Shirley

Where the East Broad Top Railroad crosses Aughwick Creek at Aughwick Mills, a concrete bridge carried the narrow gauge track. The Historic American Engineering Record photographed it in 1986 as HAER PA-403; Jack Boucher made seven black and white views and one color transparency, including two details of the first water pier from the north. The record holds no written history, only a cover sheet and the photograph index.

A 1991 inventory of the county's historic engineering and industrial sites, written by Nancy S. Shedd and published by the National Park Service, fills the gap. It records the bridge as a four span concrete structure 203 feet long, each span about 50 feet, completed in 1917, and says the concrete was reinforced with 40 pound railroad rail. According to the inventory it replaced an iron truss bridge built in 1914.

The line itself is older. The National Register nomination for the East Broad Top says the railroad ran between Robertsdale and Mount Union by 1874, and the Historic American Buildings Survey record for the Walker Farmstead near Shirleysburg says the EBT was carrying more than 143,000 tons of coal north to Mount Union by 1881, where the freight was transferred to the Pennsylvania Railroad. The nomination says that after the Second World War other fuels began to supplant coal and the line's business suffered; passenger service ended in 1953 and the company ran its last train on April 16, 1956. The 1991 inventory counted the long bridges at Aughwick Mills and Pogue among the structures still standing along the unused right of way, with much of the track still in place.

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Three tenths of a mile south of the Shirleysburg borough line, on the west side of U.S. Route 522, the Historic American Buildings Survey recorded a white frame farmhouse in April 1996 as HABS PA-6086-A. Historian Scott D. Heberling of Heberling Associates wrote it up because the Federal Highway Administration and PennDOT proposed to widen Route 522 between Shirleysburg and Orbisonia, and the survey says the right of way would require demolishing the house and barns. The documentation was the agreed mitigation for that loss.

The survey dates the house to about 1883. On March 26, 1883, the heirs of William A. Fraker, a Shirleysburg merchant, conveyed Winfield A. Walker a twenty acre parcel that the survey says then held only an orchard, sold by the guardian of Fraker's children, and the style of the house suggests it went up soon after. Africa's 1883 county history lists William A. Fraker on the Shirleysburg town council in 1858 and 1872 and as a school director in 1873, and Welch's 1909 history of Shirley Township notes that W. A. Fraker's fruit orchard had become the site of W. A. Walker's residence and more extensive fruit growing.

The house is a frame I-house with a rear ell, two and a half stories, three bays wide and one room deep, built with balloon framing and cut nails; the main block measures 30 feet 6 inches by 20 feet 5 inches. The survey says the porches are its only formal detailing, and the showpiece is a full width Italianate front porch with boxed posts, curved corner brackets and a paneled frieze. There are no fireplaces. Stove pipe holes in the flues on both floors point to a stove in each room.

The 1900 census found Winfield, 49, his wife Margaret, 50, three of their children and a boarder, Newton McGill, a 24 year old Black man who may have been a farmhand. The 1910 census recorded that the Walkers had had ten children, four of them living. Winfield died in 1919 and Margaret in 1923; the homestead passed to their son Hayes in 1927. Hayes and his wife Mabel deeded it to Mabel alone in 1953, Hayes died in 1956, and Mabel, who later married Wiley C. Dobbins, lived there until 1991, when she sold to Dean E. Varner.

The survey reports an early photograph in Dean Varner's possession, taken between about 1900 and 1925, that shows the house already painted white, and reads it as showing shutters at every window. When Heberling walked the house in 1996, the only shutters left were the louvered ones under the front porch.

The property is known to have contained only an orchard when it was acquired by Winfield A. Walker in 1883, and the style of the house suggests that it probably was built soon afterward.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, Walker Farmstead, written data pages, HABS PA-6086-A data pages, page 2 · character 2,262 of the scanned text

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The Pennsylvania Lions Beacon Lodge Camp posts its letters to Mount Union, and nearly everyone here would tell you it is ours. It is not, quite. The camp describes itself as “a beautiful five hundred and eighty-three acre summer camp for children and adults with special needs including blindness, deafness, and many other physical and mental challenges,” set “along the Juniata River of Central Pennsylvania just two miles west of Newton Hamilton, near Mount Union.” It was established in 1948 as a summer camp for blind residents of Pennsylvania.

Its buildings stand in Wayne township, Mifflin County. What does run into this county is the road named after it: Beacon Lodge Road crosses the line and carries on west through Shirley township for most of its length. A postal address is not a county boundary, which is worth remembering every time one of these is filed.

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Jack's Narrows in the 1940s, the same rocks, the same river, the same dramatic landscape that drew people to the valley in the first place. While the brick industry rose and fell, the Narrows stayed steady.

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Jack's Narrows in 1879, in an engraving of the gorge where the Juniata breaks through Jacks Mountain.

The rocks are the reason there is a town here at all. They are also, later, the reason there were brickworks: the ganister that drew the refractory companies came off these ridges.

The name is older than any of it, and it is not Captain Jack's. In about the middle of February 1744 an Indian trader called John Armstrong was murdered at the Narrows above Mount Union, along with his two companions James Smith and Woodworth Arnold. It was that killing, Africa's county history says, that "gave name to the narrow gorge through which the Juniata breaks its winding course." Lytle devoted a chapter of his 1876 history to the rival Captain Jack story and headed it "A popular error."

