Announcements

Klein and crist prize 2013–2014 winners

The Pennsylvania Historical Association awards the Philip S. Klein and the Robert Grant Crist Pennsylvania History prizes for excellence in research and writing appearing in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies. The awards were announced and presented at the PHA annual meeting banquet on October 9, 2015. More information about the awards can be found on the PHA website at www.pa-history.org.

The Philip S. Klein Pennsylvania History Prize is awarded in odd-numbered years for the best article. The 2013–2014 award was presented to Dr. Jim Higgins, a faculty member at the University of Houston at Victoria for: “B. Franklin Royer: A Half Century in Public Health,” in volume 81, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 169–206.

The Robert Grant Crist Pennsylvania History Prize is awarded in odd-numbered years for the best article by a graduate student. The 2013–2014 award was presented to Dr. Thomas Balcerski, now a faculty member at Eastern Connecticut State University for: “‘Under These Classic Shades Together’: Intimate Male Relationships at the Antebellum College of New Jersey,” in volume 80, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 169–203.

Centre county iron-making industrial archaeology report now available

A 2012 report by Gary Coppock on the excavations by Heberling Associates, Inc., at the Valentine Iron Ore Washing Plant is now available free as a downloadable pdf. Valentine and Thomas: Ironmasters of Central Pennsylvania. Phase III Archaeological Data Recovery Investigations, The Valentine Iron Ore Washing Plant (36Ce526) summarizes the iron industry within the Bald Eagle Creek Division of the Juniata Iron District from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries (with a focus on the various ironworks operated by the two families).

As part of the educational component of the archaeological investigations, the Centre County Historical Society (one of three consulting parties) funded the conversion of the report to pdf format, so that it would be publically accessible. The report (hard copy or pdf), is now available at CCHS, Centre County Library and Historical Museum in Bellefonte, at PSU’s Pattee/Paterno Library, and as a free download from the CCHS website (http://www.centrehistory.org/exhibits/building-on-the-past/ ) and from Gary’s LinkedIn page (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gfcoppock).

Several years ago, while employed by Heberling Associates, Gary supervised an archaeological project for the proposed Benner Commerce Industrial Park near State College, during which the buried remains of a nineteenth-century industrial complex, dubbed the Valentine Iron Ore Washing Plant, were unearthed. Subsequent research revealed the important role that members of the Valentine and Thomas families had on the iron industry at both the regional and national level.

In 1815 members of the Valentine and Thomas families moved from Chester to Centre County to lease an idle iron furnace and within several years were operating a half-dozen ironworks in the region. Among the accomplishments attributed to these ironmasters was Abraham S. Valentine’s invention of a machine called the log washer. By efficiently separating small fragments of limonite iron ore (wash ore) from the clayey soil matrix, the log washer revolutionized the process of ore mining and reinvigorated the entire iron industry. So successful was Abraham’s invention that a version of this machine, still called the log washer, remains in use today. Research also revealed that it was Abraham’s son, Henry Clay Valentine, who operated the Valentine ore-washing plant. After this facility closed around 1889, Henry went on to manage Bellefonte Iron Furnace’s extensive mines at Scotia in Centre County—mines that had previously fed Andrew Carnegie’s iron and steel works in Pittsburgh. Henry served as superintendent of the mines from 1902 until Bellefonte Iron Furnace went out of blast in 1911.

The report also presents a history of the log washer and its importance to the late nineteenth-century iron industry, describes the lives of the Valentine and Thomas families in Centre County, and presents genealogies/family trees that correct errors previously made by John Blair Linn and other historians. In addition to becoming prominent ironmasters, members of these two families were important figures in the history of...