Shirley township

Newton Hamilton: What the Histories Say of Hugh Brown, and the Borough of 1843

Newton Hamilton is a borough in Mifflin County, not far from the Huntingdon County line. Two old histories begin its story with a man named Hugh Brown. The 1886 history of the Susquehanna and Juniata valleys by Franklin Ellis and Austin Hungerford says Brown took out a warrant for two hundred and fifty acres on June 15, 1762, on the south side of the river, and later took up other land on the north side, where the town now stands and where he lived. The next chapter of the same book says the site is part of a tract warranted to Brown in 1762. The state's printed list of Cumberland County warrants, copied from the Land Office books, does not list a 250 acre warrant to Brown. It has a Hugh Brown twice, for fifty acres and for one hundred acres, both dated June 5, 1762, and it does not say where the land lay.

The 1886 history says Brown was killed at the place by the Indians, who captured his half-sister Hester Hamilton at the same time. The history gives no date for it. Another chapter places the killing near what is now Newton Hamilton and tells how Hester, bound and taken up the river, loosened her bonds, hid in a hollow log while the Indians looked for her, and followed the river back home. She later married Colonel William Bratton.

That chapter calls Hester a sister of Margaret Hamilton, of Newton Hamilton, and the history says Margaret inherited the tract on which the town stands, laid out the village, and lived and died there. The same history says the land was hers before 1783, as she was assessed that year with sixty acres. But its own list of the 1783 Wayne township assessment gives Margaret Hamilton fifty acres.

Printed state tax returns list a Margaret Hamilton in Derry township, which Wayne was cut from in 1782, with sixty acres in 1779, fifty in 1780 and thirty in 1782, and a Margaret Hambleton in Wayne with fifty acres in 1785. We cannot tie those entries to the woman in the history beyond name and township.

The town was laid out under its present name about 1802. On January 19, 1802, Margaret Hamilton sold Samuel McCurdy lots 28 and 29 "in the general plan of Newton Hamilton," fifty by one hundred and fifty feet, on the north side of Front Street.

Other names turn up in print. Sherman Day's Historical Collections of the State of Pennsylvania, from 1843, has "Hamiltonville, or Newton Hamilton, formerly called Muhlenberg," and calls it "a small but smart village on the canal." He does not say where any of the names came from.

Newton Hamilton became a borough by an act of the legislature approved April 12, 1843. Its first election, held in March 1844, chose John Morrison as burgess.

The federal census counted 353 people at Newton Hamilton in 1850 and 317 in 1880. The borough's count was 280 in 1970, 317 again in 1980, 287 in 1990 and 196 in 2020.

Checked against the record. Checked against the 1886 Ellis and Hungerford history, volume 1, pages 579, 580, 583, 588, 589 and 614; the 1913 Jordan history of the Juniata Valley, page 138; Sherman Day's 1843 book, page 472; and the Pennsylvania Archives, third series, volumes 20 and 24, read as page images for the dates and acreages. Ellis and Jordan agree on the April 12, 1843 act and the March 1844 election, but Jordan follows Ellis closely, so they are not two independent witnesses. Newton Hamilton is in Mifflin County, so it is listed as outside this county. The warrant is the open question. The printed list has two Hugh Brown entries and no 250 acre warrant, and its preface says the dates it gives are dates of warrant. It names no place, so we cannot say whether those entries are this Hugh Brown or this land. We have not seen the original warrant books or surveys, the Mifflin County deeds and estate papers, the 1783 tax roll itself, the 1843 session law, the borough's first minutes, or a newspaper from those years. Muhlenberg rests on Day's book alone, and none of these sources says where the town's names came from. We read the 1850, 1880 and 1990 census reports on their page images, and the 2020 count in the Census Bureau's Pennsylvania data file. The 1990 report gives 1970, 1980 and 1990 in one table. The other census years are left out here, and we did not check whether the borough's boundaries changed between counts.

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