Mount Union borough, Mapleton borough

J. Richard Burkholder, Mount Union Music Teacher

J. Richard Burkholder taught music in Mount Union from 1934 until he retired in 1974. He was born on June 7, 1912, went to a one-room school, and graduated from Chambersburg High School in 1930. His obituary says he started out as a child playing trombone in the New Franklin Silver Cornet Band and went on to play in the Penn State Blue Band. The obituary says he took bachelor's and master's degrees in music at Penn State, graduated in 1934, and began teaching in Mount Union right away. A Penn State Collegian notice of October 7, 1932, names a John R. Burkholder, class of 1934, among the band's new trombones. The notice does not say whether he is the same man.

While he was teaching, the obituary says, he was responsible for the beginning of the annual Huntingdon County Band in 1938, the orchestra in 1939 and the chorus in 1940. It calls him a guest conductor and host for band festivals all over the state and for local bands, including the Mapleton and Mount Union community bands. It also says he organized and directed The Big Band Sound in 1972, a group that was still playing when the notice ran.

A 1966 centennial booklet from Mapleton says Ralph N. Corbin led the Mapleton Community Band for 28 years, starting in 1922. It lists J. Richard Burkholder among the band's directors "from 1950 through the present."

He was a choir director and orchestra conductor at St. Luke Lutheran Church in Mount Union for many years, and he owned and ran Burkholder Music Service, which provided instruments, repairs, music and lessons. In his free time he enjoyed piloting planes and building and flying remote control planes.

He died at his home in Mount Union on September 26, 2007, at the age of 95. The notice asked that memorial gifts go to causes including the Burkholder Scholarship Fund through the Mt. Union Area Alumni Association.

Checked against the record. His birth, schooling, teaching career, church work, music business and death come from his obituary in the Chambersburg Public Opinion of October 3, 2007, as reprinted on Find a Grave. We treat its dates as the obituary's claims, not as proven facts. It gives 1934 as the graduation year for both of his degrees, and we have not seen Penn State's records. The credit for starting the county band, orchestra and chorus rests on the obituary, since we found no newspaper report of those years. The 1932 Collegian notice calls him John R. Burkholder. Find a Grave gives his full name as John Richard Burkholder, and the Penn State class year and instrument match, but the notice does not show that he is the man who came to Mount Union. The Mapleton booklet says "from 1950 through the present" and gives no years for any one director, so we do not say when he started or stopped there. Still open: when he learned to fly and what the local papers of his years say. We have not read the Huntingdon Daily News, the Mount Union Times or the Altoona Mirror.

Sources

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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