Borough · Huntingdon County
2 stories on file, each with its sources. 0.3 square miles of land in the ridge and valley country of central Pennsylvania.
Rock Hill (postoffice name Rockhill Furnace) was laid out in 1874 across the Black Log creek from Orbisonia. A large number of the early houses were built and owned by the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company. An iron furnace was opened at this place in 1831 by Diven & Morrison. The Winchester furnace was built two or three years later. Rock Hill was incorporated on June 16, 1887, with A. W. Sims as the first chief burgess. It is a station on the East Broad Top railroad and in 1910 reported a population of 504. Saltillo, a station on the East Broad Top railroad in the southern part of the county, was settled in 1796 by Henry Hubbell. On August 20, 1796, Thomas Greer filed for record the plat of "Springville," which occupied the site of Saltillo. A grist mill was built by Henry Hubbell in 1797 and J. & J. C. Brewster were the first merchants. A number of lots were sold to people in Philadelphia and other places, but the lack of transportation facilities caused many of the purchasers to surrender their claims and Springville died a natural death. Some years later Henry Hudson laid out Saltillo, which was incorporated as a borough on December i, 1875, with Samuel McVitty as the first chief burgess. John W. Jordan, ed., History of the Juniata Valley and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1913) · character 232,915 of the scanned text
Quoted from a work published before 1929 and therefore in the public domain in the United States. Spelling and punctuation are as printed, including nineteenth century spellings of place names. Scanned text carries optical character recognition errors; the character offset is given so the passage can be found and checked in the original.
2 stories
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.
From the county histories, on Rockhill borough. The passage below is printed exactly as it appears in 1883, including the spelling of the day and the errors the scanner made. It has not been rewritten, summarised or added to.
From the west are several small streams flowing into Aughwick Creek, the largest of which is Old Woman's Run, which empties into the Aughwick a little below the mouth of Black Log. The East Broad Top Railroad passes through the township nearly northeast and southwest, alongside the borough of Orbisonia, and through the town of Rock Hill. There are under the surface of Cromwell township large quantities of iron ore, both hematite and fossil, principally owned by the Rock Hill Iron and Coal Company, whose furnaces are located just outside the borough of Orbisonia. The farming lands of this township, scattered as they are through the small valleys, are susceptible of a high state of eultivation, and upon some are raised large crops of corn, wheat, oats, and potatoes. Early Settlers and Pioneer Incidents. , This township being on the old path from the lower Susquehanna to the Ohio country, and a portion of the gap or gateway through which many of the pioneers to the then far-off West journeyed, it would naturally attract the attention of some of the pilgrims in search of future homes. Of this class were ` THE CLUGAGE FAMILY., This family of pioneers settled in Black Log, which was sometimes called Horse Valley, about the year 1763, and consisted of Robert, the father, who died a few years thereafter, and sons named respectively Robert, George, Thomas, Francis, James, and Gaven, each of whom became owners of land in the valley between the Shade and Black Log Gaps.J. Simpson Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1883) · character 1,637,971 of the scanned text
Sources
Where it sits