier. The Pennsylvania main line runs through the Narrows itself, so an 1879 view of this gorge is a view of a railroad corridor, not of a valley before railroads.
A production note removed from the published text. The opening paragraph ended with a note naming an internal file and a date, which was never meant for a reader. Eleven other pages carried the same line and were fixed at the same time. Where the image comes from is now recorded in the source list instead, in plain words.
ADDED, and it is the better story: the name. Africa's history reports the murder of the trader John Armstrong with James Smith and Woodworth Arnold at the Narrows about the middle of February 1744, and says that event named the gorge. Lytle gives a whole chapter to the competing Captain Jack legend and titles it "A popular error," which is the hedge carried through here rather than an assertion that the legend is simply false. Rechecked 1 November 2026. The page said flatly that the name is not Captain Jack's. It now gives John Harris's 1754 account, Lytle's reading of it and Welch's more cautious view, because Welch does not treat the question as closed.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The post as published said Harbison-Walker built the Mount Union works in 1899. It did not. The W. H. Haws Company of Johnstown began the plant that year and sold the property to Harbison-Walker in 1900. The federal engineering survey cited in "The first of its kind in the country" on this site and Nancy Shedd's 1991 county industrial sites inventory both give 1900, in the same words as the 1990 National Register nomination for the plant, so they count as one account, not three. Welch's 1909 history, printed in Mount Union, also gives 1900: the Haws company controlled the works until the latter part of 1900, when the entire plant was sold to Harbison-Walker (pages 342 and 343). The federal history of the town (HABS PA-5974, data pages 2 and 4) gives the purchase as 1902. Shedd (pages 19 and 20) calls it a disputed sale, and the town history says some of the Haws partners were unhappy with its terms. The second works, called No. 2, is dated several ways, and this page used to give 1905. Welch's 1909 history says it was built in 1903 (page 349). The 1990 nomination says Harbison-Walker began its No. 2 Works in 1903 and completed it in 1905 (PDF page 15). The federal town history (HABS PA-5974, page 4) and the 1994 Mount Union Historic District nomination (NRHP 94000516, PDF page 19) give 1903 and 1904. Shedd (pages 19 and 20) puts it two years after the 1901 rival plant. Corrected 1 September 2026. The Welch figures for the works, from pages 347 to 349, are 29 kilns (page 347), each with a capacity of about 90,000 brick (page 348), and an output raised to 140,000 brick a day with upwards of 600 men employed (page 349). The book ran in the Mount Union Times from September 1909, and its title page gives both 1909 and 1910, so these figures belong to the book and not to a single year. The same page gives 160,000 brick a day shipped. The federal engineering survey says that by 1910 the plant employed more than 600 men and had the capacity to produce 150,000 bricks a day. That is a capacity, not an output, so it does not contradict Welch. The 1947 rail car counts are second hand. They come from The Hobo's Guide to the Pennsy, an online guide, which credits Rails Northeast without naming an issue. We did not find Rails Northeast itself, so the counts stay attributed to the guide.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
This page carried a correction that was itself wrong, and it is now reversed. The honest version of what happened matters more than a tidy note, so here it is.
The page originally said Hackman “was one of two former Harbison-Walker managers who organized Mount Union Refractories in 1911.” An earlier check cut that sentence for want of a source, cut it from a second page as well, and recorded that nothing supported it. That was wrong. The Historic American Buildings Survey's written history of Mount Union states it flatly on page 4: “The third company, Mt. Union Refractories, was organized by two former managers for Harbison-Walker, R. P. M. Davis and Clinton V. Hackman.” The survey footnotes it to Trisha Colyer's article in The Valley Log of 9 May 1990, and adds a second, independent thread: R. P. M. Davis appears in the Harbison-Walker correspondence of the 1903 strike as superintendent at the Farrandsville plant.
Why the first check went wrong, because the reasoning is the part worth keeping. It found the Harrisburg Telegraph naming Davis as president and general manager and Hackman as superintendent, and treated that as evidence against two men having founded the company. It is not evidence against it. Two men who start a firm hold two different posts in it, which is exactly what the newspaper shows. Absence of the claim from the National Register nomination was then read as the claim being false, when a nomination is not the document that would carry it.
The lesson, and this site now checks every page for it: a negative verdict needs a source, the same as a positive one. Cutting a true fact for want of a source feels like discipline while you are doing it and reads as a hole in the work afterwards.
Still good, and unchanged: Welch's 1909 portrait captions Hackman as superintendent of the Harbison-Walker brick plant, and the Harrisburg Telegraph of 21 October 1916 (page 6) names him at Mount Union Refractories. This page used to cite the issue of 21 November 1916, page 2, for that; that page does not name him, and the citation has been corrected. Welch gives both years, so the cut was wrong. Welch says Hackman "first came to Mount Union in 1902, and was here until 1905, when he went to Lock Haven" (page 351), and that after J. E. Lewis left he was "placed in charge" and "remained in charge of the work here until 1905" (pages 342 and 343). Welch also says his company recalled him to Mount Union, where he arrived on 1 March 1908 (page 351).
ADDED from the same survey page: eight kilns at the start, twenty one more during the First World War, the Clearfield County plant of 1922 and the change of name to U. S. Refractories, and the 1930 merger into North American Refractories.
Kistler is in Mifflin County, and the page says so. Two rival accounts are in print. The 1994 Mount Union Historic District nomination (NRHP 94000516, PDF page 19) names Hackman and Davis as the two organizers, and on PDF page 25 it calls Hackman "the president of Mount Union Refractories" when Kistler was planned. The Harrisburg Telegraph items checked for 1916 to 1919 name Davis as president and Hackman as superintendent, and Shedd's 1991 inventory (Kistler entry, pages 138 and 139) calls Davis the company president in 1924. The second rival account is the 1993 history Brickyard Towns (page 109), which also calls him the company president and points to an article in The Valley Log of 9 May 1990 that we have not been able to read. Brick and Clay Record of 15 October 1911 (page 319), reporting the state charter, lists Davis as president and general manager and Hackman as superintendent. The same journal on 1 January 1913 (page 74) counts 11 kilns, three more than the survey's starting eight, so some of the twenty one the survey places in the war years seem to have come before the war. The newspapers, the trade journal and the 1991 inventory support the page as written on the presidency.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Sourced from the Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Town of Mount Union, HABS No. PA-5974. The page previously had no source.
Confirmed and made exact: the page said “the hundred company houses on Ganister Hill”. The survey says Harbison-Walker owned 104 houses in 1911, all two-story frame, twenty-seven of them duplexes, all but three grouped on the hillside south and west of the plant to form Ganister Hill. A round hundred was close; 104 is what the survey says, though two other sources give a round 100, as noted below.
The nationalities corrected to the ones actually recorded. The page listed “Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, and Russia”. The survey quotes the town's own newspaper of 28 January 1916, the Twice-A-Week Republican, listing the company's employees as “Slavish, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks and Serbians” as well as “native Americans, and southern Negroes.” Serbians appear in both lists. Croatians and Russians do not appear in the paper's list, and Bulgarians, Roumanians and Italians were missing from the page. That matters here, because this page is about the immigrant families of Ganister Hill. The period terms are kept as the paper printed them; paraphrasing them into modern words hides what was actually said about these people.
Not sourced, and removed: the opening sentence describing the 1922 advertisement shown above, which no source here covers; and the line that many of those families lived on the hill.
Restored after a later check: the boarding. We first removed the claim that families boarded “five to ten single countrymen at a time” because we had not found a source, and we had missed one. The 1991 inventory, page 21, says immigrant families on Ganister Hill shared their quarters with five to ten single boarders of the same nationality. The same page names Italians, Austro-Hungarians, Serbians, Croatians, Russians and Macedonians in the neighborhood in 1910, so Croatians and Russians are on the record after all. Its footnote cites the 1910 census, and we have not seen those census sheets. The 1916 paper's list counts employees and the inventory's counts residents; the two differ, so the page gives both. The 1994 nomination uses nearly the same words and the same 100 houses, so we do not treat it as a separate witness.
ADDED, because it is the honest half of an “uplift” story: the Red Cross sponsored an Americanization Program that included instruction in domestic skills such as sewing, fancy work and cooking, and the survey itself reads the whole effort as an attempt to make newcomers “less challenging and more controllable”. A page about new Americans that records only the welcome is not describing what happened.
WHAT STAYS OPEN: the survey takes the Red Cross program from an article in the Mt. Union Times of 4 September 1924, eight years after the 1916 report on the company's uplift program. We have not seen that article and have not found it online, so what the page says about the program is the survey's account of it. The same words appear in Kim Wallace's book Brickyard Towns (1993), page 108, which comes from the same study, so that is one account printed twice and not two accounts. The survey places the program in the town of Mount Union. Whether it also reached Kistler, across the river, we cannot say.
ADDED, the end of the neighborhood: the demolition, the salvage price, the flats and Allenport are the survey's account, which cites a letter and an interview we have not seen. The 1991 inventory and the 1994 nomination both say Harbison-Walker built 100 houses on the hill, against the survey's 104 owned in 1911. The figures differ, and this page keeps the survey's number without reconciling them. The survey and the nomination also give different reasons for the demolition, as the story says. The nomination says all of Ganister Hill was demolished and also mentions one house left on the hillside. It does not say which house, and we cannot say whether it still stands.
ALSO OPEN: the survey says much of the flats “was destroyed in the 1977 flood.” We read the printed page, and 1977 is what it says. The nomination, writing of the low ground it calls the Flat, which appears to be the same area, gives floods in 1936 and 1972 and no flood in 1977. The two differ and we found nothing to settle it, so the date is left out of the story above.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Checked gage by gage against the 1937 U.S. Geological Survey report on the March 1936 floods, Water-Supply Paper 799. The story gives each creek's figures as that report prints them and does not extend them to the whole county. Two lines from an earlier draft, about bridges and homes around Huntingdon and about families evacuated from Portstown, had no source and are not in the story.
A correction to an earlier version of this note: it said the Survey had no gage on the Juniata at Huntingdon in 1936. That was wrong. The Survey's 1975 report on the 1972 flood, Professional Paper 924, lists a station at Huntingdon with records from 1896, including the 1936 maximum. The 1889 comparison on the river stays open. The Weather Service's crest of 22.50 feet for June 1, 1889 is higher than the 21.87 feet for 1936, but we have seen that figure only as the county hazard plan prints it, and the Survey's record does not reach back to 1889.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The page had the wrong cause, and so did this site's own list of refuted claims. The page said the stone house fell “just as the railroad age overtook the ferry age”, which puts the ferry's end in the late 1850s. Three county histories put it a generation earlier and blame the canal. Welch in 1909 says the ferry flourished before the canal was built. The Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of 1897 says it plainly: the ferry “was operated for many years, and not until the building of the canal, about the year 1830, was it abandoned.” The same book, writing up James Drake separately, says he ran it “until about 1830, when the construction of the canal through the Narrows took place, of which he was the first foreman.”
This site's own list of refuted claims had “the canal replaced the ferries” listed as a refuted claim, on the reasoning that a ferry crosses a river and a canal runs along a valley, so one cannot replace the other. That reasoning is tidy and it is not evidence. Nobody had looked in the county histories, and all three of them say the canal is what ended this ferry. The entry is gone and the correction is on the page.
A genuine disagreement between sources, left as one. The page said the pioneer stone house by the ferry was “destroyed by a train wreck around 1858 or 1859”. That is in Welch, and Welch hedges it twice: “probably 1858 or '59”, and “according to information received from D. E. Shaver of town”, a man's recollection half a century later. Africa's 1883 history says the house “was burned several years ago”, and Jordan's 1913 history says it was “subsequently destroyed by fire”. Two books say fire, one says a train ran into it. The page no longer states either as fact.
