County wide, Marklesburg borough, Petersburg borough, Orbisonia borough

Flood of '36 Devastated HC

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.

What the fact check changed. DUPLICATE OF 48e017a36dde5c6c, found by error-marker sweep rather than by clustering (text overlap 0.59 with the corrected original). Same post, same defect, same correction, no new research. ERROR MARKERS STILL PRESENT: "portstown", "sweeping away bridges" This copy is NOT YET PUBLISHED, so the correction is preventive. ---- ORIGINAL VERDICT NOTES FOLLOW: TWO CLAIMS CUT, and the post was rebuilt on federal measurements instead of atmosphere. 1. "sweeping away bridges and homes around Huntingdon" NO SOURCE. Cut. 2. "Entire families evacuated from Portstown as floodwaters crept across the countryside." NO SOURCE. Portstown is a real Huntingdon neighborhood and the claim is entirely plausible, but the check could not source it, so it is out. Worth chasing in a local paper later; it is exactly the kind of detail a reader will confirm in a comment. SOURCE FOUND: USGS Water-Supply Paper 799, The Floods of March 1936, Part 2, Hudson River to Susquehanna River Region, published 1937. A primary federal measurement document with gage-by-gage records for four Huntingdon County streams. Downloaded and read directly from pubs.usgs.gov, 406 pages. THE FINDING, and it reverses the emotional shape of the post: the original said 1936 "remains one of our county's most significant natural disasters," which is hedged enough to survive, but the Survey's own tables show that on TWO of the four Huntingdon County gages the June 1889 flood was HIGHER than 1936. Aughwick Creek at Orbisonia: 18,400 second-feet in June 1889 against 16,400 in 1936. Standing Stone Creek near Huntingdon: maximum known stage 9.38 feet on June 1, 1889. SAID PRECISELY, because this is exactly where a post like this goes wrong: 1936 did NOT under-perform everywhere. On Great Trough Creek it was more than four times the previous recorded peak, and on the Raystown Branch at Saxton it was 80,500 second-feet against a previous record of 29,000. But those two gages only have records reaching back to 1930 and 1911. The two gages whose record reaches back to 1889 both put 1889 on top. The post says only what the tables say, gage by gage, and does not generalize to "the county." ALSO HANDLED: "torrential rains combined with snowmelt" is not asserted in the rewrite. The Survey measured both, publishing daily March precipitation tables and separate tables of snow depth still on the ground, but the check did not open a narrative sentence stating the cause, so the post does not state one. NOT AVAILABLE, and worth knowing for next time: there was no USGS gage on the Juniata River main stem at Huntingdon in 1936. The nearest main-stem gages were Frankstown Branch at Williamsburg and the Juniata at Newport. No post should ever quote a 1936 river level "at Huntingdon."

Sources

Checked 2026-08-01 · County history, independently fact checked

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