| Year |
Event |
| 1888 |
The oil boom was still at its
height in Clarion County. |
|
| 1889 |
For the first time, the clock
faces on the Courthouse tower were illuminated at night. |
|
| 1890 |
The oil boom slackened, but lumbering
and clay-mining increased. |
| The Clarion
River (Turnpike) Bridge was bought by the county, and toll collections
upon it ceased. There was strong agitation for elimination
of tollgates on the Turnpike. |
| Clarion
Borough had jumped from 1,169 to 1,958 residents in a decade. |
|
| 1891 |
February brought
heavy floods on the Clarion and Allegheny
Rivers. |
| In May, forest fires ravaged the
region, destroying timber tracts, sawmills, houses, and barns. |
|
| 1892 |
In
a unique Grand Jury action, Joseph Kelly, Postmaster
at Lickingville, was indicted under an ancient
law prohibiting dueling. He was later found "not guilty" because
his adversary refused to fight "with guns, clubs, or swords," as
challenged. |
|
| 1893 |
Lee N. Young,
Clarion's Chinese laundryman, faced deportation
under the Chinese Exclusion Act. Local attorneys won him the
right to stay. |
| Jared
Cook, notorious Licking Twp. horsethief,
was jailed in Clarion for the seventh time. He
receved a 5-year penitentiary sentence. |
| Redbank
Township was split into East and West precincts by court
order. |
| The oil summary showed Clarion
field production down from 12,000 barrels daily in 1889 to 90 barrels
in June, 1893. |
| Judge Clark
ordered the Commissioners to rebuild the storm-razed Toby Bridge
after citizens sued. |
| There
was agitation for a county hospital. "Agreed, and it shall
be in Clarion," said a local newspaper. |
|
| 1894 |
Col. W.
T. Alexander published the county's first newspaper. |
| Clarion County
was one of 17 in the state that were debt-free. |
|
| 1895 |
The notorious Charley
Gordon, wanted in Clarion and Jefferson
Counties for many robberies, was caught in Jefferson County.
It was said that conviction on all charges against him would
mean jail terms of about 179 years. |
| Clarion's new
electric light system for homes, stores, and offices was turned
on July 4 and "worked like a charm." |
| The new Clarion-Armstrong County
bridge across Redbank Township opened. It
was 223 feet long and cost $4,000. |
| The General Assembly approved
an act, making it illegal for any person, except a close, blood
relative, to attend the funeral of any person who had died of cholera,
smallpox, yellow fever, diphtheria, or leprosy. |
|
| 1896 |
Lena Sherman,
age 35, went to Western Pennsylvania Penitentiary for two and one-half
years for bigamy. She had had seven husbands and was about
to marry the eighth. |
|
| 1897 |
Amidst loud objections from some
county taxpayers, the Civil War Soldiers' Monument was placed in
the park opposite the Courthouse. It was the first such memorial
to be erected in Pennsylvania under a new law permitting use of
county funds for this purpose. |
Reputedly
the oldest living person in western Pennsylvania was "Mother" Nancy
McCloskey, of Crown, in Farmington
Township. She was 107-years-old. Mrs. McCloskey
died on March 5. |
| An active
unit of the Anti-Saloon League was formally instituted. |
| There were 74 post offices in
Clarion County. |
|
Five large coal mines operating in the Rimersburg
area employed about 500 men. The mines were Cherry Run, Briar
Ridge, Acme, Diamond, and Keystone. |
|
| 1898 |
J.
Elder, from Foxburg, reported finding
gold ore, testing $60 to $200 a ton, in the mouth of the Clarion
River. Hopeful gold-seekers rushed to the Klondike
(West Clarion) field, despite reports that all claims within fifty
miles of Dawson City were assigned. |
| A
Rimersburg ordinance set fines of $1 for letting
pigs run at large, $5 for hitching a horse or mule to a shade tree,
and $10 for burying a dead human within the borough limits. |
| On
August 22, most Clarion residents turned out to
see the new electric street lights switched on for the first time. |
| Voters
approved a proposal to build a county poorhouse. |
|
| 1899 |
Barn burnings became epidemic
in the southern part of the county. |
| Steel
tycoon Andrew Carnegie offered to give Clarion
a public library, and it was rumored that an electric railway would
be built into Clarion before the end of the century. |
| The Clarion and
Armstrong County Commissioners planned joint purchase
of the Allegheny River Bridge and the cessation
of toll collections upon it. |
|
| 1900 |
The
county's first National Guard company since the Civil War was formed
at West Freedom in 1871. |
| The Clarion Golf Club was formed. |
|
| 1901 |
The Parker's Landing Bridge Company
sued Clarion and Armstrong Counties
to get more money for its bridge over the Allegheny River and won
an increased award of $32,000. |
| On April 21, the first automobile
ever seen in Clarion arrived. It was a Conrad
Motor Carriage. Frank M. Arnold was to be agent
for the makers and Clarion's first automobile dealer. |
|
| 1902 |
A housewife,
burning rubbish near the Fertig's gas station,
started a brush fire that swept miles of land in the Big
Sandy area and caused an estimated $30,000 in damage. |
| There was
an increasing boom in coal lands in the county. Thousands
of acres were put under leases in Madison Twp.