Confirmed and dated exactly. The charter really was 1848, and the day can be given: meetings were held along the route early in 1848, one at Scottsville on 28 February, and on 25 March the legislature incorporated the Drake's Ferry and East Broad Top Railroad Company. Lytle adds that no steps were ever taken to build it, and that Mount Union was laid out in 1850 as the transfer point between that railroad and the canal.
ADDED: the 1787 road from the Burnt Cabins, twenty four miles and forty nine perches, and the route the ferry served, named town by town from the encyclopedia rather than summarised.
Sources now openable. This page cited the Juniata Valley encyclopedia with no link. Both it and Jordan's history run to several volumes, so the right volume was established by searching the full text of each rather than by picking one: the ferry passage is in volume 1 of the encyclopedia, and the railroad charter passage is in volume 1 of Jordan.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
The claims about the DeFrehns' move in 1889, the June flood at Williamsport, Maryland, the seven sons, the 1892 fire and the 1898 departure have been read against Welch's 1909 history. The page once placed the factory on a Pennsylvania Railroad siding. Welch puts it along the old line of the P. R. R., and the page now says so. The tannery is now named as the one John Bare built in 1869, which R. J. Faust dismantled and sold to the DeFrehns. The seven sons are described as interested in the factory, not as all working in it, which is how Welch puts it. Welch's biography of Frank DeFrehn gives August 1880 for the move to Williamsport, checked on the printed page. The same section has a biography of a brother, A. I. DeFrehn, born in Tamaqua in 1872. Neither Welch's list of sons nor the 1897 encyclopedia's list of children has an A. I., and both have Augustus. Welch says A. I. married a daughter of George Fields, and his entry on George L. Fields names a daughter as Mrs. Augustus De Frehn of Johnstown, so A. I. and Augustus may be one man, but no source we have read says so, and the page keeps the name Augustus.
The fire losses come from three Pennsylvania newspapers of 1892. The mortgage, the 1906 lease, the 1909 sale and the 1911 ruling come from the Supreme Court's opinion in Moudy v. Bell, read in full. The papers disagree on the loss, so the page gives both figures. The Pittsburg Dispatch also reported $30,000, but that total included a dwelling belonging to Charles Peters, so it is not used. One paper gave the factory 150 hands, but no other paper confirms it, so that figure is left out. None of the papers gives the day of the fire, so 20 February 1892 rests on Welch alone, and so does the 1898 start of Moudy's run. Still open: the Mount Union newspapers of those years, the sheriff's docket and the deeds, which could settle the day of the fire and the loss. Rechecked 1 November 2026.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Sourced at last. The details this page carried (James Nevell, November 1896, the Beers Hotel, the Broad Top House) came from Welch's history, and none of them was cited. The page now names the book and the pages.
Corrected: the page called the Broad Top House an early hotel “in canal days”. It was not. Welch places it “along the railroad opposite the station” and dates its building to the late 1850s, by which time the Pennsylvania Railroad had been through for years. This is a railroad-era hotel, and the site has confused the canal era with the railroad era before.
A date the source will not settle. Welch gives two. On page 178, in Doyle's own biography, the Broad Top House is erected “in 1859”. On page 650 it “was built by James G. Doyle in 1858”. The same book, two different years. There is no way to choose between them from the book alone, so the page says the late 1850s and gives the one date the book is consistent about: Doyle died in the unfinished building on 28 April 1859.
The hotel was torn down and its material re-erected on the North Side, in use by Mr. Crum when Welch wrote. The building that replaced it on the corner carried his name, and so did the timber of the one it replaced.
The National Register nomination for the Mount Union Historic District says fire destroyed the Crum building in 1941. That date rests on the nomination alone; we have not seen a newspaper report of the fire.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
This post asked readers to settle a disagreement between the county's 1937 history (laid out 1840 by William Pollock for John Sharrer) and the federal survey (laid out and lots offered for sale in 1849). The contemporary newspaper answers most of it. The Huntingdon Journal for 4 and 11 September 1849 prints the lot sale advertisement over the names of George W. Speer and John Dougherty, dated 4 September 1849, confirming the survey's 1849, and showing that Lytle's 1876 history named the right two men but dated it a year late. The same paper for 5 July 1843 shows John Sharer already keeping a warehouse at Mount Union, so the name is older than the lot sale and the 1937 account is not simply wrong. Added 1 September 2026.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-11-01
Rechecked 1 November 2026: the name Bricktowners belonged to Mount Union's own team, not to the visitors, and the sentence now says so.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-10-04
Corrected 2026-10-04. A version of this story that circulated said Marzio took over the Houston museum from Philippe de Montebello. He did not: the Handbook of Texas records de Montebello as director from 1969 to 1974, then 'He was succeeded by William Agee', who left in 1982, the year 'Peter Marzio became director'. The likely source of the error is a biography site that says de Montebello's move to the Metropolitan Museum opened the job in 1982.
The football scholarship is Marzio's own phrase, in the Houston Chronicle of 19 March 2006. A reader who coached at a Division III school pointed out that Division III schools may not award athletic scholarships. Division III was created in 1973, after Marzio's time, and no record from Juniata itself saying what his aid was called has been found, so the page gives the scholarship in his words rather than as the college's record.
The Goya story is told from his own 2006 account; the Boston Globe obituary independently confirms the projected image in a lecture, the Frick visit, and his poor academic record in high school. A collection figure was left out because two sources disagree on the starting number (14,000 against 13,000 works).
Checked and confirmed. · Checked 2026-09-25
Published without a source list. Every figure in it has now been read against Welch's 1909 history and all of them hold exactly: the seven thousand gallons a day imported from Europe by way of Philadelphia, the two thousand ties treated daily, the five hundred thousand on hand, Carl W. Tiffany as superintendent and about fifty men. Welch, writing in 1909, calls the plant only a few months old and the process "somewhat of an experiment". Checked 1 September 2026.
Checked and confirmed. · Checked 2026-09-24
Published without a source list. Every claim has now been read against Welch's 1909 history and all of it holds, including the date, the two dynamos in the engine room of the brick works, the day and night current, and the phrase about a night long to be remembered, which is the book's own. Checked 1 September 2026.
Checked and confirmed. · Checked 2026-09-23
Published without a source list. Every claim has now been read against the 1991 county industrial survey and holds, including the architectural description and the count of seven built and three surviving. The superlative needed the most work, because saying a thing suffered the worst losses means counting all its rivals: the survey gives all six house types, and the Double Mountain House lost four of seven where the next worst lost two of twenty-three. One thing the original leaves out is worse still: the 1991 survey says Kistler also had twelve four family buildings, and not one of them survives. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the town, from the 1919 Sanborn map, says ten. Checked 1 September 2026.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
Dates put back, and they were this site's own doing rather than the scanner's. The passage below promises to print the record exactly as it appears, and it was doing so apart from one thing: sentences kept losing their year. “In an imposing brick church” for “In 1877 an imposing brick church”, “organized in by Rev. Richard Allen” for “organized in 1816 by”.
The cause was a rule meant to strip page numbers where a running head had run into the text. It removed any two to four digit number standing between two lowercase words, which is what a page number looks like there, and also what a year looks like in a sentence.
The rule now refuses to touch a number between 1600 and 1999, and it still removes page numbers, which was checked both ways. The dates on this page were restored one at a time from the full text of the book itself.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
Dates put back, and they were this site's own doing rather than the scanner's. The passage below promises to print the record exactly as it appears, and it was doing so apart from one thing: sentences kept losing their year. “In an imposing brick church” for “In 1877 an imposing brick church”, “organized in by Rev. Richard Allen” for “organized in 1816 by”.
The cause was a rule meant to strip page numbers where a running head had run into the text. It removed any two to four digit number standing between two lowercase words, which is what a page number looks like there, and also what a year looks like in a sentence.
The rule now refuses to touch a number between 1600 and 1999, and it still removes page numbers, which was checked both ways. The dates on this page were restored one at a time from the full text of the book itself.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
Dates put back, and they were this site's own doing rather than the scanner's. The passage below promises to print the record exactly as it appears, and it was doing so apart from one thing: sentences kept losing their year. “In an imposing brick church” for “In 1877 an imposing brick church”, “organized in by Rev. Richard Allen” for “organized in 1816 by”.
The cause was a rule meant to strip page numbers where a running head had run into the text. It removed any two to four digit number standing between two lowercase words, which is what a page number looks like there, and also what a year looks like in a sentence.
The rule now refuses to touch a number between 1600 and 1999, and it still removes page numbers, which was checked both ways. The dates on this page were restored one at a time from the full text of the book itself.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
Dates put back, and they were this site's own doing rather than the scanner's. The passage below promises to print the record exactly as it appears, and it was doing so apart from one thing: sentences kept losing their year. “In an imposing brick church” for “In 1877 an imposing brick church”, “organized in by Rev. Richard Allen” for “organized in 1816 by”.
The cause was a rule meant to strip page numbers where a running head had run into the text. It removed any two to four digit number standing between two lowercase words, which is what a page number looks like there, and also what a year looks like in a sentence.
The rule now refuses to touch a number between 1600 and 1999, and it still removes page numbers, which was checked both ways. The dates on this page were restored one at a time from the full text of the book itself.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
Services replaced with the ones the library actually names. This page listed things the library was assumed to offer rather than things it says it offers. Describing a service that does not exist creates a promise nobody has agreed to keep, and it is the same error as inventing a fact.
What the library's own site names, and what this page now carries: Summer Programs, Library by Mail, Ask A Librarian, makerspace studio appointments, interlibrary loan requests, Power Library, tax resources, voter registration and a Friends of the Library. The address is given as 330 Penn St., Huntingdon, PA 16652.
WHAT CAME OUT, and why it is not the same as saying the library lacks these things. Story hours, public computers and air conditioning are not named anywhere on the pages read. A library homepage does not list everything a library has, so this is not evidence the library lacks them; it is simply not something this page can assert. If the library confirms them, they go back in.
Hours are deliberately not printed. A third party directory listing gives one set of opening hours and the library's own page gives a different set. The library's page wins, and hours change quietly, so this page links to them rather than copying them.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
Dates put back, and they were this site's own doing rather than the scanner's. The passage below promises to print the record exactly as it appears, and it was doing so apart from one thing: sentences kept losing their year. “In an imposing brick church” for “In 1877 an imposing brick church”, “organized in by Rev. Richard Allen” for “organized in 1816 by”.
The cause was a rule meant to strip page numbers where a running head had run into the text. It removed any two to four digit number standing between two lowercase words, which is what a page number looks like there, and also what a year looks like in a sentence.
The rule now refuses to touch a number between 1600 and 1999, and it still removes page numbers, which was checked both ways. The dates on this page were restored one at a time from the full text of the book itself.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
Corrected on geography, on direction, and on who is making the claim.
A canal is not a ferry, but it did end one, and this note overstated the correction. The original page said the canal “had replaced the earlier ferries, offering faster passage than the river crossings that came before”, and ended “travelers depended on the canal boats to cross.” The second half is still wrong: a canal boat does not carry you across a river, and nobody crossed the Juniata on one. But this note went on to say that a canal cannot replace a ferry at all, and that is not right either. Three county histories say the building of the canal, about 1830, is exactly what ended Drake's Ferry a few miles from here, and the ferryman became the canal's first foreman. The mechanism was wrong in the original sentence; the connection was not. See the page about Drake's Ferry, where it is set out with the sources. The original said the canal "had replaced the earlier ferries, offering faster passage than the river crossings that came before", and ended "travelers depended on the canal boats to cross." A ferry carries you across a river; a canal carries you along a valley. They are different jobs and one does not replace the other. Both sentences are cut.
Direction. The original had Dickens going "down the Juniata River." He was going to Pittsburgh, which from Harrisburg is west and UP the Juniata, and he was on the canal beside the river, not on the river. His route, from his own chapter headings, was Baltimore to York to Harrisburg by coach, then the canal boat over the Alleghenies to Pittsburgh.
