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Will McDowell, RIP
Juniata County’s one and only museum is the Tuscarora Academy, the lone surviving building of a boarding school in the tiny village of Academia. Nearby the Tuscarora Academy was the Tuscarora Female Seminary, a boarding school for girls owned by my four-greats grandfather, Alexander Patterson. In an envelope addressed to G.P. Henry (Grace Patterson, my great great grandmother) were, as the label read, “old papers”– the will of Margaret Sigler, Ellie Stoneroad’s mother and Grace’s grandmother, and this handwritten tribute to William McDowell, a Tuscarora Academy student who died on September 20, 1845. The poem was written by Henry Wolf, “for the use of John Patterson.” There were plenty of John…
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James Sterret on abolition and the election of 1856
One of the most fragile and tattered letters in this collection is one from James Sterret to his brothers, Robert and William, on September 24, 1856. (Note: In this letter, he spells his last name as “Sterret,” while other sources say “Sterrett,” so I will use his spelling in this post.) James was brother to Mary Sterret, who married Alexander Patterson, my five-greats grandfather whose past is well documented in this collection. James lived in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and was writing to his brothers and his friends back in Mifflintown, Pennsylvania, in the final year of his life. In his letter, James was looking forward to the election of 1856, which was…
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Letters from 1827
I opened a yellowed folder, filled with equally yellowed, folded scraps of brittle paper. Inside were five letters–single sheets, folded numerous times, and addressed and mailed. No envelopes, no staples, no tape. Just folded correspondence. It was a series of four letters from 1827 and one from 1828, written by my five-greats grandfather, John Patterson, to his son, Alexander, my four-greats grandfather. John was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for three terms, representing Mifflin County and living in Tuscarora Township in what was to become, in a few short years, Juniata County. The father-to-son correspondence was unfailingly businesslike, discussing such things as crop prices and the business before…