Forty-eight places, one at a time.

Did you know? Four of the ten companies in the 125th Pennsylvania came out of Huntingdon County.

The 125th was raised in July and the first part of August 1862, a nine month regiment, under authority Governor Curtin gave to Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Higgins of Blair County. Four companies were raised in Huntingdon County and six in Blair.

The Huntingdon County companies were Company C under Captain William W. Wallace, Company F under Captain John J. Lawrence, Company H under Captain Henry H. Gregg, and Company I under Captain William F. Thomas. Lawrence was promoted to major when the regiment organized, and Lieutenant William H. Simpson took over Company F.

They organized at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg on August 16, 1862, and left for Washington the same day.

The regiment mustered out on May 18, 1863. The nine months were up and the men went home.

Higgins did not stay home. In February 1864 the Twenty second Pennsylvania Cavalry organized, and he was its colonel.

Four companies of this county's men, and a colonel who went back in.

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Two companies of Huntingdon County men marched out in the summer of 1861 with the Fifth Pennsylvania Reserves, and the county can now be told what became of the regiment, with the book it comes from.

The Fifth Reserve, numbered the Thirty-fourth of the Pennsylvania line, was organised at Camp Curtin in Harrisburg on 20 June 1861 out of companies raised in Lycoming, Northumberland, Clearfield, Union, Huntingdon, Centre, Bradford and Lancaster counties. Huntingdon County furnished two of them: the Huntingdon Infantry under Captain Andrew S. Harrison, which became Company G, and the Scott Infantry under Captain George Dare, which became Company I.

Now the count, which this page has been carrying a note about for some time. William F. Fox set the regiment's losses out in 1889 in the standard book on the subject, and lists it among the three hundred fighting regiments of the war. Of 1,046 men enrolled, 14 officers and 127 men were killed or died of wounds, which Fox works out as 141 killed, 13.5 per cent of the regiment. Another 68 died of disease, accident or in prison. Two hundred and nine in all.

An earlier version of this post gave those same figures and then concluded that more men died of dysentery, pneumonia and typhoid than of Confederate bullets. That part was wrong, and it was wrong against its own numbers: 141 is more than twice 68. In this regiment the fighting killed twice as many as the sickness did.

The two Huntingdon County officers named above were both killed. George Dare rose from captain of the Scott Infantry to major, then to lieutenant colonel, and was killed at the Wilderness while in command of the regiment. Frank Zentmyer, who took over Dare's company when Dare was promoted, was killed at Fredericksburg, where the regiment lost 18 killed, 87 wounded and 61 missing, and where Fox notes that the missing were all killed or wounded. Colonel Seneca G. Simmons had been killed at Glendale two years earlier while commanding the brigade.

Fox lists the fights where the regiment lost men: Mechanicsville, Gaines's Mill, Glendale, Manassas, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Bristoe Station, the Wilderness and Spotsylvania. It was present also at Malvern Hill, Gettysburg, Mine Run, the North Anna and Totopotomoy.

If you have a soldier from the Fifth Reserves in your family, tell us his name and his company and we will look him up properly.

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The best free thing on a hot afternoon is the public library, and the county library runs summer programs to keep children going till September.

A library card is the cheapest ticket to the wide world a child will ever get. If getting to Penn Street is the hard part, Library by Mail will send the books out instead. And if the one they want is not on the shelf, interlibrary loan will bring it in from another library.

Sign yours up. A county that reads is a county that gets ahead.

Take a kid to the library this week.

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Did you know? In 1755 a Lenape chief asked a British general a direct question, and the answer helped set this whole frontier on fire.

Shingas asked General Edward Braddock whether Indians who were friends to the English might be permitted to live and trade among them, and keep hunting ground enough to support themselves and their families. The National Park Service records Braddock's answer in five words. No Savage Should Inherit the Land.

What happened next was not a fit of temper, and it is worth getting right. Shingas and his villagers stayed neutral at first. They declined to help George Washington at Fort Necessity in 1754 and declined to help Braddock in 1755. The Lenape had no wish to be French subjects either. It was only after Braddock was defeated and France took control of the region that they reluctantly aligned with the French.

Then the raids came, deep into Pennsylvania and Virginia settlements, and the settlers gave him a name for it. Shingas the Terrible. Pennsylvania and Virginia both put a bounty on him.

One more thing belongs in this story. However hard he fought, he was never known to treat a prisoner of war with cruelty.

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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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Did you know? The canal through Huntingdon County did not die in a flood. It died quietly, and it was already thirteen years gone when the famous flood came.

