Orbisonia

Did you know? Cromwell Township is named for a man who was already dead when they named it, and who had put up the first iron furnace west of the Susquehanna.

The county history says the township was erected out of Shirley and Springfield townships in January 1836, and named "in honour of Col. Thomas Cromwell, deceased, who was an early settler and a distinguished and hospitable citizen."

Here is what he had done. In the fall of 1785, Cromwell and George Ashman began taking warrants for vacant land in the valleys around Orbisonia. Together with Edward Ridgely they built Bedford Furnace, which the 1883 county history calls the first iron-smelting establishment west of the Susquehanna. The 1897 Juniata Valley encyclopedia records the same thing separately.

On the tenth of September, 1798, Cromwell advertised in the Pittsburgh Gazette that castings and bar iron were for sale at the Bedford Furnace. Iron out of this county, going to market over the mountains.

By the time the county history was written, the author noted there remained "scarcely a trace" of where that pioneer furnace had stood.

They put his name on the township after he was gone.

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The East Broad Top Railroad's shops stand on Meadow Street in Rockhill Furnace, a middle point on a three-foot-gauge line that ran from Mount Union to Alvan. The nomination calls the railroad one of the oldest narrow gauge lines in America, and a 1991 National Park Service inventory of the county's industrial sites records that it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

The nomination says the East Broad Top Railroad and Coal Company was established in 1871, after the Civil War interfered with an earlier plan to reach the Broad Top coal. Africa's 1883 county history says the company had been organized under an act approved April 16, 1856, that construction began on September 16, 1872, and that the road opened to Robertsdale, its southern terminus, on November 4, 1874. The 1991 inventory says the owners of Rockhill Furnace built the line to reach iron ore and coal in the region, and that it reached its greatest length in 1916 with the extension to Alvan. The road carried timber, sand, rock, general freight and passengers, but coal was its great money-maker: trains hauled it to Mount Union, where it was transferred to the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1881, Africa records, the road carried 143,449 tons of bituminous coal.

After World War II other fuels began to supplant coal. Passenger service ended in 1953, and on April 16, 1956, the company ran its last train. The purchaser of the entire line preserved five miles of track and six steam locomotives, Mikado types built for the East Broad Top by the Baldwin works of Philadelphia, and began running part of the line as a tourist attraction in 1960. The 1991 inventory names the buyer as the Kovalchick Salvage Company of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and says the town of Orbisonia asked for the reopening to commemorate its bicentennial.

The bulk of the Rockhill yard dates from 1874, including the red brick roundhouse with berths for eight engines and the Armstrong turntable. When the form was written in 1974 the blacksmith shop, foundry and machine and car shops still housed their original machinery, and the foundry was filled with patterns used in making the rolling stock. About 1,400 feet of grade north of Shirleysburg washed out in 1972. Across Meadow Street, the Orbisonia passenger station had its waiting room converted into a gift shop and its freight room into a snack bar.

Decline in the use of coal after World War II forced the East Broad Top to cease operations in 1956. All of its track and rolling stock seemed doomed, but the purchaser of the line generously preserved five miles of the track and six of the steam engines.National Register of Historic Places nomination, East Broad Top Railroad (reference 66000666), 66000666, p. 3 · character 7,078 of the scanned text

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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? One of the first storekeepers near Orbisonia was buying his rum by the hogshead from Baltimore in 1773.

George Irvin settled near where Orbisonia now stands within a few years after 1760. He kept store, it is said, in a log storeroom one story high, and traded with the Indians and the early settlers, exchanging wearing material and groceries, boots, shoes, guns and powder for grain and corn.

One of his bills survived. On May 28, 1773, David McLure of Baltimore billed him for one hogshead of molasses and one hogshead of New England rum. McLure wrote that New England rum was getting very scarce, and that flour was low and likely to fall. The 1876 county history noted that a letter took three days to go from what is now Huntingdon County to Baltimore.

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When 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 its offices.

Col Isaac Rogers Post, No. 252, G. A. R., organized May 30, 1882, at Orbisonia, Pa., with the following officers: C., George S. Baker; S. V. C., William Minnick; J. V. C., A. E. Chilcoat; Adjt., B. F. Chilcoat; Chap., Jacob C. Lockard; Q.M., Henry H. Lahr; O. D., George S. De Bray; O. G., W. B. Snyder.J. Simpson Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1883) · character 0 of the scanned text

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A quarter of a mile north of Orbisonia, East Broad Top locomotive No. 12 crosses a steel I-beam plate girder bridge after clearing the yard. The survey caption below is the record's own.

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Nobody 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 the geometry is persuasion.

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Looking 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 town.

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