Whose claim is it. This matters most. Dickens does not name the Juniata anywhere in American Notes, not once. The local connection rests entirely on Charles H. Welch asserting in 1909 that Dickens "came this way", and Welch is geographically right, because the Main Line Canal from Harrisburg to Hollidaysburg ran up the Juniata past Mount Union and there was no other way for that boat to go. But the site was presenting a local historian's inference as though Dickens had recorded it himself. It is now attributed to Welch, and the quotation is attributed to Dickens.
Quotation restored from the book. The original quoted a single trimmed sentence by way of Welch. Welch's page is set in badly worn type and reads "Despite oddities" where Dickens wrote "And yet despite these oddities", and prints "1 heartily" for "I heartily". So the passage is quoted from Dickens's own text and Welch is cited for the local claim rather than for the words. The fuller passage is also simply better than the fragment that was there.
CUT for want of a source: "The stone bridge visible here was built in 1906." No source was found for the date. It is not contradicted either, and it stays on the list of things to look for.
The four-miles-an-hour packet speed and walking the towpath are Dickens's own: he describes the brisk walk on the towing-path in the quoted passage.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
Services replaced with the ones the library actually names. This page listed things the library was assumed to offer rather than things it says it offers. Describing a service that does not exist creates a promise nobody has agreed to keep, and it is the same error as inventing a fact.
What the library's own site names, and what this page now carries: Summer Programs, Library by Mail, Ask A Librarian, makerspace studio appointments, interlibrary loan requests, Power Library, tax resources, voter registration and a Friends of the Library. The address is given as 330 Penn St., Huntingdon, PA 16652.
WHAT CAME OUT, and why it is not the same as saying the library lacks these things. Story hours, public computers and air conditioning are not named anywhere on the pages read. A library homepage does not list everything a library has, so this is not evidence the library lacks them; it is simply not something this page can assert. If the library confirms them, they go back in.
Hours are deliberately not printed. A third party directory listing gives one set of opening hours and the library's own page gives a different set. The library's page wins, and hours change quietly, so this page links to them rather than copying them.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-10
The count is back, because it was right all along, and taking it out was this site's mistake rather than the original post's. That is worth saying plainly.
An earlier check found that the post's closing sentence contradicted its own arithmetic: it gave 14 officers and 127 enlisted men lost to combat, 68 to disease, and then said disease had killed more. It caught that correctly. But it then removed the whole casualty count and left a note saying the number would stay out until somebody put a source under it. The source is William F. Fox's Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, published in 1889 and still the standard reference for exactly this question. Its table for the Fifth Pennsylvania Reserves gives 14 officers and 127 men killed or died of wounds, 68 dead of disease, accident or imprisonment, and a total enrollment of 1,046. Fox's own line beneath the table reads “141 killed = 13.5 per cent”. 141 and 68 make 209. Every figure in the original post was correct and only the conclusion was wrong.
Cutting a true fact for want of a source is the error that feels like care while you are making it. It is the third time this project has caught itself doing it.
A different sentence on this page was actually wrong. It said four companies were recruited partly out of Huntingdon County. Africa's 1883 county history says two, and names them: the Huntingdon Infantry under Captain Andrew S. Harrison, which became Company G, and the Scott Infantry under Captain George Dare, which became Company I.
A distinction Fox makes and the page did not. The page listed Gettysburg and the North Anna among the regiment's battles. Fox separates the actions in which the regiment lost men from those at which it was merely present, and Gettysburg, Malvern Hill, Mine Run, the North Anna and Totopotomoy are in the second list. The page now keeps the two apart.
ADDED, and it is the reason to run this post at all: both Huntingdon County officers named in the 1883 history were killed. Fox records Lieutenant Colonel George Dare, in command of the regiment, killed at the Wilderness, and Major Frank Zentmyer among the killed at Fredericksburg. Dare had raised the Scott Infantry; Zentmyer had taken over that company from him.
A spelling note, left as found: the 1883 county history spells him Zentmyer and Fox spells him Zentmeyer. The county's own book is followed here.
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Source upgraded from Wikipedia to two county histories we already hold, and the page gained the thing it was missing: evidence.
Confirmed, Africa 1883, on the trade itself. At a conference held by Weiser with Shikellamy and other Indians at Chambers' Mill in June 1747, complaint was made against the traders James Dunning and John Powel; Dunning was accused of stealing forty-seven deer-skins and three horses “upon the heads of Joniady (Juniata) River”. The page had been asserting that traders came first and dealt in skins; it can now name two of them, and date them to 1747.
Confirmed, Lytle 1876, on the road: the traders' route ran “through the Tuscarora Valley, Shade Gap, Black Log, Aughwick, Woodcock Valley, Hartslog Valley, Water Street, Frankstown, Hollidaysburg, and crossing the Allegheny mountains at or near Kittanning Point”, and “it was this trail that gave Huntingdon county its early importance. It was the great highway between the east and the west.” That replaces the vaguer claim that the paths are under some of our roads with the route itself, named valley by valley.
The Great Cove correction is kept but its numbers are cut. A correction earns more scrutiny than the thing it corrects, not less. The geography is sound and is the point: Great Cove is McConnellsburg, in what is now Fulton County, and the county histories place the Great Cove settlements in disputed land outside this county. But the casualty figures the page carried - around fifty killed or captured, and Sheriff Potter reporting forty-seven - are not in any county history we hold and were not sourced anywhere opened. A correction that itself carries unsourced numbers is not finished, so the numbers are out and the geography stays.
A coincidence worth naming, because it could have produced a false citation. Africa's 1747 passage contains the figure forty-seven, for deer-skins stolen from an Indian trader. The page's Great Cove paragraph also carried a forty-seven, for people. They have nothing to do with each other, and a keyword search for the number would have joined them.
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Sourced for the plant, not for the photograph's decade. The page had no source at all. Welch's 1909 account of the tie-treating plant, page 226, establishes what the works were and at what scale, and that is now on the page with his figures.
What is still not sourced: that this particular photograph is from the 1950s. No source opened here dates the image. The claim that ties were still being treated here four decades after Welch wrote is a reasonable reading of a yard photograph, and it is not proven by anything cited. If the image turns out to be another decade, the Welch material stands and only the caption moves.
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The specific claim is not sourced, and the page now says so rather than asserting it.
The page said the company painted interiors in bright deep greens, blues, browns and greys, that residents complained, and that the company switched to beiges and pastels. Two federal documents were opened and searched: the Historic American Buildings Survey for the Town of Mount Union (PA-5974) and for the Town of Kistler (PA-5976). Neither mentions colours, beiges, pastels, or a complaint about paint.
Where to look. The Kistler survey names the publication the whole study fed into: Kim E. Wallace, “Brickyard Towns: A History of Refractories Industry Communities in South-Central Pennsylvania”, published in 1993 by America's Industrial Heritage Project and HABS/HAER. If the colour dispute is documented anywhere, that book is the first place to check. It was not available here.
What is sourced, and it is a bigger story than the paint. The Mount Union survey records that the houses were “solid frame structures, nicely painted and slate roofed” with interiors “painted and papered”, porcelain sinks and city water, and plans to have them “electrically lighted and scientifically sewered”. It quotes the aim: “the employees and their families should be comfortably and decently housed; and . . . they should be encouraged to keep their houses as nicely as possible.” Housing was part of what the companies called a programme of social and cultural transformation.
And the part the page was leaving out. The same programme “included a policy of curtailing alcohol consumption”, and “employees who flagrantly ignored admonishments to abstain were fired.” A page calling this “one of the gentlest labor stories” while omitting that the company could sack a man for drinking was telling half of it.
A misquotation of this site's own, corrected. An earlier version of this page rendered the workforce as “Poles, Greeks and Serbians”. The survey quotes the local newspaper of 1916 as “Slavish, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks and Serbians” as well as “native Americans, and southern Negroes.” Poles are not in it; Roumanians, Bulgarians and Italians were dropped. The period terms are kept as the paper printed them because paraphrasing them hides what was actually said.
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Source upgraded from Wikipedia to two primary records: the Nobel Foundation's own API for the prize, and Phillips's autobiography published by the Nobel Foundation for everything about Juniata.
Confirmed at the Nobel Foundation: the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William D. Phillips, one third each, with the citation "for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light" - which is the wording the page now uses rather than a paraphrase.
Confirmed in his own words: he began at Juniata College in the autumn of 1966 and graduated in 1970. He describes Juniata as "a small school in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, founded and strongly influenced by the pacifist Church of the Brethren."
ADDED, and it is much the better story: his parents were each the first in their families to go to college, both went to Juniata, and graduated in 1930 and 1936 without ever meeting - until a Juniata professor who knew them both suggested his father telephone a young Juniata alumna. His aunt, his sister and his younger brother all went there too. A page about a Nobel Prize was carrying only the graduate, and the county's actual claim is a family.
A name trap worth recording, because it nearly went the wrong way. "Juniata" appears twice in this autobiography meaning two different places. Phillips's father was born in 1907 in "Juniata, a community on the edge of Altoona" - a neighbourhood in BLAIR County, not the college and not this county. The connection was checked against the sentences that name Juniata College and Huntingdon, not against the word on its own.
Also from the record and not previously on the page: Phillips was born on 5 November 1948 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, so he is not a native of this county. The page no longer implies otherwise; the Juniata connection is the real one and it does not need him to have been born here.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
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Sourced. This page previously cited an internal catalogue reference and a photograph credit, neither of which a reader can open, and it carried a population claim with nothing behind it: that Mount Union went “from about a thousand to over three thousand” between 1900 and 1910.
Confirmed, and better than the estimate. Welch's history, page 390: “When the plant was installed, in 1900, Mount Union had a population of 1086. It now has, including suburbs, upward of 3200.” The rough figures were right and the real ones are more interesting.
Two qualifiers kept, because dropping them is how a good number goes wrong. Welch's 3,200 is “including suburbs”, so it is not the borough count on its own. And his book is 1909, not 1910, so the span is nine years rather than the decade the page implied. The page now says both.
ADDED from the same passage, which is the reason the town grew: by 1909 there were two large fire brick plants, a large steam tannery, extract works, creosoting works and two railroads, employing more than a thousand men between them, where in 1900 work had only just started on the Ganister Works.
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ADDED, from the survey's own text and footnotes: the African American families in Kistler were recruited from the area around Saluda, South Carolina. That is not a general statement about migration. It names the place they were brought from, and it is the kind of detail a family in this town might still be able to match to a grandparent.
The hedge is the source's own and it is reproduced exactly. The survey says “although no strict segregation was reported in Kistler, most of the African-American families lived on Pine Street.” It would be easy to write that up as either a segregated town or an unsegregated one. The document supports neither. It reports no formal rule and an actual concentration on one street, and it rests on interviews with residents, Mary Alexander and Ressie Costlow of Kistler, recorded in 1989 and 1991. The page now carries the same hedge the surveyors used.
Confirmed, unchanged: the six house names come off Nolen's plan key, and the survey lists three double house designs and three one and a half storey single family designs. The Vermont Farm House is one of the single family three, which is consistent with the twenty seven figure on this page.
Spelling corrected across the Kistler pages: Mann and MacNeille.
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Sourced. The page previously cited an internal catalogue reference and a photograph credit, neither of which a reader can open, and it described the operation only in general terms.
Confirmed and greatly expanded from Welch, page 226, written while the plant was new: erected by the Pennsylvania Railroad Co. on their grounds northeast of town along the Juniata River; seven thousand gallons of creosote used daily, imported from Europe and stored in large tanks at Philadelphia; two thousand feet of railroad siding; a daily capacity of about two thousand ties; roughly five hundred thousand ties on hand; Carl W. Tiffany superintendent; approximately fifty men employed.
A hedged claim, carried as his hedge. Welch writes that “so far as we can learn, this process of tie treatment to creosote is somewhat of an experiment, this being the first industry of this kind built by the Pennsylvania Railroad Co.” That is a first-of-its-kind claim and he does not assert it flatly. Neither does this page: it is given as what he could learn, in his words. Upgrading a source's hedge into a fact is the specific way this kind of sentence goes wrong.