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On Route 103, two miles east of US 522 where Aughwick Creek meets the Juniata River, stands a two and a half story house of native stone that the nomination calls one of the oldest in Huntingdon County. It measures thirty feet by twenty five, three bays wide, with a tin gable roof and a brick chimney inside the north gable end. There are four rooms, two up and two down, and a wide hallway at the south end. The feature the form singles out is the corner fireplaces, stone arched and still working. The interior walls are wood lath with hair mortar, the floors unfinished hemlock, the cellar and attic beams hand hewn, and the exterior doors solid plank with their original hardware.

The ground was part of a 150 acre tract deeded to Charles Boyle at the junction of the creek and the river; the 1768 tax records show him with 150 acres, 15 of them cleared. Lewis Smalley enlisted on January 20, 1778 as a private under Captain John Hamilton and served under several captains in the 7th Battalion of the Cumberland militia until May 1781. He bought the Boyle property in 1797 and built his home. Africa's 1883 county history lists him as constable of Shirley Township in 1808 and places the Lewis Smalley tracts in the Aughwick Valley, down around what is now Aughwick Mills.

The stone bank barn measures forty five by ninety feet. Its ground level stables can hold fifty head, a granary sits on the threshing floor level, the windows are louvered with limestone slab sills, and the beams, joists and double notched rafters are hand hewn, mortised and pegged. During the Civil War, the nomination says, Union cavalry was quartered here, and the soldiers carved their names into the barn alongside those of earlier owners. One inscription reads George W. Briggs, Capt. 7th Infantry Militia.

Also on the property are a wooden henhouse, a hogpen, a corncrib and a springhouse. The house has gained a full length hipped roof porch on the front and lost one gable end doorway, sealed over; plumbing, electricity and an oil fired furnace are the only interior changes. The homestead was entered in the National Register on November 14, 1978 for architecture and for exploration and settlement, on 30.08 acres whose boundary runs along the river bank for 875 feet back to its starting point.

Because of its location, it was thought to be of vast importance in the protection of the Pennsylvania Railroad which was feared to be vulnerable to attack by raiding Confederate troops who had penetrated as far north as McConnellsburg. Therefore, Union Cavalry was stationed and quartered on this site and many inscriptions of the soldiers resident here are to found on the barn.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Lewis Smalley Homestead (reference 78003088), 78003088, section 8, p3 · character 5,804 of the scanned text

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Runk Bridge carries Township Road 373 over Aughwick Creek south of Shirleysburg, in Shirley Township, a quarter mile west of U.S. Route 522. It is Huntingdon County Bridge No. 9, and the nomination says county bridge records show it was built in 1889 by the Pittsburgh Bridge Company.

It is a steel Pratt through truss in two spans, pin connected, with wooden stringers under a 13-foot-wide deck of yellow pine. It has one concrete pier, and the high concrete abutments are covered with lime and cement plaster. The nomination places the bridge in a very rural part of the county, where Township Road 373 meets Township Road 380, and calls it a highly visible landmark west of Route 522 and of the active tourist section of the East Broad Top Railroad, itself a National Historic Landmark.

The bridge was listed under Criterion C, for engineering, at the local level. The nomination calls it a fine example of one of the county's fewer than ten remaining pin-connected Pratt through trusses built in the late 1800s, and says it has been well maintained and keeps its integrity of material, design and setting. The Historic American Engineering Record recorded it as PA 061.040.

Deborah L. Suciu of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission prepared the form in August 1989 as part of a multiple property listing, the Industrial Resources of Huntingdon County, 1780 to 1939. The form says plainly that it contains material taken directly from an unpublished 1988 report for the Historic American Engineering Record by Nancy S. Shedd, then president of the Huntingdon County Historical Society, whom it names as a major contributor although not the preparer. Shedd's county inventory of historic engineering and industrial sites, published by the National Park Service in 1991, carries the same entry: Bridge No. 9, built in 1889 by the Pittsburgh Bridge Company, one of the county's few remaining pin-connected Pratt through trusses. The photograph of the bridge in that inventory is by Jet Lowe.

County bridge records indicate that Bridge No. 9, or Runk Bridge, was constructed in 1889 by the Pittsburgh Bridge Company. This is a fine example of one of the county's less than ten remaining pin-connected Pratt through truss bridges built in the late 1800's.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Runk Bridge (reference 90000408), section 8 continuation sheet (PDF page 5) · character 4,513 of the scanned text

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February 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, celebrated for its cool silvery water, carries the name forward. Every time you drive through the gap that shaped this town's story, you pass the place that remembers a violent frontier day in 1744.

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W. 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 the Muse. He was called the poet of the Juniata Valley and wrote verses including The Eighth Wonder of the World, The Horseshoe Bend, Jack's Narrows, The Youths of Fair Saville, and The Vale of the Juniata. He found much pleasure in singing of the natural phenomena and splendors of the Juniata Valley.

He was a member of the Presbyterian church and a teacher in the Sunday School. He aimed to be an upright citizen in the community.

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On the west side of U.S. Route 522, three tenths of a mile south of the Shirleysburg borough line, which puts it in Shirley township rather than the borough. The Historic American Buildings Survey recorded the farmstead in nine photographs and eighteen pages of documentation.

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