Orbisonia

Did you know? Cromwell Township is named for a man who was already dead when they named it, and who had put up the first iron furnace west of the Susquehanna.

The county history says the township was erected out of 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."

Here is what he had done. In the fall of 1785, Cromwell and George Ashman began taking warrants for vacant land in the valleys around Orbisonia. Together with Edward Ridgely they built Bedford Furnace, which the 1883 county history calls the first iron-smelting establishment west of the Susquehanna. The 1897 Juniata Valley encyclopedia records the same thing separately.

On the tenth of September, 1798, Cromwell advertised in the Pittsburgh Gazette that castings and bar iron were for sale at the Bedford Furnace. Iron out of this county, going to market over the mountains.

By the time the county history was written, the author noted there remained "scarcely a trace" of where that pioneer furnace had stood.

They put his name on the township after he was gone.

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Did you know? The flood of 1936 crested over Huntingdon County in the dark, in the small hours of March 18. And on two of our creeks it still did not beat 1889.

The United States Geological Survey had gages running here that week and published every reading two years later. Second feet below is the old way of saying cubic feet of water going past a point every second.

Great Trough Creek near Marklesburg peaked around midnight going into the eighteenth, at about 9,580 second feet. The biggest thing that gage had recorded in the six years before was 2,180.

Shaver Creek near Petersburg reached a stage of 9.32 feet at 3:15 that morning, measured afterward off the flood marks.

Aughwick Creek near Orbisonia crested at 3:30 a.m. at 16,400 second feet, 19.16 feet on the gage.

Standing Stone Creek, three and a half miles up from Huntingdon, topped out around 9:30 a.m. at about 5,070 second feet.

Now the part nobody expects. On Aughwick Creek the Survey records a bigger flood than 1936, and it is June 1889: about 18,400 second feet, 20.5 feet, read off flood marks. On Standing Stone Creek the maximum known stage in the whole record is also 1889, 9.38 feet on the first of June.

Two of our creeks had already seen worse, forty seven years earlier.

Tell us what they said.

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When the Civil War veterans of the southern end of the county organised themselves, they did it under the name of a colonel. The Grand Army of the Republic was the union veterans' organisation, and Col. Isaac Rogers Post, No. 252, was chartered at Orbisonia on 30 May 1882. Africa's county history, printed the following year, records the men who first held its offices.

Col Isaac Rogers Post, No. 252, G. A. R., organized May 30, 1882, at Orbisonia, Pa., with the following officers: C., George S. Baker; S. V. C., William Minnick; J. V. C., A. E. Chilcoat; Adjt., B. F. Chilcoat; Chap., Jacob C. Lockard; Q.M., Henry H. Lahr; O. D., George S. De Bray; O. G., W. B. Snyder.J. Simpson Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1883) · character 0 of the scanned text

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A quarter of a mile north of Orbisonia, East Broad Top locomotive No. 12 crosses a steel I-beam plate girder bridge after clearing the yard. The survey caption below is the record's own.

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Nobody flew over Orbisonia in 1906. The bird's eye view was a commercial art form: an artist walked the streets, drew every building, and then assembled them into a perspective nobody had ever actually seen. Fowler and Kelly made this one of the two boroughs together, and the Library of Congress holds it. It is a perspective map, not drawn to scale, which means the buildings are real and the geometry is persuasion.

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Looking south across Meadow Street, which is Route 994, from the Orbisonia depot toward the Rockhill shop complex. The East Broad Top was the narrow gauge line that ran from Mount Union south through Orbisonia to the Broad Top coal field, and this is the engineering record's own view of where it stopped in town.

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