Dating. Welch's book is 1909 and he says the plant was erected “during the last year” and opened “only a few months ago”, which places construction in 1908 and opening in 1908 or early 1909. The page says what he says rather than fixing a year he does not give.
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Citation corrected. An earlier pass on this page cited the nomination at npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/90000398_text. That address answers HTTP 200 with a 1,623 byte PNG placeholder for ANY reference number, including a deliberately invented one, so a reader following it would have got a broken image and no document. There is no digitized text asset at NPGallery for this reference, and the reason turns out to matter: the nomination is filed under the National Archives' withdrawn series. The 54-page bundle actually read is at NARA RG 79.
Confirmed from that bundle: organized 1911, plant completed 1912, third such concern in Mount Union in under fifteen years; quarries pushed out to Three Springs because the company was last on the scene; the East Broad Top serving both the quarries and the coal supply; and 'By 1919, Mount Union Refractories had expanded from eight to 29 kilns and was employing 885 men to satisfy the demand created by World War I.' The original's 'eight kilns to start, twenty-one more added' comes to the same twenty-nine and was right.
ADDED, and it is why the withdrawn filing matters: the same bundle holds the PHMC letter of 17 June 1996 and the reconnaissance survey behind it. After North American Refractories ended production in 1990 the property was sold or leased to a salvage company that dismantled the buildings for scrap. The survey of 3 April 1996 found only three buildings standing, due to come down that summer, and concluded the property 'has ceased to meet the criteria for listing in the National Register of Historic Places because the qualities which caused it to be listed have been lost.' The Bureau began the process of removal. So this plant was listed and then delisted, and the site must not imply it is still on the Register. The beehive kilns, buildings 'H' and 'I' on the survey map, are among the demolished.
Restored. This note previously recorded that the sentence 'Two former Harbison-Walker managers struck out on their own in 1911' had been cut as unsourced. That was an error on this project's part, not on the page's. The Historic American Buildings Survey of Mount Union states on page 4 that Mt. Union Refractories was organised by two former managers for Harbison-Walker, R. P. M. Davis and Clinton V. Hackman, and footnotes it. The claim is sound and it is set out in full on the page about Hackman. The contemporary record names R. P. M. Davis of Harrisburg as president and general manager, F. D. Halstead as secretary and treasurer, and C. V. Hackman as superintendent of the local plant. The nomination's own framing cuts against it: the company was 'last on the scene' and took the leftover quarries, which is not the story of insiders leaving with what they knew. No source was found for it, which is not the same as finding it untrue.
Hedge kept: 'silica brick capital of the world' is the town's own claim, which is exactly how both nominations phrase it. Kistler is across the river in Mifflin County and belongs under across-the-line.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
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Sourced. The page had no source and said nothing about who the Floods were.
Confirmed from Welch, page 431: the Messrs. Flood were born near Nossville in the lower end of Huntingdon county and spent their early days there; J. D. Flood, the senior member of the firm, spent time in Virginia and in Tyrone and was later in the furniture business in Lewistown; the Floods came to Mount Union in the spring of 1906; J. D. Flood married Marie Boggs of Lewistown and was the father of two daughters.
That the firm arrived in 1906 is worth having beside a 1910 photograph: the wagon in the picture belonged to a business four years old, run by men who had grown up at the other end of this county and come back to it.
Not claimed: the date of the photograph itself. The page says 1910 and nothing opened here establishes that. Welch's account fixes when the firm arrived, not when the picture was taken.
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Source upgraded from Wikipedia to the FBI's own Wall of Honor record for Special Agent Terry R. Anderson, which is a federal account of this case and names the place, the abductor, the seven days and the outcome.
Confirmed there: 17 May 1966 as the date Anderson was killed; near Shade Gap, Pennsylvania; William Hollenbaugh as the abductor; a 17-year-old girl held seven days; the victim rescued and Hollenbaugh killed; and Anderson's own details, born Washington, Iowa in January 1924, Drake University and Notre Dame.
ADDED: Hollenbaugh's nickname, “Mountain Man”, which is the FBI's own word for him and is how the region remembered him.
CUT: “the largest FBI manhunt in U.S. history at that time.” Two faults in one phrase. It is a superlative, and no source opened here supports it. And it was not an FBI manhunt: the search drew in state police, local officers, the National Guard and civilian volunteers, so describing it as the Bureau's operation takes the work off a great many local people. The page now says a manhunt, and lets the federal agent's death carry the scale.
Still unsourced, and left out rather than asserted: the abduction date of 11 May, the rescue on 18 May, and State Trooper Grant H. Mixell as the man who fired the fatal shot. These are almost certainly right and they are in every retelling, but the FBI page does not carry them and this county's own newspapers are not digitised for 1966 in either archive available here. The Pennsylvania State Police or the county historical society would settle all three, and that is the route rather than another search.
A note on naming. The FBI does not name the victim, and that is deliberate practice. Her name is kept here because she has spoken publicly about it for decades and is inseparable from the story in this county; the page carries nothing about her beyond what she has made public herself.
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Source upgraded. This story previously rested on Wikipedia alone. It now rests on the National Historic Landmark nomination itself (NRHP ref. 93001614), plus I. C. White's 1885 report for the Second Geological Survey, which we hold.
Credit corrected. The original gave the discovery to John Frazer alone. The nomination gives it to three men: the rocks 'profoundly represent an understanding achieved by Henry D. Rogers, the director of the first survey and his two assistants, James C. Booth and John F. Frazer.' Frazer was an assistant, not the man on his own.
Number corrected. The original said 'several layers of sandstone.' The nomination is specific: the 1836 survey found 'there were in fact three ridge forming sandstones, not just one as previously thought.'
Measurement corrected. The original said the pillars sit 'about ten feet apart.' White's 1885 report, quoted in the nomination, says 'isolated piles of rock 50' high, with passage-ways from one to ten feet wide between them.' Ten feet is the top of the range, not the typical gap.
Sharpened, all from the nomination: the watercolour is by George Lehman, it was the frontispiece to Rogers's 1858 final report rather than merely 'in it', and Lehman is 'commonly believed' to be the first professional artist hired by a state or federal survey to sketch sites for government reports. That hedge is the nomination's own and is carried through rather than upgraded. Juniata College owns the MAJOR section, donated by the Africa family, with the remainder held by the John V. Eisenberg heirs and used by a local game and hunt club. NHL criteria 1 and 2, theme XIII Science, Earth Science, Geology.
Location tightened: 'between Huntingdon and Alexandria' becomes the nomination's own placement, on Warrior Ridge about a mile and a half northwest of Huntingdon along the old Huntingdon-Hollidaysburg Turnpike. White's 1885 description does place it 'near the road to Alexandria', so the original was not wrong, only vague.
Checked and held: the designation really is a National Historic Landmark, not a National Natural Landmark, which is what a geological feature designated in 1993 looks like it ought to be. The nomination is headed 'NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK NOMINATION' and the designation date is 4 November 1993. The suspicion was checked and did not survive, which is the correct outcome to record.
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A generalisation the record contradicts for the named family. The page said “Italian families like the Peduzzis and Melonis came for the brick work”. For the Peduzzis that is not what happened. Welch has T. C. Peduzzi reaching America in 1890 and going to Montana and Washington. The W. H. Haws plant, the first brick works in Mount Union, was not built until 1899, nine years later, and he was a stone mason by trade rather than a brick worker.
The broader statement may well hold for other Italian families in this town, and this page is no longer the place it is asserted from: a claim about why a whole community came needs its own source, not one family's doorway.
The Meloni half is untouched here because nothing opened settles it either way. It is neither confirmed nor refuted, and it is no longer stated as though the Peduzzi record supports it.
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Source upgraded from Wikipedia to the Smithsonian's own published study of Saxton, by Arthur H. Frazier, 1975. The page was already careful and its central claim survived; three things changed.
Age corrected, or rather un-asserted. The page said he "went to work at twelve as an apprentice to a watchmaker." Frazier says: "When he was eighteen years old, Saxton was serving an apprenticeship under David Newingham, a local silversmith, watchmaker, and engraver, in his native village of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania." That places him in the apprenticeship at eighteen and gives no starting age at all, so twelve is not shown - and it is not refuted either, because an apprenticeship recorded at eighteen could have begun years earlier. The page now says what the source says and names the master, which it could not do before.
Date settled. The page hedged between "around September 25 or October 16". Frazier gives 16 October 1839 flatly. The hedge is no longer needed.
Small embellishment removed. The page had him at "the window of his office". Frazier says a second-storey window of the Mint, and says nothing about whose office it was.
Hedge made more precise, in both directions. Frazier's sentence is carefully built and the page now mirrors it: the plate is "perhaps the earliest daguerreotype ever taken in the United States, and certainly represents the oldest American daguerreotype extant." Perhaps for the taking, certainly for the surviving. The page had been weaker than the source allowed on one half and is now exact on both.
ADDED, and it is the reason to run this story at all: the cigar box and the ordinary reading glass, and the letter of recommendation from John McCahan of the Huntingdon Gazette. A county newspaperman vouching for a local boy is how the oldest surviving American photograph starts.
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Partly sourced, and the page says which parts.
Confirmed at NASA's own Apollo 11 mission page: the crew of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin; launch on 16 July 1969; splashdown on 24 July 1969; the landing on 20 July 1969; and “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed.” NASA's page also dates the mission to fifty-seven years ago, which is what the page says.
Not sourced here, and listed rather than quietly kept: that Armstrong stepped off about six hours after the landing; that Aldrin followed nineteen minutes later; that the pole would only go about two inches into the ground; the West Point salute; and the estimate of six hundred million watching, or one in five people alive. Two NASA pages were opened for these and neither carries them - the mission overview gives no timings and the anniversary feature is a photographic essay. They are almost certainly right and they are the sort of detail NASA's mission reports do carry; the report itself is the route, not another search of the same two pages.
A NOTE ON WHAT THIS PAGE IS. This is a national anniversary, not Huntingdon County history. That is a fine thing for a county page to post and the facts in it still have to be right, but it is worth being clear that nothing on it connects to this county, and the fact-checking effort this site can spend is better aimed at the county's own past.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
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Source upgraded from Wikipedia to two federal pages and one nineteenth-century biographical record, and the page gained more than it lost.
Confirmed, from the Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of the Juniata Valley of 1897, which is among the county histories we hold: "David McMurtrie Gregg, born April 10, 1833, at Huntingdon; graduated at West Point, 1855 ... colonel Eighth Pennsylvania Cavalry in January, 1862; brigadier general of volunteers, November 29, 1862", and service through the Gettysburg campaign. The page had his birthplace and his rank right and can now date both.
Confirmed at the National Park Service: on the afternoon of 3 July 1863, "United States cavalry under General David Gregg stopped Jeb Stuart's Confederates from turning the Federal flank and threatening Meade's rear." That is the site's claim that Stuart never got around behind the Union line, in the Park Service's own words.
ADDED, all from the Park Service: Gregg was outnumbered; McIntosh's and Custer's 3,200 men attacked from three sides; the Union lost 254 men and the Confederates 450. And the Gregg Cavalry Shaft, erected in 1884, which the Park Service calls the only monument commemorating the services of both Union and Confederate cavalry at Gettysburg. A superlative, so it is carried as theirs and attributed rather than asserted here.
Two things dropped for want of a source. "About three miles east of town" - no distance was found on any page opened. And "one of the most important cavalry actions of the war", which is a ranking claim and needs its own support; the casualty figures and the Park Service's own account of what Stuart failed to do carry the weight better than an adjective would.
The hand-to-hand detail is left out for the same reason. It is very likely true and it is attributed in secondary accounts to a Confederate officer of Lee's Brigade, but that account was not opened here.
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Sourced, from a page image of the book rather than its OCR, which had the chapter only as an index entry.
