What the record holds about this county at war.

The frontier, 1777 and after

Before there were regiments there were militia. Col. John Piper, lieutenant of Bedford County, wrote to the Supreme Executive Council on 19 December 1777 commending Mr. Holliday of Frankstown for assembling the people of his vicinity and procuring provisions for the militia who went to their assistance, and reported on 20 January 1778 that the situation of the frontiers was such that the settlements were close to being abandoned altogether. This county was the frontier, and its first military history is the history of people deciding whether to stay.

The Civil War

Africa's 1883 county history gives the war eleven chapters, which is more space than it gives any other subject. It follows, regiment by regiment, the units Huntingdon and Blair men filled: the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-eighth, the Forty-ninth and Fifty-third, the Sixty-second, the Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh, the Eighty-fourth, the Ninety-second, the One Hundred and Tenth, the Twelfth Cavalry, the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth, the One Hundred and Forty-seventh and Forty-ninth, the Nineteenth and Twentieth Cavalry, the One Hundred and Ninety-second, and the Two Hundred and Second, Fifth and Eighth, before a final chapter on Huntingdon and Blair men who served in other regiments altogether.

The county's stories below carry the parts of that record we have checked.

After the war: the Grand Army of the Republic

The G.A.R. was the union veterans' organisation, and a post was how a small town's survivors kept hold of one another. Two were recorded in this county by 1883: Harry Corbin Post, No. 200 at Mapleton, organised in December 1880 with twenty-one members and grown to forty-seven three years later, and Col. Isaac Rogers Post, No. 252, chartered at Orbisonia on 30 May 1882. Both have their first officers named in the record.

Where this record stops, and why

This page thins out after 1900, and that is a fact about the sources rather than about the county. The public-domain books this site can quote were printed in 1847, 1876, 1883, 1897, 1909 and 1913. Across all of them there are three references to the Spanish-American War and the First World War together, and none at all to the Second World War or anything after it, because most of them were printed before those wars happened. Huntingdon County men and women served in every one of them. We have not found a source we can publish that records it, so rather than write something that reads well and rests on nothing, this section says so and stops. If you hold a unit history, a discharge, a roll or a memorial listing, that is exactly the gap it would fill.

What we have checked so far