Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania · established 1787
Every story we can prove, from all forty-eight of our towns and townships.
A county history you can check. 221 stories, each one carrying the sources under it, sorted into the borough or township it actually happened in. Plus where to eat, what to do, and who plays who on Friday night.
Start here
Pick your town.
Eighteen boroughs, thirty townships, drawn at their real boundaries. Click any shape.
The shaded ones already have stories written and sourced. The pale ones have their founding record pulled from the county histories and are waiting on the rest. That distinction is on the map on purpose: a gap you can see is a gap somebody can fill.
Boundaries are the U.S. Census Bureau's 2020 cartographic boundary file for Pennsylvania county subdivisions, filtered to Huntingdon County. 43 of 48 municipalities currently have at least one story.
The photographic record
Photographs, and where they came from.
54 plates, nearly all of them Library of Congress survey photographs. Every one is of Mount Union Borough, because that is where the picture research has been done so far. The other forty-seven have their record in print, not in pictures, and that gap is worth closing.
Mount Union BoroughThe Brick Office that Became the Red CrossLook at the sign in the yard. This little brick building on Market Street was the General Refractories Company office. When the company closed its…
5 sources
Mount Union BoroughKistler, the Village that Was DesignedMost company towns were laid out by engineers with almost no thought given to how they would feel to live in. Kistler was different. In 1916 the…
4 sources
Mount Union BoroughThe Mailbox Made Out of the TownWhen the last of it was over, the town went and got the bricks. A committee collected brick and some of the most elaborate shapes from all three…
4 sources
Mount Union BoroughThe Gambrel Roofs on Water StreetThe 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…
4 sources
Mount Union Refractories beehive ovens · Library of Congress / HABS-HAER (Nancy Shedd) · see all 54 photographs →Best sourced
Stories with the deepest record behind them.
Mount Union BoroughThe Brick Office that Became the Red CrossLook at the sign in the yard. This little brick building on Market Street was the General Refractories Company office. When the company closed its…
5 sourcesBroad Top City BoroughBroad Top StrikeDid you know? By July 11, 1920, about three thousand bituminous coal miners in the Broad Top field were idle. The Associated Press carried it out of…
4 sourcesHuntingdon BoroughHuntingdon's Grand Courthouse Towers OverDid you know? Huntingdon tore down a courthouse people loved, and fifty five years later they were still sore about it. The county's second…
4 sourcesMapleton BoroughBorn on the RailsDid you know? Mapleton was named by a railroad company, for trees. The 1966 centennial history puts it plainly: when the Pennsylvania Railroad was…
3 sourcesShirleysburg BoroughPurdue's FounderDid you know? The man Purdue University is named for was born in Huntingdon County, and he had to quit school at twelve. John Purdue was born…
3 sourcesTodd TownshipFirst U.S. Coke SmeltingDid you know? There is a furnace site on Big Trough Creek with a real claim on American industrial history. John Savage of Philadelphia leased the…
3 sources43 food and drink businesses and 107 things to do, each with an address, a telephone number where one is published, and a link back to the Visitors Bureau listing it came from.
Sports Six districts, one college, five national titlesWho plays in which conference, which municipalities each district draws from, and the volleyball programme at Juniata College that has won five NCAA Division III championships.