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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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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…