Confirmed, Welch page 334: “The Mount Union Fire Department was organized July 28, 1903. At the present time there are about 50 members, who have enlisted their services voluntarily for the extinguishing of public fires.” The page had said fire protection “before 1903” with nothing behind it. The year was right and can now be given to the day.
ADDED: the first slate of officers, all named on that page — Samuel S. Mosser president, R. O. Johnson vice president, Stewart A. Kyper secretary, Arthur Johnson assistant secretary, Frank B. Davis financial secretary, G. B. M. Kepler treasurer, Charles Wenzel chief, Frank Moore assistant chief. And Welch's own complaint that the department badly needed equipment, which is a more honest picture than a salute on its own.
A cross-check that held. Charles Wenzel appears as fire chief here, and independently on this site's page about the Harbison-Walker works at full steam in 1909, which describes him as chief of the Mount Union fire department and the borough's street commissioner. Two pages built from different sources agree about the same man in the same year.
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Source upgraded from Wikipedia to the official recipient record, and everything the page already claimed survives.
Confirmed: born 15 April 1837 at Huntingdon, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania; Medal of Honor for action at Chickamauga, Georgia on 20 September 1863; the action itself, rallying broken troops under fire. The record gives the citation verbatim, so the page now quotes it instead of paraphrasing, and the paraphrase was leaving out the point of the action: the ground was held long enough to get the wagon trains and the batteries away.
ADDED from the record. His rank at Chickamauga was captain, in the Ordnance Department; brevet brigadier general was his highest rank later, and the page had been carrying only the eventual rank. The medal was presented on 8 July 1902, thirty-nine years after the action. He died 29 May 1921 in New York and is buried at West Branch Cemetery, New Jersey. The medal itself is in Special Collections at the Georgetown University Libraries.
One nuance the record carries and the page does not need to hide: his service was credited to Harrisburg, Dauphin County. He was born in Huntingdon; the credit is an administrative fact about where he was accounted for, not about where he came from.
The ambassadorship to France, 1897 to 1905, was already checked in an earlier pass and is unchanged.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
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Source upgraded from Wikipedia to two books we already hold, which is where this should have been checked first.
Confirmed, Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of the Juniata Valley, 1897 - a contemporary account written while he was still a young man: "Martin Grove Brumbaugh, Huntingdon, Pa., was born in Penn township, Huntingdon county, April 14, 1862, son of George B. and Martha P. Brumbaugh, who now reside in Marklesburg." It also gives the whole early career: common schools and Juniata College, graduating 1881; country schools taught in 1877 and 1878; Millersville in 1882; teaching at Juniata until 1884; elected county superintendent of schools and re-elected in 1887, serving six years; Howard University as a post-graduate student from 1890, then the University of Pennsylvania.
Confirmed, Souvenir Historical Book of the county Sesqui-Centennial, 1937, which lists him among Huntingdon County men who reached prominence: "Martin G. Brumbaugh, Governor of Pennsylvania, 1915-1919."
Sharpened. The page said he was "born overlooking the Raystown branch" and "raised in Woodcock Valley". Both are defensible - Marklesburg sits in that country, and Africa's history places a frontier fort "in Woodcock Valley, near Marklesburg" - but the record says Penn township and names the parents at Marklesburg, so the page now says that. The Woodcock Valley tie is real and is given where it belongs: his great-grandfather Jacob bought land there.
CUT: "Pennsylvania's 26th governor". An ordinal is a checkable number and it could not be checked. The Historical and Museum Commission's own governors page answers with the agency's landing page instead - a redirect that returns a success code and none of the content, which is the failure that looks most like an answer. The years 1915 to 1919 are sourced and carry the point without it.
The line about him teaching at fifteen is arithmetic from two sourced facts in the same paragraph, born April 1862 and teaching country schools in 1877, not a claim from elsewhere.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Wikimedia Commons record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
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A correction that did not propagate, which is worse than not making it. An earlier pass refuted the claim that the 1936 flood was the most destructive ever recorded in the Juniata Valley, using the Geological Survey's gage records: on Aughwick Creek at Orbisonia the June 1889 discharge was about 18,400 second feet against 16,400 in 1936, and on Standing Stone Creek the highest stage in the whole record is 9.38 feet on 1 June 1889. That correction was applied to one page. This page still said the Juniata “broke all records”, so the site was contradicting itself again, and this time the contradiction was introduced by fixing only half of it.
All four flood pages on the site were checked together. Two state the 1889 finding correctly. One, the Corbin Bridge page, does it the right way and is left alone: it reports that a centennial souvenir book “called the flood of March 17, 1936, probably the most destructive the Juniata Valley had ever experienced,” attributed to the book, carrying the book's own “probably”. That is how a strong claim from a weak source should appear.
Sourced, the building itself: Welch records that Mount Union had two planing mills, one run by steam and the other owned and operated by A. S. Welch with electric power in connection with his lumber business. The page had never said which mill this was, and still does not (nothing opened here identifies it), but a reader now knows there were two and whose they were.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
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Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-09
Corrected on arithmetic and on a missed fact that is better than anything in the original. Arithmetic: the original says '23 years straight' and '1937-1960'. May 11 1937 to January 7 1960 is 22 years and about 8 months. Rounding up to 23 is an overstatement of a checkable number, so the rewrite says twenty two. Name corrected: it was the National Republican Congressional Committee, which he chaired from 1953. Sharpened: 'a key player on the Ways and Means Committee' is vague. The source says that at his death he was its ranking member. Say the actual position. The missed fact: he died in office, on January 7 1960 at Bethesda Naval Medical Center, several weeks after brain surgery. That is why the service ends in 1960, and the original presented the end date as if it were a retirement. A man who served twenty two years and died in the job is the story; the original had the dates and missed what they meant.
Official record unreachable, recorded so nobody repeats the attempt. The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress is the right source for this page and all three routes to it none of the three sites that carry it could be opened from here. congress.gov answers 403, congress.gov answers 403, and history.house.gov answers HTTP 200 with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than the record - a wall that reports success. The arithmetic correction made in an earlier pass, from twenty-three years to twenty-two, stands on its own: May 11 1937 to January 7 1960 is twenty-two years and about eight months, and that is a calculation rather than a citation. The dates themselves still want the Directory behind them.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-09
Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress item record, so a reader can open it.
The prose makes only general statements about company towns, which the federal survey documentation supports and other pages of this site cite in detail. It carries no number or date of its own to check.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-09
Photograph citation corrected from an internal credit line to the Library of Congress record, so a reader can open it. The text on this page is descriptive and still carries no source of its own; that is the next pass, not this one.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-09
The same number, corrected on the same day on every page that carries it. This page said ninety four company dwellings at Kistler, finished in 1917. So did the page about the design of the village. Neither figure could be traced to a document, and the survey gives the Sanborn Map Company's count of 1919: 111 residences, eighty single family, twenty one double, and ten four family buildings that were not on Nolen's plan and were pulled down in the 1930s.
A correction that reaches the page you happen to be reading is not a correction. This project has already had one figure fixed on one page and left standing on another, so both Kistler counts were changed together and every story on the site is now searched for the old number.
Unchanged, because it is documented: the General Refractories figures in the first paragraph, which come from the Mount Union survey and are given place by place rather than as a total.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-09-09
Sourced at the Library of Congress record for the map itself.
Confirmed: “Mount Union, Huntingdon Co., Pa. 1906”, published at Morrisville, Pennsylvania by Fowler & Kelly, c1906; drawn by T. M. Fowler, Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler, 1842-1922; a sheet 34 by 59 centimetres; number 811 in the Library's catalogue of panoramic maps of cities in the United States and Canada. The page had his initials right and can now give his name, his dates and his publisher.
Corrected, gently. The page said the view was “drawn from the air before airplanes”, which is a good line and slightly misleading: it was not drawn from the air at all. The Library's own note reads “Perspective map not drawn to scale.” Fowler worked from the ground and constructed the viewpoint. The page now says that, which is the more impressive fact.
The growth claim replaced with sourced figures. The page said the town “tripled in size” in the decade after the map. Welch, writing in 1909, gives 1,086 in 1900 and upward of 3,200 including suburbs by the time he wrote — which is close to a trebling but over the nine years before 1909, not the decade after 1906. The page now carries his figures and his dates instead of an unsourced span.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
The original asserted a 140-foot tower, a Statue of Justice on top of it, and the French Renaissance style. Its last word on the subject is the brickwork reaching the second story. The 1909 Historic Huntingdon returned nothing on a new courthouse. SAH Archipedia could not be opened. So: Unsourced, not false. Also cut: "has dominated the town skyline for nearly 145 years." 1883 to 2026 is 143 years, and "nearly 145" is a strange way to say it. "Dominated the skyline" is also an unsourced scope claim. What replaced it is entirely from Africa 1883 and is better than what it replaced: a grand jury declaring the old courthouse inadequate, six bids spread over twenty two thousand dollars, the county taking the lowest one, the offices decamping to the Morrison House, and a very precise construction snapshot dated November 24 with the brick at the second story. All of it checkable, none of it invented. One claim kept from the original: the 1883 date, which is consistent with a building whose brickwork was at the second story in late November 1882.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Four claims cut. This post took a source that explicitly says it does not know, and made it certain. 1. The hedge was upgraded. Africa 1883 says flatly "The origin of the name of the township is not clearly settled." That converts an explicit non-answer into a confident narrative. 2. "Iroquois" is not in the source. Africa says "Indian warriors" in Maguire's 1845 statement and nothing about which nation. 3. "the Great Indian Warpath" is not in the source either. What Africa actually says is that the maps show "the Indian path leading from Frankstown to the Bald Eagle's Nest." Different path, different name. Two separate inventions of specificity in one sentence. 4. "The village of Warriors Mark was founded in 1768" is unsourced. Africa gives the earliest land warrants in the township as July 28, 1766, to John Baynton and Samuel Wharton, nine surveys; further warrants in 1767 for Samuel Wallace and others; and farms improved in 1777 by Nathan and Thomas Rickets. No 1768, and no village founding date at all. Removed. 5. "today it is the northernmost township in the county" is an unsourced geographic superlative. Removed. Correct in the original: the township was erected in 1798. Africa nails it down further than the original did, to the January 1798 term of the Court of Quarter Sessions, and reproduces the petition and the court's order. What the original missed, and it is much better than what it invented: Krider's four forked oak trees standing at the corners of a square with stones grown into the forks. That is a physical thing a person showed the historian, in a specific place, and it is far more arresting than "ceremonially marked trees."
