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In all the prime of his strength and usefulness
The Citizens Union Bank of East Waterford, Pennsylvania, was a small-town bank organized in 1922. A few of my family members were among the leaders of the bank, which rolled along through the 1920s before failing during the Great Depression. Its assets were transferred to the Port Royal National Bank in 1931. In my collection is a bound minute book from the Citizens Union Bank, giving reports of all board meetings from the bank’s founding to its dissolution. On April 14, 1926, the board passed a resolution mourning the passing of Dr. R.M. Quiq, longtime doctor in East Waterford and bank director. At the time of his death, Dr. Quiq…
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Artifact: PRR freight bills
I have a thick ledgerbook from S.E. Pannebaker’s lumber mill in East Waterford, Pennsylvania. Stuffed into the pages of the book are all sorts of interesting papers, including these bills for shipping two carloads of lumber from East Waterford, through Juniata County on the narrow-gauge Tuscarora Valley Railroad to Port Royal, and then along the Pennsylvania Railroad to transfer to the Erie Railroad for final delivery to the Standard Hardwood Lumber Co. of Buffalo, New York. None of these companies exist today–not even Standard Hardwood, whose address now seems to be the trackside location of a Laub warehouse.
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Samuel Pannebaker’s car
Many of the papers in my grandfather’s collection came from John and Beulah Patterson, aunt and uncle to my great grandfather, both of whom died childless. Beginning in the early 1950s, my great grandparents lived in the same East Waterford house as the Pattersons, after moving from Harrisburg back to the old hometown. Following John’s and Beulah’s deaths, these papers, I surmise, stayed behind in the old home. When my great grandmother moved to spend the final decade of her life in the single-level house my grandfather built in Honey Grove for just that purpose, the papers moved with her. She died in 1994; my grandfather moved in for the final…
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A presidential tomb
The 29th president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, died on August 2, 1923, before completing his first term. He was beloved at the time of his death, since his official corruption and incompetence were not yet widely known . That knowledge would come later, cementing his legacy as among the worst presidents of all time. Following his untimely passing, a movement sprung up to construct a memorial to Harding in his hometown of Marion, Ohio, whose hometown newspaper he ran before embarking on a political career. Marion’s Harding Memorial, a ring of white marble columns encircling an open courtyard with the graves of Warren G. and his wife, Florence, was completed…
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School papers
The Juniata County countryside, like so many other rural places in the U.S., is dotted with pieces of education’s past. One-room school houses have been turned into homes or sit empty in the middle of farm fields; buildings once housing larger schools are now apartments; and, in the case of the Tuscarora Academy in Academia, the one remaining building of a nineteenth-century academy for boys houses a museum that’s occasionally open. My collection of papers includes some artifacts from this educational past. Here are three pieces: two souvenirs from the East Waterford Primary School, listing pupils from the 1896-1897 academic year, and an invitation to the commencement exercises of the…
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Retail artifacts
That my grandparents lived in a funeral home was a slightly odd but mostly accepted piece of childhood. That the house had also contained a store about a decade before I was born was a piece of childhood fascination. My mother talked of minding the shop and slicing meat for customers, and that old meat slicer stood along the wall in a room that held musty old toys that we grandkids played with when we visited. The idea that an insignificant rural crossroads like Honey Grove, Pennsylvania, could be home to a grocery store seemed impossibly quaint and old-fashioned to my young mind. And like so many other stories I heard…
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Continental traveler
A yellowed but intact envelope from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Highways was marked, in big, loopy, penciled writing, “Important Don’t Destroy.” Inside was a very important looking document indeed–a title for a 1922 Buick sedan, registered to John J. and Beulah Patterson of East Waterford, Pennsylvania. It’s dated 11-24-23. JJ Patterson was the brother of Grace Patterson Henry, my great great grandmother. JJ and his wife, Beulah Pannebaker Patterson, had no children and lived in a beautiful, rambling house in East Waterford that became the home of his nephew, my great grandfather John Patterson Henry, and wife Margaret Adam Henry, my great grandmother. The Pannebakers and the Pattersons were East Waterford business…