Warriors Mark, situated in the township of Warriors Mark, Huntingdon County, received its name from certain strange marks that, according to early settlers, had been carved on the trees by Indians.
The old song, “The Blue Juniata,” has made the name of this river famous. Juniata is an Iroquois word, and there can be little doubt that it is a variant of the more common form, Oneida. In various documents written before 1765, the name Juniata was spelled in more than twenty different ways. One of these forms was Choniata. The initial guttural sound is the only thing that really differentiates this form from Oneida, when the latter is divided, as it should be, into four syllables. A. L. Guss declared that an educated Wyandot, who spoke a dialect of the Iroquois tongue, was very positive in his assertion that Juniata means “standing-stone people,” or “the people of the standing rock.” This is the usual explanation of the name of the Oneidas, who were in the habit of setting up in each of their villages a standing stone as a national or tribal emblem.
Birmingham, in Huntingdon County, was laid out in 1797 by John Cadwallader, who was ambitious to start a manufacturing town at the head of navigation on the Juniata River. The village owed its early growth to the iron industry, and its founder, hopeful that it would become a great industrial center, named it for the English city of Birmingham.
Bellwood, in Blair County, bears the name of a prominent family of pioneers named Bell. Until 1828, Edward Bell, who had settled in Antis Township in 1800 and had started a gristmill, a sawmill, and a store, was the only merchant in this region. The place was then called Bell’s Mills. The present town was laid out in 1877 by Dr. A. K. Bell, assignee of B. F. Bell. The name was later changed to Bellwood.
Julian, in Centre County, received its name from the old Julia Ann Furnace. Julia Ann was the wife of General James Irvin, one of the owners of the furnace.
Although Altoona, in Blair County, is popularly known as the “Mountain City,” its name has no direct or indirect etymological relation to the Latin adjective altus, signifying “elevated, lofty.” A popular explanation of the origin of the name derives the name of Altoona from Allatoona, said to be a Cherokee Indian name. In 1849, David Robinson sold his farm to Archibald Wright, of Philadelphia, who transferred the property to his son, John A. Wright, who then laid it out in building lots, became one of the founders of Altoona, and was responsible for the naming of the town. According to his own statement, he had spent considerable time in the Cherokee country of Georgia, where he had been especially attracted by the beautiful name of Allatoona, which he bestowed upon the new town in the belief that it was a Cherokee word meaning “the high lands of great worth.” In the Cherokee language there is a word, eladuni, which means “high lands,” or “where it is high;” but to a Cherokee, Allatoona and eladuni are so different that the former hardly could be derived from the latter.
The Bald Eagle Creek, the Bald Eagle Valley, the Bald Eagle range of mountains, Bald Eagle Township, and the village of Bald Eagle (Centre and Blair Counties) all take their name from the noteworthy Delaware Indian chieftain, Wapalanné, or “Bald Eagle.”
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