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Supersedes an earlier check made the same day, with a third source that turns a thin post into a good one. What could not be sourced earlier, and still cannot be: the 140-foot tower, the Statue of Justice, and "French Renaissance." All three remain cut. Four sources checked, none of them carries it. Still unsourced, still not false. What the new book did give: the 1937 Souvenir Historical Book, published for the county's sesqui-centennial, describes the 1842 courthouse that the present one replaced and openly mourns it. "It was a beautiful colonial structure, with tall white columns across the front and a beautiful white colonial belfry. Unfortunately that beautiful building, which should have been preserved was torn down and the present one erected in 1882." That is a named, dated, published local voice grieving a demolition fifty five years after it happened, and it is a far better post than a tower height would have been. The 1937 book says "erected in 1882." Africa 1883 shows the brickwork only reaching the second story on November 24, which means it was not finished in 1882. The sources do not agree on a single completion year, so the original asserts none. It says the 1842 building came down and the present one went up starting in 1882, which both sources support. Also still cut: "has dominated the town skyline for nearly 145 years" is both an unsourced scope claim and bad arithmetic, since 1882 to 2026 is 144 years and 1883 to 2026 is 143. Ordinal corrected: the present courthouse is the county's THIRD, not its second. Africa and the 1937 book agree on the sequence: the first stood in the middle of Third Street between Penn and Allegheny, the second went up in 1842 on the present site, and the third replaced it.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
1. "Pennsylvania's largest lake" is wrong as written. The Army Corps of Engineers' own Raystown page says "the largest lake located entirely in Pennsylvania." Dropping "entirely" turns a true, careful claim into a false one, and it is the kind of thing a reader from Erie corrects in public. Same family as "only one left" versus "only one ever." The post now quotes the Corps' hedge instead of upgrading it, and makes the distinction the hook. 2. "since its creation in 1974" is corrected to 1973. The National Inventory of Dams, the Corps' own federal dam register, gives Raystown Dam a Year Completed of 1973. 3. "has spawned lake monster folklore since its creation in 1974" is CUT. That is a duration claim, and duration claims need their own source exactly like scope words do. No published source found for when the story began or where the name came from. Rather than hedge it or drop the legend entirely, the original says plainly that the check could not source it and asks the readers who would actually know. 4. "Folklore or fact? Nobody knows." is removed. "Nobody knows" is itself a claim about the state of knowledge. Sourcing note: the Corps' Raystown page could not be opened directly and was read through the Internet Archive snapshot of 2020-08-14. The National Inventory of Dams was read from the Corps' own public nationwide CSV export, which opened directly.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
The two copies differ only in their final clause. This one calls the relocation "one of the era's largest rail" projects; the other calls it "a significant railroad rerout." Both descriptions are attached to an event the check could not source at all, so the difference is moot and both are cut. The sourced facts stay identical across copies because they came from something real. The invented flourish drifts because it came from nowhere. All corrections identical to 8913b1cfd1de0fc4: the 1857 purchase date restored, the Huntingdon to Hollidaysburg section correctly shown as out of service by 1876 and therefore already dead before the 1889 flood, the unsourced 1892 main line relocation cut, the Johnstown conflation removed, and no canal end date stated because the sources disagree on it.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Birthplace held up, but not from where the original got it. Neither Africa 1883 nor the 1897 Juniata Valley encyclopedia nor the 1909 Historic Huntingdon contains the name Purdue at all. Wikipedia gives Huntingdon County with NO citation on that sentence. The claim is carried by Purdue University's own Archives and Special Collections: "John Purdue was born in Germany Valley (near Shirleysburg), Pennsylvania on October 31, 1802." Africa 1883 independently places Germany Valley in the south part of Huntingdon County, east of the Aughwick, which is what lets Germany Valley and Huntingdon County sit in the same sentence. Two claims cut, both for source conflict. 1. "gave the money AND LAND." Three sources, no agreement on the land. Purdue's official history page says the 100 acres came "from local residents" and only the $150,000 came from Purdue. Purdue's Archives says he gave "one hundred acres of land that he had purchased on the west bank of the Wabash." Wikipedia says the donation was raised to $150,000 and 100 acres. All three agree on the $150,000 and only that. The land is dropped, not averaged, not picked between. 2. "on ONE condition: it had to carry his name." Every source that lists his stipulations lists more than one, and they do not agree on what the other one was. Purdue's Archives: "the college bear his name and that he be awarded a lifelong seat on the board of directors." Wikipedia, citing Kriebel's The Midas of the Wabash: "for the college to be located in Battle Ground, Indiana and for his surname to be associated with it." The name condition is in every account, so it stays. The count "one condition" is wrong and is replaced with "among his conditions." The second condition is dropped because the sources contradict each other on what it was. 3. "made his fortune in dry goods" is narrowed. The Archives biography has him brokering crops and hogs on commission first, then storekeeping, then banking, newspapers, railroads and an agricultural works. Dry goods is one chapter, not the fortune. What the original missed, and it is the whole reason to run this story: the extreme poverty, the iron foundry father, school at eight and out at twelve. Also the one graduate at the first commencement, with Purdue himself giving the address. Straight from the university's own archives.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Corrected. Confirmed from Africa 1883: J. C. Blair began as a small retail stationery trade on Penn Street between Fourth and Fifth in 1869, moved into manufacturing what he sold, employed one hundred skilled workers by 1883, and in 1881 bought the Presbyterian Church building at Penn and Sixth and converted it into a factory he named the Keystone Building, fifty by seventy feet and four stories. Africa's telephone list separately records him as 'Blair, J. C., manufacturing stationer.' None of this specific, checkable, vivid material was in the original. A newspaper search for the firm's reach was attempted and did not produce usable evidence . The page does not need it, because the sourced detail is stronger. Dropped by implication, the legal pad: the original is titled the legal pad and opens 'That pad of paper on your desk has Huntingdon roots', which reads as a claim that the legal pad originated here. The rewrite claims tablets, which is sourced, and claims no invention. If the legal-pad origin is to be claimed later it needs its own source, and the title should change with it. 'By the trainload' is deliberate colour about volume, not a figure.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Supersedes an earlier check of this story, with 8 quoted sources against 4. The earlier check was right about what it caught and missed something bigger. Six American Indian intellectuals founded it at a meeting McKenzie convened, and he deliberately kept himself out of the credit. He was forced out of Fisk. He closed the student newspaper, abolished the student council, banned most extracurricular activities, and students who broke those rules were expelled and labelled Bolshevists. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Crisis, 'Men and women of Black America: Let no decent Negro send his child to Fisk until Fayette McKenzie goes.' Students protested in 1924 and 1925 and he resigned in 1926. Two independent articles agree, which matters because this is a serious claim about a real person. The Fisk University article, which is separate from the McKenzie article and notably more balanced, says he was 'eventually forced to resign when his strict policies on dress code, extracurricular activities, and other aspects of student life led to student protests in 1924 and 1925.' The same article's bibliography carries a Journal of Southern History paper devoted to the strike (Lamon, 49#2, pp. 225-44), so this is documented scholarship, not an internet grievance. And the other side is also sourced, so the original carries it: the Fisk article credits him with developing Fisk into the premier all-Black college in the United States, winning its academic recognition from the Carnegie Foundation, Columbia and Chicago, and raising a million dollar endowment. He was also genuinely the first American sociologist to specialize in Indian affairs and he taught at Wind River. He is a complicated man, not a villain and not a hero, and the rewrite says so in as many words. Nothing here is a false-statement finding. This is an omission finding, and for an elected official omission is the expensive kind: a reader who knows Fisk history closes that gap in the comments, and the correction is more visible than the original. The page already says 'helped found', 'helped bring together', 'run by Native people themselves', and even 'He was not from Huntingdon County. He came to it.' Its Juniata chronology is correct: he returned in 1927 and retired in 1941. Its only problem is the Fisk omission.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Three of four numbers held. One was dropped, and it was dropped because the source fights with itself. The American Canal Society's Juniata Division index sheet says in its narrative: "The Juniata Division required 88 locks to overcome a change in elevation of 584 feet in the 127 miles between Duncan's Island and Hollidaysburg." That is where the original post's three numbers come from and 584 feet and 127 miles are uncontested anywhere in the document. BUT the same document's own lock by lock table carries this note: "This totals 86 locks, not the 88 in McCullough & Leuba." The compilers tabulated the locks themselves, got 86, and flagged that it disagrees with their own cited authority. That is a conflicting number inside a single source. The lock count is dropped. Not averaged, not footnoted, not shipped with an "about." Two superlatives cut, both unsourced. 1. "it carried something unprecedented." No source calls the Juniata Division unprecedented and it plainly was not, since it was one division of a system already under construction. 2. "the crown jewel of the Main Line of Public Works." What the original missed: the packet boat ran between Huntingdon and Hollidaysburg, so the inaugural run started here. That is the local hook and the original buried it. And the opening was not the finish. The same paragraph records that faulty workmanship was found afterward and locks and aqueducts had to be rebuilt before the canal could fully operate the following year. Seventy seven of its locks were wooden. That is a better and truer story than a crown jewel. Spelling note: the source document spells it "Huntington" throughout, an old variant. Corrected silently to Huntingdon in the original, flagged here.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Corrected. Two of its supporting claims did not survive that scrutiny. Confirmed: Smith had the town laid out in 1767 and named it for Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, who had donated to the College of Philadelphia where Smith was provost. The substance of the correction is right. A specific attribution to a named relative is exactly the sort of detail a reader will ask about, and it is the riskiest kind of claim to carry unsourced in a post whose entire subject is getting the record right. Corrected, 'the county histories of 1876 and 1883 both agree': the check verified 1883 (Africa) and 1909 (Historic Huntingdon). The check did not open any 1876 history and cannot confirm one says this. The rewrite names the two books actually read. Hedge restored, and this matters: Africa 1883 does not state the naming as fact. It says the name 'is believed to have been given' by Dr. Smith in her honor. The rewrite shows both, the 1883 hedge and the 1909 flat statement, which is both more honest and more persuasive. Quote the source's own hedge.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Five numbers and one role claim removed. This post was almost entirely numbers, and almost none of them held up. 1. "co-founded" is contested and is removed. Wikipedia says "co-founded with Chip Davis in 1974," citing an Omaha World-Herald piece the check could not open. Berkey's OWN official site does not claim it. It calls him "featured keyboardist with Mannheim Steamroller." When a man's own site gives him a smaller title than a third party does, the smaller title is the one to print. Used his wording. 2. "Over 50 years with Mannheim Steamroller" is removed. His own bio page says 38 years and the page is undated, so it cannot be turned into a current figure. Two sources, no agreement, no date. 3. "10 original Christmas albums" versus "11 original Christmas albums." That is the cleanest possible case for the drop rule. Neither number ships. 4. "more than 30 albums" is removed. No source found. 5. "over 300 classical pieces" is removed and replaced with his own site's figure, over 400 published titles, in his own site's words. His number, not ours, and it is bigger anyway. 6. "multiplatinum-selling" is removed. 7. "across every major idiom" is removed. That is a scope word and it needs its own source. What survived: birth date and birthplace (May 24, 1942, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania), Juilliard, and the Huntingdon connection, which is the only part of this story the page actually cares about. Sourcing note: the birth date and birthplace come from Wikipedia citing Pitcher, John, "New CD shows Berkey's range," Omaha World-Herald, 20 December 2009. Everything else traces to berkey.com, his own site.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Confirmed: the date (May 1, 1947, before dawn); two 16-foot sheets of steel lying lengthwise on an open gondola of a westbound freight, which shifted so their ends stuck out over the tracks on both sides; the train struck was the Pennsylvania Railroad's New York to St. Louis sleeper-coach flyer, running westbound on the parallel track; the steel ripped open its side; and the third-train claim, which is real. An eastbound freight hit the steel protruding on the other side moments later, its engine and tender were thrown from the rails, and all four main tracks of the PRR were tied up. Corrected, train name: the original calls it the 'American Limited'. Both papers call it 'The American'. There is no 'Limited' in the name. Corrected, death toll: the original says four dead. Four was the first-day wire figure (Nome Nugget). By the next day the AP reported FIVE dead and named all five: Joseph Selnick jr., 18, soldier, Pleasant Gap, Pa.; Pvt. Robert E. Deavers, 37, Zanesville, Ohio; Pfc. Herbert B. Huetsch, 21, Columbia, Ill.; Michael Burdock jr., Monessen, Pa.; and Mrs. Jean D. Sims, 26, Clifton, Va. Wikipedia's citation to a Pittsburgh Press headline of May 2 1947 ('Fifth Victim Dies After PRR Crash') corroborates the fifth death, but the check did not open that paper. The rewrite says 'five people were dead by the next day', which is exactly what the opened source supports and also explains why other accounts say four. Dropped, injured count: the numbers conflict badly. 40 (first-day AP), 46 (Pittsburgh Press headline per Wikipedia, not opened), 51 in the Evening Star headline against 45 injured plus 6 critical in its own body. No injury figure appears in the rewrite. Dropped, distance: the first-day AP says five miles west of Huntingdon, the May 2 AP follow-up says 4 miles west. Two AP dispatches disagree, so the distance is dropped and the rewrite says only 'west of Huntingdon'. Dropped, 'the fourth passenger car': no source supports it. The only traceable statement, in the Wikipedia entry citing an AP story in The State (Columbia S.C.), says the FIRST coach. The check did not open The State, so first coach is not asserted either. The rewrite says the steel ripped open the side of the train and names no car. Dropped, '1:47 a.m.': traces only to the same Wikipedia entry and its unopened AP citation. The two papers opened say 'pre-dawn hours' and 'early yesterday'. The rewrite says 'just before dawn'. Name conflict flagged: the Evening Star prints the mother's surname 'Simms' in the AP Wirephoto caption and 'Sims' twice in the article body, in the same issue. The rewrite uses Sims, the majority spelling in that issue. The story the original missed: the two-week-old baby who came out of the wreckage wrapped in a towel with a broken leg and lived, while her mother did not, and the honeymoon couple in the same hospital. Both are in the rewrite. Tone: the original ended 'Tag somebody who grew up along these tracks, bet they've never heard this one' on a wreck that killed five people including a young mother. Replaced with a genuine question about J. C. Blair Memorial Hospital.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