The Pennsylvania Main Line Canal ran its Juniata Division about 127 miles, from Duncan's Island where the Juniata meets the Susquehanna, all the way up to Hollidaysburg. The state started looking for a way to unload the whole system as early as the 1840s. In 1857 the Pennsylvania Railroad bought the Main Line, in the words of the state historical marker, "for a fraction of its value," and started taking apart the divisions that did not pay.

The stretch from Huntingdon up to Hollidaysburg was out of service by 1876.

Then came 1889. The Geological Survey's own flood records show what that spring did here: on Standing Stone Creek, three and a half miles above Huntingdon, the highest stage ever recorded is 9.38 feet on June 1, 1889. On Aughwick Creek near Orbisonia, the biggest discharge in the whole record is June 1889, about 18,400 cubic feet a second. Neither has been topped since, not even in 1936.

That flood is what finished the canal off downstream. The marker says the damage was heavy enough that the rest of the canal above Newport was abandoned.

So the canal here was already a ditch full of weeds before the water ever came for it.

Does anybody still know where the old canal bed shows along the river? Point us to it.

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Did you know? The Army Corps of Engineers does not call Raystown Pennsylvania's largest lake. It calls it the largest lake located entirely in Pennsylvania. Those are two different claims and the difference is the whole sentence.

The Corps describes Raystown as 8,300 surface acres of clear water surrounded by 21,000 acres of forested mountain slopes, built and managed for flood damage reduction, recreation, natural resource opportunities and hydropower.

The federal dam inventory lists Raystown Dam at 225 feet high, holding back as much as 871,000 acre feet on the Raystown Branch of the Juniata, in Huntingdon County, completed in 1973.

And then there is the other thing people say about that water. Local legend puts something living down in it. We are calling that exactly what it is, a legend. We could not find a published source for when the story started or where the name came from, and we are not going to make one up.

So help us out here.

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Did you know the first white men through this valley were not farmers? They were traders, and they were here for skins.

In June 1747, years before any settlement was legal here, Conrad Weiser sat down with Shikellamy and other Indians at Chambers' Mill and heard a complaint against two traders, James Dunning and John Powel. Dunning was accused of stealing forty-seven deer-skins and three horses “upon the heads of Joniady River” — the Juniata, here. That is what the business was, and that is how early it was running.

They came along the old Indian path. Lytle's county history traces it: eastward through the Tuscarora Valley, Shade Gap, Black Log, Aughwick, Woodcock Valley, Hartslog Valley, Water Street, Frankstown, Hollidaysburg, and over the Alleghenies at Kittanning Point. “It was this trail,” he writes, “that gave Huntingdon county its early importance. It was the great highway between the east and the west.” Some of our roads still run on it.

Then the French and Indian War came through and emptied this frontier for years.

One correction, because we have seen it repeated: the Great Cove massacre of 1755 did not happen here. Great Cove is present-day McConnellsburg, in what is now Fulton County, about forty miles south of us. It belongs to the same war and the same terror that emptied this frontier, and it is not a Huntingdon County event.

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76 years ago today, June 25, 1950, North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel. Three years of fighting. Over 36,000 Americans never came home. Folks call it the Forgotten War. Not in this county. Bring coffee. Listen. They've been waiting.

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Fifty seven years ago today, two Americans were standing on the moon.

Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder first, about six hours after Eagle set down in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20, 1969. Buzz Aldrin followed him nineteen minutes later. Michael Collins was overhead the whole time, alone in the command module, and he never got to land.

They planted the flag together, and it very nearly went wrong. The ground was harder than anyone expected and they could only get the pole about two inches in. Aldrin was afraid the whole thing would topple over on live television in front of the world, so he stepped back and gave it a crisp West Point salute.

An estimated six hundred million people were watching. Roughly one in five human beings alive at the time.

We are a people who do hard things. Look up tonight.

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Did you know? One of the men remembered as throwing tea into Boston Harbor is buried in Huntingdon County.

Thomas White came over from Ireland and settled here. The county biographical record says he "is remembered as having taken part in the Boston tea party," and that he was a farmer, a nail maker, and a soldier in the Continental Army. He was born in May of 1739 and died September 13, 1820.

Note the wording, because it matters. The old book says remembered as, not proved to be, and I am going to say it the same way the source did.

A nail maker from Ireland who may have stood in the harbor that night, and who chose to spend the rest of his life farming in these hills.

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The people of this county are about as plain and solid as folks come.

They work hard, they keep their word, they help a neighbor without being asked, and they don't make a show of any of it. That's not weakness. That's strength you don't have to advertise. The fancy world overlooks places like ours. That's their loss. Give me a county full of salt-of-the-earth people over a city full of talkers any day. We know what matters.

This is home.

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