A Brief Call to a Greater History

Much of Pennsylvania is, from a historian’s point of view, invisible. Once past the Pittsburgh area and its hinterlands, the Philadelphia area and its hinterlands, and the coal regions, only an occasional article has appeared on what processes, what events, defined the lives of those who occupied the great majority of the area we call Pennsylvania. We have only a few professional articles on the West Branch of the Susquehanna and very few on the upper regions of that valley. The Allegheny River Valley only becomes visible as the Allegheny River approaches Pittsburgh. The “northern tier” counties are rarely written about. Appalachian counties such as Fulton and Sullivan have almost no presence in any professional narrative. The region along the upper Delaware River has been rarely touched upon. How many who are reading this have ever read an article that focused on Jefferson County, that touched upon why Elk County has such a large Catholic population in the midst of an overwhelmingly Protestant region, which asked why Huntingdon County’s African American population, as percentage of overall population, is much larger than any of its adjacent counties? There is, in short, a scarcity of scholarly articles and books, and at times a complete lack of such articles and books, for far too much of Pennsylvania.

The paucity of scholarly works about the Juniata Valley has been among the more puzzling aspects of the way in which Pennsylvania history has been traditionally written. The main section of the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal ran the length of the valley. The main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad ran the length of the valley. The main shops for the Pennsylvania Railroad were in Altoona, railroad shops that, by the mid-twentieth century, were one of largest such complexes in the world. The region is filled with a plethora of religious groups, many of them existing in regions that also contain large mainstream Protestant populations. Different large industries lined the banks of the Juniata River for many decades through the nineteenth century. Although it is clear that a significant number of different ethnic groups settled in the Juniata Valley, there is only limited information concerning them and no comprehensive study regarding the region’s ethnic diversity.

I wrote in 1998 that historians know less about the history of the Juniata Valley than we do about the early Middle Ages. This volume of Pennsylvania History starts to redress this situation and for that we should be grateful. Paul Fagley addresses an item much in need of being addressed: the nascent iron industry that flourished across the region during from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s. A glance at the list of furnaces and forges cited in Fagley’s article demonstrates the volume of activity in iron smelting that ranged across the Juniata region during the period of “Juniata Iron.” Fagley quite properly follows the iron production in the Juniata Valley past its peak and into the twentieth century, demonstrating the vitality of the industry in the region and the way in which it shaped the culture of the Juniata Valley. Jason Wilson and Victor Hart’s work on “Clark’s Ferry and Tavern” demonstrates not only the social and cultural aspects of entrepreneurship in the near frontier, but also, as the narrative progresses, the many strands of economic endeavor that flourished as the national economy expanded into the valleys and plains away from the seaboard. This last point needs to be emphasized. While the Juniata Valley is today one of many “Appalachian” valleys that have become backwaters as modern engineering, modern transportation, intense urbanization, and the increasing rural-urban divisions have encouraged the mainstreams of commerce and consumption to bypass the Juniata Valley, it was not always thus. Regions such as the Juniata area shared reciprocal commerce, consumption, travel, and cultural ties with the seaboard regions of the country.

The historical integration of what is now (2016) considered “rural” and, in some ways, “separate” into the broader national culture of the nineteenth century is emphasized in Audrey Sizelove’s “The History of the Tuscarora Female Seminary.” Sizelove points out that “by...