https://huntcopa.com/Sourced Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania history, one story at a time, filed by borough and township.en-ushttps://huntcopa.com/story/thomas-h-adams-schoolteacher-to-banker/https://huntcopa.com/story/thomas-h-adams-schoolteacher-to-banker/Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000After teaching school for five years in Franklin and Huntingdon counties, Thomas H. Adams was ready to enter business. His savings were modest but sufficient: by April 1861, he had opened a mercantile partnership with Peter M. Bare in Mount Union. A storekeeper first, Adams proved a judicious businessman. He returned to Mount Union in July 1867 to settle permanently. By 1873, he founded somethinghttps://huntcopa.com/story/jacks-spring-then-and-now-1909/https://huntcopa.com/story/jacks-spring-then-and-now-1909/Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000In 1909, when Charles H. Welch published his History of Mount Union, the town was already nostalgic. He printed Jack's Spring twice: as it used to be, and as it is today. The spring is celebrated for its cool, silvery water. Welch's side-by-side plates show a landscape transformed within a lifetime. The wild spring of the earlier days gave way to carefully walled stone, a visible mark of progresshttps://huntcopa.com/story/harbison-walker-plant-at-full-steam-1909/https://huntcopa.com/story/harbison-walker-plant-at-full-steam-1909/Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000We have shared photographs of the Harbison-Walker plant abandoned, silent under the federal survey cameras. This is the plant alive. It is 1909. Smoke rises from the round beehive kilns visible in the yard. Workers stand among the structures that made the town prosper. We cannot say who is in the picture. We can say who arrived the year the works began: Charles Wenzel, born at Northeim inhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-paint-rebellion/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-paint-rebellion/Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000In the early years at Kistler, the company painted interior walls in bright, deep shades of green, blue, brown, and grey. The residents who lived in those houses complained. When they did, the company provided a lighter palette of beiges and pastels instead. A small story, but entirely human. The company held the power to choose the colors, but the people who lived inside the houses had a voice.https://huntcopa.com/story/r-f-ernst-the-man-behind-the-camera/https://huntcopa.com/story/r-f-ernst-the-man-behind-the-camera/Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000For weeks we have been sharing photographs from Charles H. Welch's 1909 history of Mount Union. Now we want to tell you about the photographer who took most of them: R. F. Ernst. Ernst was born in Goslar, Germany, on New Year's Day 1877. He came to America at eighteen and settled in Houtzdale, Pennsylvania, where he worked in photography with a cousin. After a few years, he returned to Germanyhttps://huntcopa.com/story/drakes-ferry-before-the-bridges/https://huntcopa.com/story/drakes-ferry-before-the-bridges/Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000Before every bridge there was a ferry. Drake's Ferry, which flourished in the early 1800s, was established by Samuel Drake, Sr. in 1783, at the east end of Jack's Narrows just west of town, with the tavern and stables on the north side of the river. It served travellers heading south toward Baltimore and Harper's Ferry. A canal-era traveler in the 1830s called the scenery there sublime, writinghttps://huntcopa.com/story/crum-corner-reinventions/https://huntcopa.com/story/crum-corner-reinventions/Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000One corner, many lives: an early hotel called the Broad Top House stood here in canal days on the corner of Jefferson Street and Railroad Avenue. The Crum building stands there today, having replaced it. Inside the Crum building worked the barber James Nevell, in a fine room opposite the Beers Hotel. He entered the barbering business for himself in November 1896 and controlled a large clientelehttps://huntcopa.com/story/when-the-government-came-to-listen/https://huntcopa.com/story/when-the-government-came-to-listen/Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000In 1989 and 1991, federal historians came to town to record the people who remembered the brickyards. They recorded Fred S. Beatty, Josh Booker, Marge Cassatt, Mike Dimoff, Sylvia Hoenstine, and Carl Peduzzi here in Mount Union in 1989. They returned in 1991 to speak with John Curry, Ivan Phillips, and Robert Wagner, among others. These were the people who saw the plants run, who handled thehttps://huntcopa.com/story/small-store-in-the-east-end/https://huntcopa.com/story/small-store-in-the-east-end/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000Selea Cutshall lost both legs to a serious railroad accident. But he built a life anyway. Born in Springfield Township on February 6, 1870, he came to Mount Union in October 1905 and opened a small store in the eastern section of town. He worked as a confectioner and cobbler. By 1909, when the town's history was written, Cutshall was described as getting around remarkably well and ambitioushttps://huntcopa.com/story/when-the-presses-replaced-the-hands/https://huntcopa.com/story/when-the-presses-replaced-the-hands/Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000The