Jack's Narrows, 1879

Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 2016, so there is no passage in them that bears on it. Rather than attach an unrelated page and let it look like corroboration, this story stands on the sources listed below.

Checked against the record. A FALSE CLAIM REMOVED. The original said this 1879 engraving showed the valley "before factories and railroads filled" it. By 1879 both railroads had long since arrived. Lytle's 1876 history records that the Pennsylvania Railroad was completed in 1850, twenty-nine years earlier, and that Mount Union was laid out that same year. Africa's 1883 history records the East Broad Top opened to Three Springs on 1 July 1874, five years earlier. The Pennsylvania main line runs through the Narrows itself, so an 1879 view of this gorge is a view of a railroad corridor, not of a valley before railroads. TOOLING SHORTHAND REMOVED from the published text. The lede ended with a build note naming an internal archive filename and a date, which was written for whoever was assembling the page and was never meant for a reader. Eleven other live pages carried the same line and are fixed in the same pass. Where the image comes from is now recorded in the source list instead, in plain words. ADDED, and it is the better story: the name. Africa's history reports the murder of the trader John Armstrong with James Smith and Woodworth Arnold at the Narrows about the middle of February 1744, and says that event named the gorge. Lytle gives a whole chapter to the competing Captain Jack legend and titles it "A popular error," which is the hedge carried through here rather than an assertion that the legend is simply false.