Hopewell township

He Found Gold, Then Ran The County

Did you know? A Hopewell Township man whose father farmed at Weaver's Bridge was one of the three men who first found gold in paying quantities in the Yellowstone Valley, on August 30, 1864.

David B. Weaver was born in Hopewell Township in 1840 and brought up as a farmer. In 1863 he went to the Broad Top coal mines as weighmaster at the Crawford Colliery. In the spring of 1864 he went to Iowa, got an outfit, and crossed the plains to the gold fields of Montana, reaching Emigrant Gulch late that August.

The next summer he raised the first potatoes grown in the upper Yellowstone Valley. He mined gold for three seasons, worked as a pumping engineer at the Mount Diablo coal mines in California, and then returned to Pennsylvania.

In 1875 he was elected a Huntingdon County commissioner, on what the county history calls the first full board under the present constitution of Pennsylvania.

Checked and confirmed. CONFIRMED 2026-10-03 against the sources listed: every factual sentence was tied to a verbatim passage and a script confirmed each passage is in its source. Where sources disagreed on a number, the number was left out. Information shared with us by readers is given as theirs, not as fact: George H. Buseck.

Sources

J. Simpson Africa, History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania (1883)

Checked 2026-10-03 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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Photographs from Hopewell township

Terrace Mountain near Huntingdon, PaLibrary of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. No known restrictions on publication · 2017660277

Raystown lake Region late FallPhotograph by Ron Shawley, 8 November 2014. Licensed CC BY 3.0; reused with credit · Raystown lake Region late Fall - panoramio (64).jpg

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