Warriors Mark

Where the Little Juniata River passes Birmingham, a steel truss bridge carries a plank deck across from Warriors Mark Township in Huntingdon County to the Blair County side. The nomination places it just off Route 453, immediately north of the entrance to the town, and it belongs to two counties at once: it is Blair County Bridge number 48 and Huntingdon County Bridge number 15. Blair County does the maintenance and the two counties share the cost equally.

The Penn Bridge Company of Beaver Falls erected it in 1898 to replace a wooden bridge built in 1852. It is a single span Pratt through truss, 137 feet long and pin connected, with a deck 14.7 feet wide of three inch plank on steel stringers and beams, resting on cut stone abutments. At each end a metal crest tops the upper chord, cut with six quatrefoils. As built it carried a pedestrian sidewalk on the downstream side, later removed.

By the time the form was prepared in 1989 the bridge saw little traffic. The nomination calls it the only means of access to two dwellings on the Blair County side of the river, so its five ton weight limit was no hardship, and Nancy Shedd's 1991 inventory of the county's engineering sites for the Historic American Engineering Record adds that with so little demand it was unlikely to be replaced. It had been sandblasted and painted in 1978, and a 1987 inspection found it in good condition, recommending that the deck be renailed and more nailers added in time.

The nomination says it is one of fewer than ten pin connected Pratt through truss bridges of the late 1800s remaining in the county, and it was put forward for engineering under Criterion C at the local level. The nomination counts the loss of the sidewalk as the one exception to the bridge's integrity of material, design and setting. A color photograph of the bridge, taken in 1979, appears on page 109 of Second Century, the Huntingdon County Historical Society's 1987 bicentennial album.

The bridge was erected in 1898 by the Penn Bridge Corapany of Beaver Falls, Pa., to replace a wooden bridge constructed in 1852. As built, it included a pedestrian sidewalk on the downstream side, which was later removed.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Birmingham Bridge (reference 90000400), section 8, continuation page 2 (PDF page 5) · character 5,041 of the scanned text

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Did you know? Nobody is certain how Warriors Mark got its name, and the county history says so in plain words.

The 1883 county history opens the question with this: "The origin of the name of the township is not clearly settled." Then it gives two different accounts, neither of them firsthand.

Michael Maguire came to the county with his parents in 1773. In a statement he made in 1845, he said there were marks on trees near where Warrior's Mark Town now stands, made by Indian warriors.

The second account is stranger. Henry Krider, who owned and lived on the farm northwest of the village, walked the historian out into the woods south of the turnpike and showed him the remains of four forked oak trees standing at the corners of a square. In the fork of each one sat a stone, almost completely swallowed by layers of new wood grown over it. Krider called those the Warrior's Marks, and said he had heard a tradition that the spot was a favored camping place.

The township itself is on firmer ground. The court created it at the January 1798 term, after people in Franklin township petitioned that their township "in its present situation is burdensome and inconvenient by reason of its extent and number of inhabitants." The same court appointed John Addleman constable and Nicholas Hewitt overseer of the poor.

Four oak trees with stones grown into the forks.

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Did you know? A Huntingdon County town was once sold off by lottery, and the lottery is a big part of why it never became the city it was drawn up to be.

On December 13, 1797, John Cadwallader laid out Birmingham on the north bank of the Little Juniata, about three miles below where Tyrone sits now. The county history says it was laid out "for a manufacturing town, at the head of navigation." Three hundred acres. Streets from sixty six to two hundred feet wide. Two lots set aside for a school house and a library hall, and four lots promised to any established religious society that wanted to build a church and a burial ground.

Then came the part that sank it. The lots were sold by ticket. Ten dollars for a town lot, five dollars down. Which lot you actually got was drawn by ballot, overseen by five freeholders who had to swear or affirm to act impartially before they could start. People in eastern cities bought in without ever standing on the ground.

The history is blunt about what the plan hid. It was "made to look very attractive to a people who knew nothing of the steep hills and ravines included within the limits of the plat." When buyers came to see what they had drawn, a good many found their lot "perched upon a steep hillside or in the bottom of a deep hollow," and they walked away from money they had already paid.

The great city never came. The village is still there.

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Did you know? Warriors Mark had a schoolhouse as early as 1790, and an old settler said the stone one that replaced it cost a drink of whisky for every stone in it.

The first schoolhouse was built of logs. Later it was replaced by a stone building. James Thompson, an old settler, put the price this way: "That school house cost a drink of whisky for every stone in it."

When the township was organized in 1798 there were already more than one hundred land owners.

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The 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 the Harbison-Walker works appear elsewhere on this site.

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