Mount Union borough

St. Patrick's Day Flood, 1936

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.

The St. Patrick's Day Flood, March 1936. It put Mount Union's low streets under water and it is the flood this county still measures other floods against.

But it was not the worst on record here, and we know that because the Geological Survey had gages running that week and published every reading. On Aughwick Creek at Orbisonia the 1936 crest was 16,400 second feet. A June 1889 flood on the same creek reached about 18,400. On Standing Stone Creek the highest stage in the whole record is not 1936 either; it is 9.38 feet on the first of June, 1889.

Two of our four gaged creeks had already seen worse, forty-seven years earlier, and nobody alive remembers being told that.

What 1936 did do was reach far enough to move Washington. That June Congress passed a $320,000,000 omnibus flood-control act, and Pennsylvania was named among the states whose emergency projects, in one congressman's words, could not wait until the following year.

Checked against the record. REFUTED, and refuted by this site's own sourced page before any outside source was opened. The original called 1936 "the most destructive flood ever recorded in the Juniata Valley." The page on the same flood at flood-of-36-devastated-hc already carried the Geological Survey's gage records and says the opposite: on two of the four Huntingdon County gages the June 1889 flood was HIGHER. Aughwick Creek at Orbisonia, 18,400 second feet in 1889 against 16,400 in 1936. Standing Stone Creek, maximum known stage 9.38 feet on 1 June 1889. Two pages on one site were making opposite claims about the same flood, and only one of them had a source. That is the cheapest fact check there is and it should have been run first. CAUSATION SOFTENED. The original said the flood "hit so hard, across so many towns, that Congress passed the Flood Control Act that same year." The Act is real and was signed on 22 June 1936. The Corps of Engineers' own published history of the law credits the floods of 1935 AND 1936 together rather than 1936 alone, but every route to that document returned HTTP 403 here, so it is not cited: a source that was not opened does not go under a sentence. What IS opened and cited is the contemporaneous report of the $320,000,000 omnibus bill naming Pennsylvania among the states with emergency projects that could not wait. So the page now says the flood reached far enough to move Washington, which the record supports, rather than that it single-handedly caused the Act, which was not shown. DATE. The flood keeps St. Patrick's Day in its name, and the naming is right, but readers should know the crest here came in the small hours of 18 March. The month is used rather than a bare 17 March so this page and the gage page cannot be read as contradicting one another.

Sources

Checked 2026-09-09 · Historic Mount Union collection

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