This website is being updated. Please check back regularly as we continue to enhance our online experience.
News, exhibits, research notes, and events.
October 15, 2020
The last of the 1895 Tyrone Daily Herald clippings collected by Scott Troutman — Penn State students with a cannon shooting Daniel Shivery's house, a deafness-cure swindle worked with two watches having different ticks, and a definitive pneumonia recommendation: a fresh cat skin to the breast, always using your neighbor's cat.
Read moreOctober 15, 2020
Gary Long's Bald Eagle Avenue memoir — the 1940s neighborhood at 1352 (the German-immigrant blacksmith Michael Long's house, where the author was born in February 1940), Mrs. Antokol's raisin pastries, Mr. Antokol's pine-tar maple-tree surgery, Mr. Havens the air-raid warden, Mrs. Chaney's cinnamon toast, and the morning train in 1958 that took five young men away for good.
Read moreJuly 15, 2020
Cary Simpson's 1992 dispatch on Tyrone's most beloved monument — the pedestrian underpass at 11th Street and Washington Avenue, formally known as Railroad Street — and the day two children from Huntingdon told their parents they wanted to go to Tyrone for one specific reason: "to go through the Pig Hole."
Read moreJuly 15, 2020
1895 Tyrone Daily Herald — eight gallons of water removed from a dropsy patient, an old man's hiccoughs cured when his mother-in-law fired a gun under the bed and burned his toes, a fatal envelope-licking, and farmer George W. Snyder of north-of-town producing four hundred bushels of potatoes from a few gallons of seed.
Read moreJuly 15, 2020
Reverend H. W. Wilson's 1897 view of the iron industry that built Tyrone — John Gloninger and Company, the colossal pre-syndicate firm whose Tyrone Forge of 1809 and Upper Forge of 1815 evolved into the modern town. Two men working seven tons in a week for seven dollars a ton; headless nails at twelve cents a pound; and a 140-employee rolling mill rolling 12,000 tons of boiler-tube skelp a year.
Read moreApril 15, 2020
More 1895 Tyrone Daily Herald snippets — a one-dollar mail-order scam offering to keep the smell of boiling sauerkraut out of the house (answer: eat the cabbage raw), Walter Main's circus returning to a packed tent in Tyrone two years after the wreck, and Richard Kennedy walking from St. Louis to New York on a $1,000 wager finding Tyrone "too lively" to stop the night.
Read moreApril 15, 2020
John Burket of Warriors Mark — the last surviving Civil War soldier in his community — speaks at the Burket Cemetery on Memorial Day 1938, age 89, recalling enlisting at 15 by lying to the doctors at Hollidaysburg, sharing a hello with a Confederate across a ravine, watching Lincoln weep over the dead, voting for Lincoln from the field, and marching into Washington with a candle burning in his musket muzzle.
Read moreOctober 15, 2019
The "Rich Land" at Pennsylvania Avenue and 10th Street — bought for $450 in 1850, built on by John D. Stewart and Jacob Burley in 1851 as the L-shaped City Hotel, twice survived (the 1854 fire and the 1911 saloon-license loss that converted it into a business block), and now City Hotel Park.
Read moreOctober 15, 2019
How Tyrone became a Pennsylvania Railroad town: first passenger train September 1850, the 1853 wooden depot lost to fire in 1879, the elegant brick replacement of 1881 (lost in 1968), the 1903 West Tyrone Yard, and the great wrecks — the Walter L. Main Circus Train of 1893, the 192-injured station collision of 1913.
Read moreOctober 15, 2019
More 1889 Tyrone Daily Herald snippets — a Centre County man with "telescope eyes" who tells time off a clock two miles away, a thirty-foot black snake spotted near the church at Scalp Level, and a Westmoreland County cat fully wrapped in flypaper that died of fright in a brush heap.
Read more