and in adjourning areas. |
|
| 1903 |
Clarion
residents watched with awe as a huge forest fire burned north of
town for several days and nights, reaching from the mouth of Toby
to Miola. |
| A Clarion
newspaper said "One of the most disgraceful sights ever seen in
Clarion in the line of filth was exhibited a few
mornings ago at the front of the Second National Bank. The
whole pavement was literally plastered all over with big splotches
of tobacco juice and enormous wads of tobacco. If such disgusting
uncleanness continues in such public places, and in front of our
hotels, the Borough Council ought to pass a law imposing a heavy
fine upon any person who spits upon our pavement." |
| The County
Commissioners bought the G. V. Curll farm for $71
an acre, for use as the County Poor Farm. |
|
| 1904 |
Clarion's
Town Council hired a policeman and warned that ordinances governing
fast driving would be strictly enforced. Horsemen driving
fastr than eight miles an hour would be fined $5.00. |
|
| 1905 |
In the biggest
timber transaction in Clarion County history, A.
W. Cook and Company bought 6,000 acres, a bandsaw mill,
a railroad 12 miles long with cars and locomotives, a store, a hotel,
and 25 housees from the former Droney Lumber Company. The
cost was $200,000. |
| Mrs. Elizabeth
Freeman, from Madison Twp., celebrated
her 113th birthday. She had eleven children, twenty
grandchildren, fifty-five great-grandchildren, and three great-great-grandchildren. |
|
| 1907 |
A marriage license was granted
to H. A. Davis, 84, and Ellen L. Jones,
72, of Brady's Bend. Both were natives of
Wales. |
| Henry
Frank, from Lickingville, received a U.
S. patent for his invention of a bread slicer. |
|
| 1908 |
Clarion's
new nickelodeon, owned by Finkbeiner and O'Brien,
opened at Wood Street and Sixth Avenue. |
| Payment on bounties on "noxious
animals" were suspended by the County Commissioners when the bounty
fund ran out. |
|
| 1911 |
Ways and means of securing the
10,000-acre Cook Forest Estate lands for a huge state park were
studied. The tract lay in Clarion, Forest,
and Jefferson Counties. |
| Vincent Voycheck
was hanged in Clarion County's only execution. |
|
| 1913 |
A bill for purchase of Cook Forest
tract for a state park was for third reading in the General Assembly.
The cost was to be $600,000. |
|
| 1914 |
The
Clarion Free Library opened its doors in Fourth Avenue with 225
books. |
|
| 1917 |
As war talk spread, it was announced
that Clarion County had almost 5,000 men of military
age. |
| Clarence D. Van Duzer,
who represented the State of Nevada in Congress,
was arrested for fraud in the sale of $25,000 worth of allegedly
valueless mining stock to Clarion County residents.