The post says "built in 1805." Africa 1883 says "About the year 1796 a company was formed ... to erect a furnace called 'Huntingdon,' on the Warrior's Mark Run, in Franklin township." Nine years off, and note the source's own hedge, "about the year," which the rewrite keeps. The post says it was "built in 1805 by Alsatian immigrant George Anshutz." It was built by a company of three, and Africa is unusually specific about who did what: Mordecai Massey owned the land, Judge John Gloninger of Lebanon contributed the money, and Anshutz contributed the skill. Giving one man all of it is a factual claim and it is wrong here. This is the same defect corrected in this site's page on General Gregg. Cut, no source: "Alsatian." Africa says only that Anshutz's skill was "acquired in the manufacture of iron in Europe." Cut, no source: the list of "seven original structures" (stone blast furnace stack, brick company store, ironmaster's mansion, gristmill with equipment, mill house, worker's house, office building). The check did not open a survey that enumerates them. Cut, no source: "By 1810, Huntingdon County's iron industry roared with eleven furnaces, eight forges, three rolling mills, and twelve naileries." Four precise counts in one sentence. The word "nailery" does not appear anywhere in the county histories we hold. Cut entirely rather than partially. Complication the original glosses: the original calls it "a complete iron plantation ... with seven original structures," implying continuity from 1805. Africa says the FIRST location "was not favorable, and after some time was abandoned, and another furnace was built about a mile farther down the run." So whatever stands today is the second works, not the original seat. Any post about surviving structures has to say which furnace it means. What the original missed: the three-way division of land, money and skill; the one horse and pair of oxen, carried with the source's own hedge "it has been said"; and the charcoal run lasting until 1870.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
The original's central premise is wrong. It calls Jacob Higgins "a Huntingdon County officer." Africa 1883 says, twice and unambiguously, that he was from Blair County: "authority from Governor Curtin to Lieut.-Col. Jacob Higgins, of Blair County, to recruit a nine months' regiment." This matters more than a normal date error because the entire reason the original exists is to claim him as ours. He is not ours. What IS ours, and what the original never mentions, is that four of the regiment's ten companies were raised in Huntingdon County, with named captains. The 125th mustered out May 18, 1863. The Twenty second Cavalry organized in February 1864, with Higgins as colonel. That is roughly nine months later, not immediate, so the original's claim of an immediate move is removed. The rewrite says only that this regiment's men went home when their nine months were up, which is what the muster-out record shows. Africa follows the Twenty second through 1864 engagements but the check did not read a statement that Higgins personally served to the end of the war, so the original stops where the source stops. Africa gives Higgins no middle initial anywhere the check found. The initial may well be right in other records, but since the check did not open one, the rewrite uses the name the source uses. Correct in the original: the nine month enlistment, the May 1863 end date (May 18, 1863 exactly), and the move to the 22nd Pennsylvania Cavalry. Gregg of Company H here is not the same man as the Gregg in the Huntingdon Hero page corrected earlier, who was the cavalry officer at East Cavalry Field. Do not merge them.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Corrected. The post was largely right and one detail was wrong in a way a visitor would notice from the parking lot. Confirmed from PA DCNR: iron production topped 3,000 tons annually by the early 1880s, and DCNR adds the detail the original omitted, that this made it one of the largest charcoal furnace operations in the state. Freedom Iron began producing locomotive tires, railroad car wheels and axles in 1856 'utilizing iron produced at the Greenwood Works', which does establish the link the original asserted. John Armstrong Wright 'helped found the Pennsylvania Railroad and the city of Altoona'. Added, and it is the best line available: 'The iron was hauled by wagons over Stone Mountain to Freedom Iron Works to be turned into wrought iron.' Concrete, physical, sourced, and it was not in the original at all. Corrected, 'The furnace stacks still stand at Greenwood Furnace State Park today': not supported. What DCNR says is that Furnace Stack #2 was restored as a monument in 1936, and that six original buildings and the cemetery remain. Plural stacks 'still standing' implies surviving original structures and overstates what is there. The rewrite says exactly what DCNR says. Corrected, 'John Armstrong Wright led the company': DCNR does not give him a title at Greenwood or at Freedom Iron. What it says is that John A. Wright and Company purchased the works in 1847. The rewrite says that instead. Timeline untangled: the original ran the early 1880s tonnage straight into the Freedom Iron products, which began in 1856. Both are true and they are decades apart. The rewrite keeps them in order rather than implying one figure describes the other date.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Corrected. The core claim holds and traces to an official state source, but the original overstated it in three separate ways and one of them is a superlative in capital letters. Confirmed: PA DCNR's own Trough Creek park history says, without hedging, 'During 1835, for the first time in the United States, good iron was produced using coke as a fuel at Mary Ann Furnace.' DCNR also confirms Savage leased the furnace in 1832, renamed it, and built Savage Forge. Africa 1883 independently records Mary Ann Furnace and Forge on Big Trough Creek, owned by John Savage, conducted by George Thompson. The claim is contested and the original should show it. Wikipedia's coke article says the first use of coke in an American iron furnace was around 1817 at Isaac Meason's Plumsock works in Fayette County. But a flat 'FIRST in the entire U.S.' in capitals invites a reader with a search engine to produce Meason in ten seconds. The rewrite attributes the claim to the state park's own history and keeps DCNR's qualifier 'good iron', which is the word that makes the claim defensible. Dropped, 'John Savage's innovation': DCNR says Savage leased and renamed the furnace. No source opened credits him with the technique. Sole credit for an innovation is a claim of its own and this is the same trap that hit this site's page on General Gregg. Dropped, 'changed American metallurgy forever' and 'We were decades ahead of national iron technology': unsourced significance and unsourced scope. Dropped, 'birthplace of American coke-iron smelting': stronger than what DCNR actually says, and directly exposed to the Meason objection.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
The sourced part is almost word for word right, which is why the one unsourced sentence stands out so badly. Confirmed: Africa 1883 says Cromwell "was erected from Shirley and Springfield townships in January, 1836, and named 'in honour of Col. Thomas Cromwell, deceased, who was an early settler and a distinguished and hospitable citizen.'" January 1836, the two parent townships, and the honorific language all check out. One claim cut: "a practice rarely documented in Pennsylvania's township records." No source. It is a scope claim about statewide practice, resting on nothing, and it is doing all the work in the original. Removed. One claim tightened: "an early settler who arrived around 1785." Africa does not say Cromwell arrived in 1785. It says that in the fall of 1785 he and George Ashman "began to take warrants for vacant lands in the valleys in the vicinity of Orbisonia." Taking up land warrants is not the same as arriving. The post now says what the source says. What the original missed entirely, and it is the whole reason the man got a township: Bedford Furnace. Africa calls it "the first iron-smelting establishment west of the Susquehanna" and the 1897 encyclopedia independently calls it "the first furnace west of the Susquehanna river." Two independent published sources for the superlative, which is the bar. The September 10, 1798 Pittsburgh Gazette advertisement is Africa's own citation of a contemporary newspaper. Not used: Africa also records a claim that "the first bar-iron made in this country that found its way to the market of that city was produced at this forge," but he writes it as "it has been claimed that," and a hedge that heavy on a superlative that large does not belong in a post. Left out rather than repeated with the hedge. Not used: no death date for Thomas Cromwell was found in any of the county histories we hold, so the original says only that he was already gone, which is what the 1836 naming language establishes.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
1. "William Lovell ran the only building, a public house." Wrong twice over. Africa 1883: "When the village was laid out three buildings stood on its site." And Lovell's tavern was "the first in the village, previous to 1815," which is eighteen or more years AFTER the village was laid out. He did not run the only building and he was not there at the founding. 2. "By 1849 postal confusion forced the town to pick ONE name." No source. Africa says only "Measures for the incorporation of the borough were inaugurated in 1849." Not one word about the post office or name confusion. Invented causation, removed. 3. "The citizens voted for Cassville." Wrong, and it is the opposite of what happened. Africa: the name "was selected by a committee consisting of Robert Speer, D. Stever, and D. Clarkson." A three man committee, not a town vote. The original post even asks readers "What name would you have voted for?" off a vote that never happened. Correct in the original: the two former names, and the 1853 incorporation (March 3, 1853, by act of the Legislature). Spelling: Africa's borough section spells it Chilcotestown and the family Chilcote. Used the town spelling the source uses. Not asserted: why Cassville. Also fixed: the original ended "Tag someone from Cassville's Name," which is a broken template string, not a call to action.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
The open question was the 1959 birth year, which Wikipedia does not carry. The library of congress name authority file does, and it is a better source than anything else in this story's chain: record n90644672 gives 'Raschka, Christopher, $d1959-' and a birthDate of 1959-03-06, with LC's own note reading 'Chris Raschka (born March 6, 1959 in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania)'. The post's year was right and the rewrite can now give the exact day. Confirmed: two Caldecott Medals, The Hello, Goodbye Window in 2006 and A Ball for Daisy in 2012. Added: Yo! Yes? was a Caldecott Honor Book in 1994, so there are three Caldecott recognitions, not two. The post undersold him. Corrected, the from-here trap again: 'From a small rural Pennsylvania county to the top of American children's illustration' implies he was raised here. He was not. He was born here and grew up in suburban Chicago, with part of his childhood in Austria, his mother's homeland. The rewrite claims the birth, which is genuinely ours and genuinely documented, and says plainly that the raising was elsewhere. Claiming only what is true is also what makes it safe to say loudly.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Confirmed: about 3,000 bituminous coal miners in the Broad Top field of District No. 2 idle on a strike order issued by the district officers and approved by the international president of the United Mine Workers. Corrected, 'more than 3,000': every paper says 'About 3,000' or 'About three thousand'. The post upgrades the source's own hedge into a floor. The rewrite says 'about three thousand'. Corrected, the July 10 date: no source supports it. The AP dispatch is datelined Johnstown, Pa., July 11, 1920 and reports the men 'are idle', so the walkout began on or before July 11 but the day itself is not established. This is the publication-date-versus-event-date trap in a new form. The rewrite says 'By July 11, 1920'. The Nogales reprint redates the same wire copy 'July 14', which is a reprint artifact and not a second event. Dropped, 'near Dudley': no source opened mentions Dudley, or any specific mine or town. The dispatch describes the Broad Top field as a whole, filed out of Johnstown. Dropped, 'Most locals today don't realize our backyard was a flashpoint in America's coal labor wars': two invented scope claims in one sentence, neither with a source. Corrected, 'for higher wages': this is the real find. It was not a demand for a raise. The miners alleged the operators refused to pay the full mining rate already due under the government agreement that ended the previous winter's general strike, plus the district wage scale signed after it. The operators held that the new scale wiped out a Broad Top sub-district rate of ten cents a ton above the district base rate that had been in effect since early in 1917. Men walking out over ten cents a ton they said was already theirs is a sharper and truer story than 'higher wages'. Ocr note: the Ward County Independent prints 'District No. 3'. Three other papers print District No. 2, and Johnstown is UMW District 2, so No. 2 is correct and the Minot copy is a typo. Name not asserted: all four papers say only 'International President Lewis of the United Mine Workers'. None gives a first name, so the rewrite says 'the international president of the United Mine Workers' and names no one. Almost certainly John L. Lewis, but that needs its own source before it goes in print. The OCR is too garbled to quote: 'Broad Ton field hnn thm hnrt..t haul to Philadelphia markets from bituminous mines and its outnut I ilmii.u- Important now because of a coal famine'. Worth confirming from a cleaner copy.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Corrected, and this one carried the single riskiest thing a post can carry: a direct quote in quotation marks that does not match its own cited source. The quote is wrong as cited. The post has Braddock replying "the English Shoud Inhabit & Inherit the Land." The post's own claimed source, the National Park Service page on Shingas, gives the reply as "No Savage Should Inherit the Land." Both phrases circulate in accounts of this exchange, which descends from Charles Stuart's captivity narrative, but the original is quoting one wording and citing a page that prints another. The rewrite uses the NPS wording and says so in the text, so a reader can check it in one click. Causation invented, and this is the bigger fault. The post says "Enraged, Shingas switched sides to the French." No source says that. What the sources say is that the Lenape stayed neutral in the early stages, declined to assist Washington at Fort Necessity in 1754 and Braddock in 1755, had no desire to be French subjects, and aligned with France only reluctantly after Braddock's defeat left France dominant in the region. Turning a considered and reluctant political decision by a Native leader into an emotional outburst is a real distortion, and it is the kind that reads badly. Dropped, 'killing and capturing hundreds': no source opened supports a number. The sources say numerous raids, and that both Pennsylvania and Virginia put a bounty on him. Confirmed and kept: 'Shingas the Terrible' is genuine. Added, because leaving it out makes a one-sided portrait of a real person: 'Although he was an implacable foe in battle, he was never known to treat his prisoners of war with cruelty.' This is the same defect class as this site's page on Fayette McKenzie, a real human being flattened into one trait. Softened: 'sparked a frontier war that changed Pennsylvania forever' overstates single-cause history. The rewrite says the answer helped set the frontier on fire, which the sequence supports.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
It was still the wrong outcome, exactly the failure a cautious check warns about: cutting a true fact for lack of a source reads as discipline in the moment and as a hole in the work later. It says: "When the Pennsylvania Railroad was being projected through the county more than a century ago the company established a station here and named it Mapleton because of the many huge maple trees standing in the area." The centennial says the railroad company named the station, for the trees. Naming by a corporation is a sharper fact than naming by drift. The centennial says "A town was laid out and building encouraged, but by 1858 only three houses stood here." So a town WAS laid out, it simply did not take. The post now says both: it was laid out, and it did not take. Both sources agree 1858 is the year the place was still almost nothing, three houses, not the year it was laid out. Independent corroboration gained: the 1966 centennial separately confirms Africa 1883 on the 1851 owners (M. F. Campbell and John Donaldson) and on only three houses standing by 1858. Two sources eighty three years apart agreeing on both details is much firmer ground than Africa alone. New material added: Campbell gave the borough land for all of its churches and the cemetery, and the Presbyterian church still in use was built by Campbell, Clayton and Mrs. John Donaldson from brick made in Campbell's own factory. Ocr note: the centennial's scan renders the capital C in Campbell, Clayton and Cemetery as G throughout ("Gampbell", "Gayton", "Gemetery").
