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George Kipple, adventurer
Among the Patterson papers is a letter dated August 27, 1880, six days shy of one century before my birth. It’s addressed to J. Patterson, and here’s where I get a bit confused. My family, as I’ve noted, has many people named John Patterson–direct ancestors as well as varying degrees of cousins. I know that some of these Pattersons were involved in the Tuscarora Academy and Tuscarora Female Seminary, two schools in Academia, Juniata County. This letter, from George Kipple in Willow Creek, Nevada, is sent to a J. Patterson who had been, it seems, Mr. Kipple’s former teacher. I’m guessing this was at the Tuscarora Academy, sometime in the…
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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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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…