Mount Union borough, Shirley township

John S. Morrison, the Name on the Scholarship

The John S. Morrison Scholarships were created by Oliver L. Etnier, and Mount Union Area High School's guide says he created them in honor of his uncle. That uncle was a Huntingdon County farm boy who became a Tyrone paper maker. He had been dead for 99 years when the Associated Press reported the plan for the scholarships in December 1989.

A biography printed in 1892 says Morrison was born in Huntingdon County on December 21, 1837, a son of John and Anna Shaver Morrison. His father, who the biography says sat in both houses of the state legislature and served a term as a judge, farmed near Aughwick Mills in Shirley Township. Morrison studied at the Cassville and Shade Gap academies and came home at 19, and his father gave him "complete control of all his interests."

On September 2, 1864, he enlisted in Company K of the 202nd Pennsylvania, a company recruited in Huntingdon County, and he was its first lieutenant. The biography says he helped organize it. The regiment guarded railroads in Virginia and was mustered out at Harrisburg on August 3, 1865.

Late in 1865 he went to Roaring Spring in Blair County and joined in organizing Eby, Morrison & Co. to make paper. The 1883 county history says the first mill started on April 1, 1866, burned that October and was running again in a new building by March 1867. By 1876 the firm was Morrison, Bare & Cass. In 1880 the partners built a second mill at the north end of Main Street in Tyrone, and Morrison moved there to run it. It went into operation on October 1, 1880, burned on June 18, 1882, and was rebuilt the same year. In 1886 D. M. Bare took the Roaring Spring mill, and Morrison and Joseph K. Cass kept Tyrone as Morrison & Cass.

The First National Bank of Tyrone was established in August 1890, with Morrison as its president. On October 9, 1890, a charter was issued to the Morrison & Cass Paper Company, and the Democratic Watchman listed John S. Morrison of Tyrone and Oliver L. Etnier of Pittsburg among its directors. Etnier was in his early twenties.

Morrison died at Tyrone in the middle of that month, after more than six months of liver disease, the biography says. The Watchman reported that he left $60,000 "for a public library and suitable building" in Tyrone and $5,000 to the Altoona Hospital. He was buried in Mount Union Cemetery.

His sister Jennie had married David Etnier, a Mount Union merchant and miller, and she died in 1878. Oliver L. Etnier was born in Mount Union in 1868; the sources we read do not settle who his parents were. The Associated Press said he worked at Morrison & Cass before moving to Wilmington, Delaware, where he became a paper distributor, and that he wrote the conditions for his trust in 1930. The trust's federal return for the year that ended April 30, 2025, still calls its application "The John S Morrison Scholarships Form."

Checked against the record. Much of what we know about Morrison's life comes from his sketch in the 1892 Biographical and Portrait Cyclopedia of Blair County, a book of warm local biographies, so we checked it wherever we could. The 1883 county history confirms the Tyrone and Roaring Spring firm, the Tyrone mill and its 1882 fire, and his first lieutenancy in Company K. The 1890 charter, bank and death notices come from the Democratic Watchman in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive. The scholarship's origins come from the Mount Union high school guide, the Associated Press story of December 1989, and the trust's federal return. The biography's dates need care. It prints his death as October 16, 1886 and dates the bank to 1885. The same book says elsewhere that the bank was organized in August 1890 and that he died three months later, and the October 1890 newspapers report his death that year, so we use 1890. Find a Grave gives October 17 and the biography October 16, so the story says only mid-October. An 1899 Watchman report of a Carnegie offer of money for a Tyrone library hints that the town had none then, but we have not confirmed it. Still open: his will, and whether the library he left money for was ever built. The high school guide calls Oliver Etnier Morrison's nephew, and the family records we read do not settle Etnier's parents, so the story does not name them. Etnier's 1868 birth comes from the guide and the Associated Press, not from a birth record.

Sources