Huntingdon borough

The First Post Office, 1797

Did you know? The post office at Huntingdon was the first in the county, and John Cadwallader was its first postmaster.

The precise date it was established could not be found. When J. Hall Musser, Huntingdon's postmaster in 1876, contacted the Post Office Department, James H. Marr, the Acting First Assistant Postmaster General, replied that the department in Washington did not know the date, because a fire in December 1836 had consumed the post office building and burned some of its earliest record books. Africa's 1883 history calls it the general post-office building. A ledger book did show that the Huntingdon office began to render quarterly accounts on the first day of January 1798. Because the postmaster must have done some business before that date, the department believed the office was established in October or November of 1797. Lytle printed the reply in his 1876 county history.

Lytle also reprinted a reminiscence from the Huntingdon Gazette of February 11, 1829: "Thirty-two years ago, no mail, public or private, entered the confines of this county." A newspaper was started in Huntingdon about that time, the Gazette recalled, and its editor depended on a few hardy merchants who, after three months' preparation and making their wills, ventured to Philadelphia for goods and brought back as many city newspapers as kept him going until their next trip.

Checked and confirmed. CONFIRMED 2026-10-30 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.

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