machines that built the secret. In 1942, when Robert Wagner came to work at Harbison-Walker's Mount Union plant, hand molding accounted for 90 percent of production. The company had patented special impact presses made right here that transformed the work. These machines produced denser brick that could better withstand the extreme temperatures inside coke ovens. By the late 1970s, about 95https://huntcopa.com/story/g-w-radle-store-mount-union/https://huntcopa.com/story/g-w-radle-store-mount-union/Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000The G. W. Radle store in Mount Union sold farm supplies. Farm Equipment and Farm Supplies, the signs read in the window glass. A Mail Pouch thermometer hung on the wall, and the photo captures the sidewalk too: kids and a dog, the texture of a small-town businesshttps://huntcopa.com/story/defrehn-chair-factory/https://huntcopa.com/story/defrehn-chair-factory/Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000In 1889, William DeFrehn and his sons arrived in Mount Union from Williamsport in Maryland to start a chair factory. A flood had damaged their establishment back home. They bought the old tannery that R. J. Faust had dismantled and converted it to their factory. Seven sons worked in the business: Robert, William Jr., Edward, Charles, Frank, Augustus, and George. Thousands of fine quality chairshttps://huntcopa.com/story/old-presbyterian-church-1867-to-1908/https://huntcopa.com/story/old-presbyterian-church-1867-to-1908/Fri, 02 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000The brick church in this photograph stood on the southeast corner of Shirley and Division Streets for over forty years. Built in 1866 and 1867 at a cost of four thousand five hundred dollars, it replaced an older frame church put up along the Shirleysburg road in 1849 for five hundred dollars. The congregation worshiped there until 1908, when a new church building was completed. The story beginshttps://huntcopa.com/story/kasan-and-song-1909/https://huntcopa.com/story/kasan-and-song-1909/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000Mount Union in 1909 was more worldly than people imagine. Alley Kasan came to America in 1901 and by 1903 opened a grocery on West Shirley Street. Ye Hing Song, described in the town's own history book as a laundryman, kept his shop in the Welch building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Jefferson Street. Both men appear in Charles Welch's 1909 History of Mount Union, Shirleysburg andhttps://huntcopa.com/story/leather-before-brick/https://huntcopa.com/story/leather-before-brick/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Before the brick works came the tannery. In 1883, when Mount Union's chief industry was A. D. Faust and Sons, they could process 13,000 hides a year with a crew of 25 men. The tannery had been built in 1859 by Mr. Bare and ran for decades before silica brick would transform the town. The 1909 photograph shows the Juniata Oak Extract Works, part of that leather era. Workers and buildings stand inhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-boom-decade-and-a-second-sodom/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-boom-decade-and-a-second-sodom/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Mount Union, in numbers: 764 people in 1880, 810 in 1890, 1,086 by 1900 — and 3,338 by 1910, more than triple the town of a decade before. The brick industry came first. The wages followed. And with the wages came the makeshift and disreputable services and entertainments that followed the money. The town earned a nickname for it: a second Sodom and Gomorrah, a reputation that marked the decadehttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-poet-at-the-depot/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-poet-at-the-depot/Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000W. W. Fuller was born at Ickesburg in Perry County on November 6, 1837. He entered the Pennsylvania Railroad's service on March 5, 1865, and by December 1, 1866, was Freight and Passenger Agent at Thompsontown. On April 1, 1876, he accepted the Mount Union agency and held it for thirty years until his pension on December 1, 1906. Besides his railroad interests, Fuller found time to seek thehttps://huntcopa.com/story/one-storefront-two-trades/https://huntcopa.com/story/one-storefront-two-trades/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000The storefront of J. E. Everett in Mount Union, photographed around 1910. Two people stand in the central doorway, framed between two windows. On the left, the word Groceries. On the right, the word Confectionery. A Mail Pouch crate or sign sits at ground level. One storefront with two separate names. The couple in the photograph occupy the space between them, the merchants of this arrangement,https://huntcopa.com/story/a-face-from-naroden-glas/https://huntcopa.com/story/a-face-from-naroden-glas/Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Georgi Vasilev, from the village of Krushoradi in the Lerin district, lived in Mount Union, Pa. This portrait appeared in Naroden Glas, the Bulgarian language newspaper of America. The newspaper published portraits and advertisements featuring Bulgarian and Macedonianhttps://huntcopa.com/story/creosote-river-of-ties/https://huntcopa.com/story/creosote-river-of-ties/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000The