The Congressman was brought back to Clarion
for trial. |
|
| 1920 |
The will of the late John
D. Ross, prominent Clarion citizen, provided
for the erection of a memorial library and community building, to
be known as the Ross Memorial Library and to be built in Clarion
to perpetuate the memory of his late mother, Mrs. Mary Ann
Wilson Ross. |
|
| 1921 |
Nora D. Young,
of Redbank Twp., became the first woman ever appointed
to a political post in Clarion County when she
was named as County Assessor. |
| County detective Charles
H. Sullivan was shot during a raid on a moonshine still
in Huey. Fifteen barrels of liquor were seized. |
|
| 1922 |
Clarion County voter registration
was as follows:
| Republicans |
8,420 |
| Democrats |
8,059 |
| Socialists |
305 |
| Prohibitionists |
728 |
| Independents |
971 |
| TOTAL |
18,483 |
|
|
| 1923 |
The County's Courthouse was wired
for electric lights. |
| Six one-room
schools were scheduled to be closed. |
|
| 1924 |
A state geologist estimated that
Clarion County still had 1.2 billion tons of recoverable
coal in 12 beds covering 784 square miles. |
| On May
23, Piney Dam's gates were closed. The river below the dam
dropped sharply. The new dam's power plant immediately began
to generate and transmit electric power. The Clarion River
Power Company announced that the new dam at Piney would serve consumers
in twelve counties and would stop the flow of 1.4 billion cubic
feet of water weighing 44 million tons. |
|
| 1925 |
An old
county landmark, the Gatesman Hotel in Lucinda,
burned down. |
|
| 1926 |
Clarion
and Armstrong County Commissioners took over the
tollbridge across the Allegheny at Parker, making
it a free bridge. The counties were to pay the company owning
the bridge a total of $2,500 a year. It was the last tollbridge
remaining in the region. |
| A tribe
of Seneca Indians camped at Cook Forest for a week,
and an estimated 10,000 people went there to see them as the New
York State tribe staged some tribal ceremonies in the last stand
of virgin pine and hemlock in the area. |
|
| 1927 |
A report said there were 308 radio
sets in Clarion County. |
| Clarion
County paid off the last of its 1903 bonds for building
the Poor Farm. The original debt was $90,000. |
| Governor Fisher
signed the Armstrong Bill, which appropriated $450,000 for purchase
of 7,000 acres of Cook Forest land to become a state park under
supervision of the Department of Forests and Waters. |
| Clarion State Normal School's
name was changed to Clarion State Teachers' College [now Clarion
University]. |
|
| 1929 |
The County
was to receive more than one billion dollars in state aid for road
construction in 1929 and 1930. |
| The long campaign for public ownership
of Cook Forest ended. |
|
| 1930 |
The Clarion
Milk Company formed. |
| The Coca-Cola
Bottling Company opened. |
| The former
Berney Band Glass Company was acquired by the Owens-Illinois Glass
Company. |
| Thomas B. Slick,
a Clarion oil millionaire, died after a brief illness.
He was the largest independent oil producer in the United
States. A town in Oklahoma was named in his
honor. Asking of the wildcatters, he had run a "shoestring"
up to a reported one hundred million dollars. |
| Twenty State Police officers from
Butler made fourteen arrests in a series of moonshine
still raids in Clarion County. They seized
several stills, destroyed much mash and liquor, and retained some
liquor evidence. |
|
| 1933 |
Clarion
Borough inaugurated 24-hour police protection. |
| Reports of the National Re-employment
Service reported that this agency had found jobs for more than 1,000
jobless residents of Clarion County. |
|
| 1935 |
The County had an outbreak of
chicken-thieving. |
|
| 1936 |
Jack ("Red") Barton,
an early flyer in the Clarion County area, invented
an aircraft landing beacon that was expected to be a boon to pilots
landing planes at night or in bad weather. |
|
| 1939 |
Rimersburg
celebrated the centennial of its founding. |
|
| 1940 |
Clarion
Borough marked the centennial of its founding with a week-long program
of varied events. |
|
| 1942 |
County
coal production in 1941 was 1,250,000 tons. |
| The County faced a critical teacher
shortage, caused in part by a ban on hiring married teachers. Another
problem was unavailability of school buses. |
|
| 1943 |
The County had 2,042 men in all
branches of military service. Civic groups planned erection
of a County Honor Roll listing names of men and women in service. |
| Clarion attorney,
George F. Whitmer, filed the second largest mortgage
ever recorded in the county, a $15 million instrument from the Pennsylvania
Electric Company. |
|
| 1944 |
The lights come on again in the
Courthouse clock, long darkened because of blackout requirements. |
|
| 1945 |
There were 15,218 registered voters
in the county: 6,878 were Democrats; 8,171 were Republicans. |
|
| 1946 |
Several Clarion-area
people appeared as movie extras in a Cecil B. DeMille
epic, The Unconquered, being filmed, in part, in the Cook
Forest State Park area. |
|
| 1948 |
The old
landmark in Lucinda, the Grand Central Hotel, burned
to the ground. It was built in 1895 and was owned by Arthur
Mills, from Clarion. |
| Many of the county's abandoned
coal mines were being sealed to prevent escape of acid water into
streams. The state had appropriated $1,090,000 to do the work
over a two-year period. |
| On Memorial
Day, Clarion Park was formally dedicated. The park, on the
site of the former Clarion County Fairgrounds,
was purchased by the Parker D. Cramer Post, V.
