Agnes And The Flat, 1972

In Mount Union, the low ground north of the railroad viaduct went by a plain name: the Flat. The town's National Register nomination explains it. The ground was farmland in the floodplain of the Juniata River until 1906, when the Pennsylvania Railroad completed its viaduct and the land was opened for development. The nomination notes that de facto racial and ethnic segregation existed in Mount Union, as in most of America. After 1906, it says, most of the town's African American workers and their families lived there.

In the early 1950s Harbison-Walker tore down its whole Ganister Hill neighborhood. Residents were allowed to buy the houses for salvage, and the federal survey of the town records that materials from many of them went into new houses, particularly in "the flats" along the Juniata.

Then came June 1972 and Hurricane Agnes. At the U.S. Geological Survey gauge at Mapleton Depot, near the State Highway 655 bridge, the Juniata peaked at 10 a.m. on June 23 at a gage height of 33.07 feet, carrying 125,000 cubic feet of water per second. Even that stayed below the 38.2 feet the same gauge records for March 18, 1936, taken from a floodmark.

It was high enough. The nomination says the Flat was badly flooded in 1936 and again in 1972, and that several industries and countless homes were ruined.

When the nomination was prepared in January 1994, most buildings in the Flat were less than 50 years old. The north end of the borough, between the river and the main line tracks, was left out of the Mount Union Historic District because the floods of 1936 and 1972 had damaged and removed many of its historic structures.

Checked 2026-10-31 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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