Pennsylvania Railroad's first creosote tie-treating plant stood northeast of Mount Union along the Juniata River, opened just before 1909 when this photo was taken. The plant was the PRR's first industry of this kind: treating wooden railroad ties with creosote to preserve them. About seven thousand gallons of creosote were used daily, imported from Europe and stored in Philadelphia beforehttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-night-the-lights-came-on/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-night-the-lights-came-on/Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000On August 20, 1905, the electric lights came on for the first time. Scott Dibert, president of the Mount Union Silica Brick Company, had brought electric light to the town through the Mount Union Light and Power Company. The two large dynamos sat in the engine room of the brick works itself, furnishing both day and night current to the streets. It was a night long to be remembered. The electrichttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-rarest-house-in-kistler/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-rarest-house-in-kistler/Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Seven Double Mountain Houses were built in 1917 for workers in Kistler, the company town of Mount Union Refractories across the Juniata River from Mount Union. Only three of the seven were still standing when the federal surveyors counted in 1991. Each duplex stands one and one-half stories tall, distinguished by a rectangular plan, gable roof with pent eaves, a wide shed roof dormer on thehttps://huntcopa.com/story/hackman-the-man-who-built-two-towns/https://huntcopa.com/story/hackman-the-man-who-built-two-towns/Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000This is Clinton V. Hackman, who ran the Harbison-Walker brick plant at Mount Union from 1902 until 1905, when he left for Lock Haven and J. A. Lansberry took charge. But his larger mark on the valley came after he left the Works. Hackman was one of two former Harbison-Walker managers who organized Mount Union Refractories in 1911, built on the Juniata's edge. That company then built companyhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-killing-that-named-the-mountain/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-killing-that-named-the-mountain/Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000February 1744. Three Delaware Indians killed an Indian trader named Jack Armstrong and his two companions, James Smith and Woodworth Arnold, at the Narrows above Mount Union. That killing, and the man who died there, gave the place its name. Jack's Narrows, the narrow gorge where the Juniata River breaks through, is known to every traveler who has wended his way through. Jack's Spring, celebratedhttps://huntcopa.com/story/stricklers-ice-cream-and-gasoline/https://huntcopa.com/story/stricklers-ice-cream-and-gasoline/Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Strickler's in the 1950s was where two needs met on the same corner: ice cream and a full tank of gas. The Ice Cream sign is painted large above the store. The pumps stand out front, numbered and ready. A truck waits at the curb. Everything in the photograph speaks of a simple afternoon transaction in a workinghttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-factory-that-outgrew-the-brick/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-factory-that-outgrew-the-brick/Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000The factory where the women worked. In 1920, Mount Union Manufacturing opened for men's suits and coats. Within two years, 62 women worked there. The L. Greif Company of Baltimore bought the firm in 1922 and kept building. Employment reached 314 by 1938. In the 1940s, during World War II, part of production shifted to army uniforms, and the company doubled the factory size. By 1948, it had 591https://huntcopa.com/story/who-named-mount-union/https://huntcopa.com/story/who-named-mount-union/Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Who named Mount Union, and when? The town's own histories can't quite agree. Welch's 1909 book says Col. William Pollock gave the name, in consequence of the union of mountains at this point. A footnote adds that good authority also claims John Dougherty named it. The founding date is no tidier. Lytle's 1876 county history says Mount Union was laid out in 1850 by Gen. George W. Speer and Johnhttps://huntcopa.com/story/dickens-on-the-canal/https://huntcopa.com/story/dickens-on-the-canal/Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Charles Dickens took a canal boat down the Juniata River in the 1840s, when the waterway was the main road. The canal had replaced the earlier ferries, offering faster passage than the river crossings that came before. In his 1909 history, Charles H. Welch recorded Dickens's own words about the journey: "There was much in this mode of traveling which I heartily enjoyed at the time, and look backhttps://huntcopa.com/story/twenty-days-to-burn-a-brick/https://huntcopa.com/story/twenty-days-to-burn-a-brick/Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000A green brick holds so much water that it would blow apart in the kiln, so before anything else it had to be dried. Left in the yard that took days and depended entirely on the weather. The yards