F. W., and $75,000 was raised to convert the fairgrounds to a park.
It was a memorial to the county's men and women who had served
in all wars. |
| The Knox Glass Bottle Company
planned to resume bottle productions early in 1949, making a new
throw-away beer bottle. |
|
| 1949 |
The body
of Private Donald Lobough, of Rimersburg,
was returned from New Guinea and buried in his
hometown on October 10. He was a Congressional Medal of Honor
recipient. |
|
| 1950 |
By order
of the U. S. Postmaster General, the name of Parker's Landing
was changed to Parker. |
| After a mine picket was wounded
by gunshot, Judge Weaver granted an injunction
to the Allison Mining Company, Huey, PA, restraining
miners from interference or violence. |
| In the first
week of November, 72 Clarion County men were drafted
into the services. |
| The Sarah
Furnace coal mine of the Keystone Mining Company shut down
indefinitely, idling 250 men and striking a severe blow at the economy
of the southern part of the county. Dating back to 1902, the
mine was the only one in the area that had provided steady employment
during the Depression years. |
|
| 1951 |
Clarion
County ranked second in Pennsylvania for coal production,
with a total of 2,521,342 tons. |
| The 13th producing
gas well to be drilled in the Sligo area in 1951
came on September 7, on the Glenn Slaugenhaupt
farm. Two previous wells, each producing over a million feet
daily, had come in August on the Paul McCall and
Harry McCall farms. |
|
| 1952 |
Miss Genevieve Blatt,
an East Brady native, was endorsed by the Democratic
Party for Auditor-General of Pennsylvania. She was the first
woman slated for state office in Pennsylvania. |
| David
Edgar Elliott died at the age of 86 on April 26. He
had held public office longer than any other man in the County's
history. |
|
| 1953 |
The new
Swanson Cookie Company plant opened in Rimersburg. |
|
| 1954 |
On May
16, an estimated 3,000 people attended the dedication of the new
Clarion Osteopathic Community Hospital. |
| A memorial
tablet on the Courthouse lawn, honoring the County's veterans of
all wars, was dedicated on Veteran's Day (November 11). |
|
| 1955 |
There
were forty-five open-pit coal operations and seventeen deep mines
in the County. In 1953, the coal industry paid wages and salaries
totalling $2,929,500 in the county. |
| With the
unveiling of a state Historical Commission marker, Foxburg
Country Club gained recognition as the oldest golf course in continuous
use in the United States. |
|
| 1956 |
The Clarion
County Historical Society formed. It announced the opening
of museum displays in the Courthouse. |
| Strong winds
blew down 400 ancient trees in Cook Forest State Park, badly damaging
the Forest Cathedral area. |
|
| 1957 |
A familiar
Clarion landmark, the seventy-one year old Main
Street School, was razed to make room for a service station. |
| Mrs. Shirley Ann Bellmer,
daughter of the Hon. and Mrs. Lloyd F. Weaver,
of Clarion, was the first woman admitted to the
County Bar Association in its 116-year history. |
|
| 1958 |
Operators
of the Midway Drive-In, in Limestone, posted $300
in bonds after being charged with showing a motion picture on a
Sunday. |
|
| 1960 |
Fire destroyed
or damaged thirteen buildings in the center of Foxburg
on February 16. |
|
| 1961 |
The County Commissioners approved
a plan under which public libraries in Clarion,
New Bethlehem, Knox, and Foxburg
would receive $9,334 in state and county funds. |
|
| 1963 |
The Grassy
Flats Bridge, across the Clarion River, was closed
by court order and was to be torn down. |
|
| 1964 |
Clarion
State University students, directed by Dr. Gustav Konitsky,
unearthed an ancient Indian rock shelter near the Clarion
River. |
| Thirty-one
college students, including five Negroes and some faculty members,
demonstrated in front of the Redbank Valley School in protest of
the school administration's refusal to accept a Negro girl as a
student teacher. |
|
| 1965 |
Mrs. Grace M. Sloan,
from Clarion, was sworn in as Pennsylvania's Auditor-General,
becoming the first woman in state history to hold two different
elective state offices. |
|
| 1966 |
Army Specialist
Fourth Class Joseph Torzak, son of Mr. and Mrs.
Steve Torzak, of Clarion, was
killed in Viet Nam on June 8, 1966. He was
the first Clarion County serviceman to die there. |
| Fire destroyed
the historic Sloan grist mill at Limestone. |
|
| 1967 |
Benedictine
Sisters, of the Order's Convents in Clarion and
Fryburg, appeared before a nationwide television
audience as part of the Erie Diocese Sisters' stage show, featured
on the Ed Sullivan television show. |
| The Clarion
News won one of three top national awards for its 125th
Anniversary Edition. |
| The Federal Aviation Administration
provided funds for planning the County's proposed new airport. |
|
| 1968 |
The Eccles - Lesher
Memorial Library in Rimersburg was
dedicated February 3. |
| The historic Stinson Monoplane
of the late Parker D. Cramer, Clarion
aviation pioneer, was rescued by helicopter from its forty-year
resting place on the Greenland ice cap where Cramer
had landed it safely, but out of fuel, during one of his great circle
exploratory flights. |
About Clarion County 
