Union township, Mapleton borough

Three Crosses Above Mapleton

High above Mapleton, on the bare rocks at the top of Jacks Mountain, crosses stand in view all year round. The Daily News wrote in 2017 that the three of them had been a much loved local landmark since 1983.

That was the year Jack Wise went up the mountain to put up the first one. The paper said in 2022 that he hoisted the original crosses up the mountain one by one, on consecutive Easter eves, beginning in 1983. It called them a labor of love, and its 2017 article was headlined "Renewing a legacy of faith."

Find a Grave's memorial for Jack Leroy Wise says he was born in Mapleton on October 4, 1932, and died on June 6, 2004. It places his burial in the Mapleton IOOF Cemetery and gives his inscription as SGT US ARMY KOREA.

His family has since done repair work on the crosses. On a Saturday morning in March 2017, family members were on the mountain replacing two of them, and the paper reported that the three crosses were repaired and set back in place. In 2022 it said the originals had been refurbished by his family.

The mountaintop is private property. When The Daily News went up for its 2022 photograph, it went with help from the Mapleton Fire Department and with the permission of the property owner.

Checked against the record. We read The Daily News photo caption of April 15, 2022, the open part of its article of March 13, 2017, one photo caption from that article, and the Find a Grave memorial. The rest of the 2017 article is for subscribers and we did not read it, so this story stops at what the open parts and captions say. The birth date and inscription rest on the memorial alone, which is a contributor's entry and not a public record. We matched it to him by name, town and year of death. We also read a clipping of a longer Daily News article from April 3, 2010, which agrees on the 1983 start and the date of death. We could not find a public copy to link, so nothing above is cited to it. We do not name the landowner. We could not confirm any repair after 2017.

Sources

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

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Photographs from Union township