fixed that by running flues under the drying floors, and later by circulating steam and waste heat off the kilns. This is the rotary dryer and its conveyors. Then the burning. Setters stacked the brickshttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-last-day-and-the-molds-that-went-to-utah/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-last-day-and-the-molds-that-went-to-utah/Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000At the end of November 1985 a Harbison-Walker spokesman told the United Steelworkers that the Mount Union plant was closing, because the silica brick market had all but collapsed. Somewhere between twenty five and forty seven people were still on the payroll. In 1925 there had been 563. Then came a strange postscript that says everything about what was made here. Mount Union and one Generalhttps://huntcopa.com/story/what-the-company-called-this-place-in-1917/https://huntcopa.com/story/what-the-company-called-this-place-in-1917/Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000In a 1917 advertisement, Harbison-Walker called itself the largest manufacturer of refractory materials in the world, and called its Mount Union operation the largest silica brick plant in the world. Those were the company's own words about itself, and the federal survey quotes them as such. What the survey states in its own voice is more than enough: by 1910 the plant employed more than sixhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-dust/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-dust/Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000This is the inside of the packing shed at the No. 1 works. Every one of those posts is doing a job, and the floor runs on past the end of the photograph. It is also worth being honest about what the work cost. Silica yards were harder on a man than fire clay yards, because the air carried a far heavier load of silica dust, and silica dust causes silicosis. The men in crushing, in grinding and inhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-gambrel-roofs-on-water-street/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-gambrel-roofs-on-water-street/Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000The federal survey describes them exactly as they still stand: two rows of one and a half story, gambrel roofed houses along east Water Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, built by the General Refractories Company for its workers. In the early 1950s the company sold them. Across the whole region the brick companies followed the same policy when they got out of the housing business, which was to givehttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-top-and-the-bottom-of-the-same-company/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-top-and-the-bottom-of-the-same-company/Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000This is 118 Market Street, the General Refractories superintendent's house. It is still there. The same company owned forty one houses in Mount Union, scattered in four different places. Two rows of gambrel roofed houses along east Water Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. A row of seven, two stories, right up against the plant on Wausau Place. Six frame houses on Shirley Street. And twelve onehttps://huntcopa.com/story/213-shirley-street/https://huntcopa.com/story/213-shirley-street/Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000This was the Harbison-Walker manager's house, at 213 Shirley Street. The federal study of these towns explains what you are looking at without needing to say a word about this particular house. In a company town the rank was built into the street. A large and deliberately distinctive house for the man in charge, set at a distance and often up on a rise, and much smaller identical houses with nohttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-brick-office-that-became-the-red-cross/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-brick-office-that-became-the-red-cross/Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Look at the sign in the yard. This little brick building on Market Street was the General Refractories Company office. When the company closed its Mount Union yard in the early 1950s, the brickyard and seven houses next to it were leveled. Three buildings were spared, for a reason that had nothing to do with sentiment: the office, the superintendent's house and a weigh shed happened to sit on ahttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-couple-who-would-not-change-their-house/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-couple-who-would-not-change-their-house/Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000A Norman Cottage sits gable end to the street, one and a half stories, with one roof slope run out long to cover a side porch and a three window bay pushed out of the front. Twenty three were built at Kistler and twenty one were still there when the federal survey counted them. Kenneth and Edna Cox kept theirs exactly as it was built. No additions, no alterations to the outside. The surveyhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-houses-in-kistler-have-names/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-houses-in-kistler-have-names/Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Not numbers. Names. They are written on John Nolen's own plan for the town, and the