resort; here is Mount Aloysius Academy and the State Tuberculosis Sanatorium No. 2. Ebensburg, county seat, laid out in 1805; population 2179, is also a summer resort; through the woods and around the lakes of this region the rhododendrons grow as tall as trees and are gorgeous in their bloom. Descending along the upper waters of the Conemaugh, numerous vestiges are seen of the old Portage Railroad, a series of inclined planes, connecting the State Canal at Hollidaysburg east and Johnstown on the west. Dickens wrote of the scenery along the canal, “Sometimes the way wound through some lonely gorge like a mountain pass in Scotland.” Many dams, which are really lakes, have been built by manufacturers, the largest is three and one-half miles long, surrounded by wooded hills with here and there a waterfall.
Johnstown, population 67,327, at confluence of the Conemaugh River and Stony Creek, was founded in 1800 by a Swiss Mennonite, Joseph Schantz (Johns). A glance at the deep, narrow valleys, with their high inclosing walls, goes far to explain the possibility of so tremendous a catastrophe as that which overwhelmed Johnstown on May 31, 1889. Conemaugh Lake, two and one-half miles long, one and one-half miles wide, was reserved as a fishing ground by a club of Pittsburgh engineers, its waters were restrained by a dam 1000 feet long, built by the state as a reservoir to store water for the state canal during the dry seasons; a continuance of violent rains filled the lake to overflowing; the break occurred at three o’clock in the afternoon, a gap of 300 feet being formed at once. The water that burst through swept down the valley in a mass one-half mile wide, forty feet high, carrying everything in its way, completely destroying Johnstown and other towns and villages in its track, going 18 miles in seven minutes, the distance between Johnstown and the lake. The mass of houses, trees, machinery, railway iron and human bodies was checked by the railway bridge below Johnstown, which soon caught fire, probably burning to death hundreds of persons imprisoned in the wreckage. About 2205 lives were lost; in the Grandview Cemetery a large space is dedicated to the “Unidentified Dead,” with a Westerly granite monument, having heroic size statues of Faith, Hope, and Charity; sculptor, F. Barnicoat, Quincy, Massachusetts; there are 778 individual markers for the bodies, largely unidentified, laid out geometrically, so that from whatever angle the plot is seen, they are in curved rows.
Johnstown was an important shipping station on the canal connecting Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. An interesting feature now remaining is the canal tunnel at bend of the Conemaugh, four miles east of Johnstown; second such tunnel built in America; constructed by the state about 1828 or 1830; the first is in Lebanon County, made in 1827. The Carnegie Library received by bequest from James M. Swank, historian and iron and steel statistician, his books and historical relics. Franklin Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Gothic, gray sandstone; the sills under the windows of the auditorium are dressed stones from the abandoned Pennsylvania Canal Locks, near site of the present Pennsylvania Railroad station; architect, George Fritz. First Presbyterian Church, at the corner of Walnut and Lincoln Streets, dedicated, 1913; modified English
THE GAP BELOW JOHNSTOWN
Gothic, Cleveland gray sandstone and green tile, architects, Badgley & Nicholas, Cleveland.
The Cambria Steel Company began in 1840, when George S. King and David Stewart discovered a vein of iron ore about fifteen inches thick, on the Laurel Run, west of Johnstown; they built the first blast furnace in Cambria County in 1842, calling it the Cambria Furnace; in 1843 Dr. Peter Shoenberger bought out David Stewart’s interest; he was the great ironmaster of his time, conducting a chain of furnaces, forges and rolling mills, stretching almost 500 miles, from the old Marietta furnace in Lancaster to the Wheeling, West Virginia, iron works. The Cambria Iron Works were completed in 1853, and sold to a syndicate of Philadelphians who selected Matthew Newkirk as president; in 1854 they rolled the first iron rails; the first steel rails in America were rolled here in 1867 from blooms imported from England. Iron is the county’s chief industry.
Clearfield County