Flood Mark on the Planing Mill

Photograph not reproduced here. The image that goes with this story is held by huntingdoncountyhistory.com and its credit does not permit republication, so it is cited rather than copied. See the original.

Checked against the record. A CORRECTION THAT DID NOT PROPAGATE, which is worse than not making it. An earlier pass refuted the claim that the 1936 flood was the most destructive ever recorded in the Juniata Valley, using the Geological Survey's gage records: on Aughwick Creek at Orbisonia the June 1889 discharge was about 18,400 second feet against 16,400 in 1936, and on Standing Stone Creek the highest stage in the whole record is 9.38 feet on 1 June 1889. That correction was applied to one page. This page still said the Juniata “broke all records”, so the site was contradicting itself again, and this time the contradiction was introduced by fixing only half of it. All four flood pages on the site were checked together. Two state the 1889 finding correctly. One, the Corbin Bridge page, does it the right way and is left alone: it reports that a centennial souvenir book “called the flood of March 17, 1936, probably the most destructive the Juniata Valley had ever experienced” — attributed to the book, carrying the book's own “probably”. That is how a strong claim from a weak source should appear. SOURCED, the building itself: Welch records that Mount Union had two planing mills, one run by steam and the other owned and operated by A. S. Welch with electric power in connection with his lumber business. The page had never said which mill this was, and still does not — nothing opened here identifies it — but a reader now knows there were two and whose they were. ONE NAME HELD BACK, deliberately, for the owner of this site to decide. Welch names the proprietor of the steam-powered mill, and the surname is the one this site does not print anywhere. He is a genuine 1909 businessman and the mention would be historical, exactly like the three historical Patricks the site already carries. But putting that surname on a public page is a choice about the site, not a fact check, so the mill is described without him and the name is in the working notes.