federal survey copied them down: Double Valley Farm House, Double Mountain House, Double Capri Villa, Georgian Cottage, Vermont Farm House, and Norman Cottage. The architects picked those old fashioned forms on purpose. They believed the character of a building could shape the character of the people livinghttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-wpa-built-this-school/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-wpa-built-this-school/Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Kistler Elementary sits at the end of Cedar Street. The federal survey records two things about it that belong together: the brick school in the company town dates to 1936, and the building was put up by the Works Progress Administration. A company built the houses. The government built the school. The children who filled it were the children of men making brick for steel mills two hundred mileshttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-kistler-company-store-taken-down-in-1990/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-kistler-company-store-taken-down-in-1990/Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Kistler was about as complete a company town as this region produced. The company built and kept up virtually every building in it, along with the roads, the water and the electric. This was the store and school building. The federal photographer got there in time, because the caption on this negative carries four words that end the story: demolished inhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-engine-they-left-in-the-shed/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-engine-they-left-in-the-shed/Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000When the federal survey team walked the East Broad Top yard, this is part of what they found. A concrete block engine house going soft at the edges, tracks running out of it lined with abandoned EBT coal hoppers, and inside, still sitting where it had been left, a switch engine that once worked these yards. The survey also noted what had grown up along the Route 522 side of the same yard byhttps://huntcopa.com/story/nine-grades-of-coal-and-a-yard-that-never-slept/https://huntcopa.com/story/nine-grades-of-coal-and-a-yard-that-never-slept/Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000The East Broad Top yard at Mount Union went in with the line itself, in 1873, and its whole reason for existing was that two railroads of two different widths met here. Everything coming off the narrow gauge had to get onto standard gauge cars, and everything going the other way had to come off. They kept finding better ways to do it. Around 1922 an overhead electric gantry crane went up to movehttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-plant-across-the-river/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-plant-across-the-river/Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000The third brickyard in town was started by two men who used to run the first one. R. P. M. Davis and Clinton V. Hackman, both former managers for Harbison-Walker, organized the Mount Union Refractories Company and built its plant in 1911 and 1912 on the edge of town along the Juniata. It opened with eight kilns. During the First World War they built twenty one more. In 1922 the company put up ahttps://huntcopa.com/story/a-question-we-cannot-settle-and-maybe-you-can/https://huntcopa.com/story/a-question-we-cannot-settle-and-maybe-you-can/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000This stone house stands on West Water Street near Division. The federal survey records it as the John Sharrar House and dates it to about 1841. The photographer noted that the gable end you cannot see in this picture was the canal side, because the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal came through here in 1829 and Mount Union started life as a canal village. Here is the honest problem. The county's 1937https://huntcopa.com/story/lower-spruce-creek-presbyterian/https://huntcopa.com/story/lower-spruce-creek-presbyterian/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Spruce Creek township's first photograph on this site. The valley is best known outside the county for its trout water, which is why a president fished it, but the church came first and is what the township was organisedhttps://huntcopa.com/story/raystown-lake-from-todd-township/https://huntcopa.com/story/raystown-lake-from-todd-township/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Todd township's first photograph here, and the lake is the reason. Raystown is the largest body of water wholly inside Pennsylvania, and its northern arms reach into this township. The photographer recorded only "Raystown lake Region late Fall"; the position saved with the file falls in Todd township, which is how it is filedhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-methodist-church-at-mill-creek/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-methodist-church-at-mill-creek/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Mill Creek borough's first photograph on this site is of its United Methodist church. The date stone reads MEC 1852, which the photographer takes to stand for Methodist Episcopal Church, and says so as a supposition rather than a fact. The steeple, he notes, is a fairly modern addition. Both of those hedges are his and both are