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Confirmed in a primary source, same day, page one, and then made much stronger. The Harrisburg Telegraph of September 20, 1916, page 1, city edition, carries the story datelined "Mount Union, Pa., Sept. 20" and reports the explosion as having happened "at 6 o'clock this morning." That kills the newspaper-date-versus-event-date trap outright: the paper and the event are the same day, and the paper says so. Every core claim in the original holds: September 20, 1916, six men killed, cotton dry house, completely destroyed, Aetna Explosives Company, Mount Union. Even the word "terrific" in the original is the newspaper's own word. Four claims were cut on 1 August 2026, and the first cut was wrong. 1. "over 1,000 workers at peak production." No source had been found for it then. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on the town (HABS No. PA-5974) says the powder plant "employed at least 1,000 men and women until closing at the end of 1918," so the figure is back in the story, in the survey's words: at least 1,000, not over 1,000 at peak production. 2. "The plant churned out smokeless powder for World War I." Cut as written. The papers call it a powder plant and an explosives plant, and the Evening Public Ledger of October 25, 1916 has Aetna and du Pont planning to convert auxiliary factories to dyestuffs once "the demand for explosives and munitions becomes normal," which confirms munitions but not smokeless powder specifically. Worth noting the United States was not in the war in September 1916, so "for World War I" needs care it was not given. 3. "killing six workers in an instant" loses "in an instant." Embellishment on top of a death toll. 4. "the cost of that industrial boom was measured in lives lost to catastrophic accidents" was a plural claim with a single incident under it. The Harrisburg Telegraph's weekly Mount Union column reported fires in that exact building on August 5, August 19 and September 2, 1916, in the seven weeks before it blew up. Three separate notices, each treated as ordinary town news. The post no longer has to assert a pattern. It can just print the paper. Not used: the Evening Public Ledger of January 8, 1916 reports an earlier Aetna fire "supposed to have been caused by spontaneous combustion due to overheating the building" with a loss figure the OCR renders as "J75.C0O." The figure is almost certainly $75,000 but the OCR is not clean enough to print a dollar amount from, so it is left out. The three krishocker.com and spicerweb.org URLs originally attached to this story are now unnecessary. The post stands on the newspaper.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
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 railway decline LATE, after the village's best years. Naming Tyrone and Altoona as the cause is invented specificity, a known trap. Cut rather than hedged. The original also had the sequence backwards. Africa is explicit that Birmingham failed as a speculation FIRST, in the 1790s, for reasons that had nothing to do with railroads, and then had its most prosperous stretch from about 1836 until the railroad came. The real reason it failed is far better than the invented one and it is documented at length: Cadwallader sold the town by lottery to absentee buyers, and the ground did not match the paper. Africa reproduces the entire deed of dedication, which is where the ten dollar ticket, the five dollar deposit, the ballot and the five sworn freeholders all come from. Date handled carefully: the deed was subscribed by John Cadwallader and his wife Catherine on Dec. 13, 1797, and the plan was not recorded until Feb. 26, 1799. The post uses the 1797 laying-out date, which is what Africa's own summary sentence uses.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Confirmed by the college itself, which is the institution that holds the records: Nancy (Slaughter) Lee was the first African American student to graduate from Juniata College, in 1932. She was a Huntingdon native and a graduate of Huntingdon High School, the daughter of Levi and Anna Bertha Slaughter, enrolled after finishing high school in 1928, and was part of the Day Students' Club all four years. Her senior portrait in the 1932 Alfarata is the first image of a Black student to appear in any Juniata yearbook. Dropped, 'a time when many American colleges still turned Black students away': true in substance and unsourced as written. 'Many' is a scope word and needs a source of its own, and the original does not need it. The specific facts carry more weight than the generalisation. Dropped, 'walked across the stage': nobody has sourced a description of the ceremony. It is a small invented image and this is not a post to invent images in. Dropped, 'made history quietly, one commencement at a time': she graduated once. The phrase means nothing. The yearbook detail is the strongest thing available and it was not in the original at all. Two leads came out of the check: (a) 'Her family traces back to Charles Slaughter, who escaped slavery in Virginia and settled in Huntingdon County in 1845.' If that holds it is one of the best local stories on this site and deserves its own post, not a clause in someone else's. (b) 'After graduating from Juniata, Nancy (Slaughter) Lee '32 later moved to Philadelphia, where she passed away in 1957.' Hedge worth keeping in mind: the television coverage of her story says 'little is known about her time at the college.' Both are leads still being followed.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-08-01
Error: "The road was completed by 1819." It was not. The 1991 county survey of historic engineering and industrial sites says "By 1821 the road was complete from Huntingdon to Blairsville, a distance of seventy-seven miles," and gives the construction date range as 1815 to 1821. Two years early. Correct in the original: the 1810 authorization (the company was incorporated March 20, 1810), the seventy seven miles, and Huntingdon to Blairsville. Those all check out exactly. Cut, no source: "one of over 200 turnpike companies building more than 3,000 miles of toll roads across Pennsylvania." It is also doing nothing for a county page. Gone. Cut, no source: "replacing colonial Indian trails and dirt roads with the commercial superhighways of the early republic." Rhetoric asserting a causal replacement nobody sourced. What the original missed, and it is far better than what it had: the road is still there and still unpaved. The survey describes a three and a half mile stretch over Warrior Ridge between Huntingdon and Alexandria as extant and relatively unaltered, and lands the best line in the whole entry, that it is still marked by the same potholes, ruts, washouts and mud that travelers complained about at the time. A history post that ends at a place a reader can drive to today is worth five that end in 1821. Also recovered: the project stalled for four years after incorporation and was only rescued by a citizens' meeting in the county courthouse in January 1814, and the company ran out of money and paid contractors in scrip. Africa 1883 separately indexes a "Huntingdon, Cambria and Indiana turnpike shinplaster," which is that same scrip. Not used: Africa's line that "a considerable length of [it] passed through a rugged and sparsely settled region, unable to contribute any substantial aid" is quoted inside the 1991 survey rather than read in Africa directly at that page, so it is left out of the original.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-07-29
The two standard county histories confirm nearly all of it. (1) 'Middle of Third Street' is RIGHT: Africa 1883 says 'Third, then called Smith Street,' which reconciles the 1794 document's 'middle of Smith St.' (2) 1797 is RIGHT: the 1909 history says 'the probability, however, is that the building was first used in 1797.' (3) The William Smith bell donation is RIGHT and documented by a surviving 1798 receipt. (4) The 1842 second courthouse is RIGHT: Africa 1883 says it was 'completed and occupied in August, 1842.' Only two problems remain. First, the weight: the 1798 receipt says 350 pounds, but the 1909 history says the bell itself 'weighed 254 pounds.' The rewrite also surfaces the genuinely moving fact the original missed: the bell outlived the courthouse and went on to ring for schoolchildren until it cracked.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-07-29
Partly confirmed, one clear error, several unsourced. Confirmed by the 1897 Juniata Valley encyclopedia: Thomas White was an immigrant from Ireland, is remembered as having taken part in the Boston tea party, was a soldier in the Continental army, born May 1739, died September 13, 1820. Important: the source hedges ('is remembered as having taken part'), and the original post correctly preserved that hedge with 'county histories remember him among the men'. Good instinct, kept in the rewrite. The error: the original calls him 'a young Irish tailor'. The source says 'farmer, nail-maker, and soldier'. There is no tailor anywhere in it. And born in 1739 he would have been about 34 at the 1773 tea party, so 'young' is a stretch too. Still unsourced and therefore removed: raising 21 children, membership in the American Philosophical Society, three sons serving in 1812, and son Ezekiel being captured at Lundy's Lane in 1814 and dying in a British prison camp. That last one is a vivid, checkable claim and it needs its own research before it is ever stated here.
Checked against the record. · Checked 2026-07-29
Africa 1883 gives the whole arc: 'In 1872, W. A. Orbison and C. W. Welch, under the firm-name of Orbison & Welch, established... the Huntingdon Car-Works... at the end of which time operations were suspended.' Then: 'In July of 1880, J. G. and M. C. Blain, under the firm-name of Blain Brothers, purchased the establishment, which they enlarged to four times its previous capacity, and added an extensive foundry for casting car-wheels... hence the change in the name of the works.' So Blain Brothers Car and Car Wheel Works in the 1880s is correct. One claim removed: 'Proof of it sits in Washington today, in the Smithsonian's collection of American business history.' The check could not source that at all, and it is the kind of specific institutional claim a reader can check in thirty seconds. Dropped rather than hedged. The rewrite uses what the original missed entirely: the works had already failed and been shut down before the Blains bought it and made it the town's biggest employer.