kepthttps://huntcopa.com/story/grace-united-methodist-three-springs/https://huntcopa.com/story/grace-united-methodist-three-springs/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Three Springs borough's first photograph here, taken from Pennsylvania Route 994, which is Hudson Street where it runs through the town. The borough sits on the old East Broad Top line between Orbisonia andhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-lutheran-church-at-cassville/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-lutheran-church-at-cassville/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Cassville borough's first photograph here, taken from Seminary Street. The street name is not accidental: Cassville Seminary operated in this small borough in the nineteenth century, and the town kept the name of it in itshttps://huntcopa.com/story/orbisonia-and-rock-hill-from-the-air-1906/https://huntcopa.com/story/orbisonia-and-rock-hill-from-the-air-1906/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Nobody 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 thehttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-post-office-at-shade-gap/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-post-office-at-shade-gap/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Shade Gap sits where the road goes through Shade Mountain, and a gap in a ridge is why most small towns in this county are where they are. This is the borough's first photograph on the site: its post office, inhttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-hudson-grist-mill-saltillo/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-hudson-grist-mill-saltillo/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Saltillo's first photograph on this site is of a mill on the National Register of Historic Places. The picture shows the west side, the shed addition, and what is left of a Fitz steel water wheel. The Fitz Water Wheel Company of Hanover, Pennsylvania built overshot steel wheels for mills like this one into the twentieth century, long after most of the country had gone tohttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-h-o-andrews-feed-mill-mapleton/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-h-o-andrews-feed-mill-mapleton/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000A feed mill is where a farming county turns its own grain back into something its animals can eat, and Mapleton's is on the National Register of Historic Places. This is the borough's first photograph on this site other than the Grand Army post recorded inhttps://huntcopa.com/story/two-stone-houses-in-birmingham/https://huntcopa.com/story/two-stone-houses-in-birmingham/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Birmingham is the smallest borough in Huntingdon County and one of the oldest, sitting on the Little Juniata where the Pennsylvania Railroad main line runs. These two stone houses are the first photograph of the borough on this site. It was released by its photographer into the publichttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-birmingham-bridge-over-the-juniata/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-birmingham-bridge-over-the-juniata/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000The Birmingham Bridge carries Pennsylvania Route 350 over the Juniata north of Birmingham, and it does not belong to one county. Its far end is in Tyrone Township, Blair County; its near end is in Warriors Mark Township, Huntingdon County. The Historic American Engineering Record photographed it in March 1988 from the downstream side. The photographer was Jet Lowe, whose plates of thehttps://huntcopa.com/story/col-isaac-rogers-post-orbisonia/https://huntcopa.com/story/col-isaac-rogers-post-orbisonia/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000When 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 itshttps://huntcopa.com/story/harry-corbin-post-mapleton/https://huntcopa.com/story/harry-corbin-post-mapleton/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Mapleton's Civil War veterans organised in December 1880 with twenty-one men. By the time Africa's county history went to press three years later the post had grown to forty-seven and was, in the book's phrase, in a flourishing condition. The Grand Army of the Republic was the union veterans' organisation, and a post was how a small town's survivors kept hold of onehttps://huntcopa.com/story/alexandria-memorial-public-library/https://huntcopa.com/story/alexandria-memorial-public-library/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000The federal survey photographed this building at Hartslog and Main Streets in Alexandria borough. The plate below is the survey's own, and the caption is the one the Library of Congress records with it: the southwest front, looking northeast. Alexandria is one of the oldest towns in the county, laid out inhttps://huntcopa.com/story/alexandria-high-school/https://huntcopa.com/story/alexandria-high-school/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Main Street at Church Street, Alexandria borough, recorded by the Historic American Buildings Survey. The caption below is the survey's: the northeast front, lookinghttps://huntcopa.com/story/the-view-from-orbisonia-depot/https://huntcopa.com/story/the-view-from-orbisonia-depot/Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000Looking 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