Lou’s View – Sept. 22, 2016
Jeeps and Planes
by Lou Bernard
A couple of weekends ago, I spent seven hours riding around in a Jeep in the forest. For charity.
The Piper Aviation Museum held their first annual Jeep Mystery Tour, which was the idea of President John Bryerton. It involved, mainly, riding around in Jeeps in wildly remote areas of the county, getting muddy and worrying about snakes. It was a great time.
It was on September 10, as a fundraiser for the museum. John had asked me if I’d be willing to ride along and make a couple of short speeches about the history of the locations we were riding through. I was happy enough to jump in his Jeep and ride along, because you never know when something interesting is going to happen, and it was a way to raise money for the museum.
We started with Farrandsville, and I talked a bit about the history of the community and how the Queen of Spain built a mansion there. I also talked about Benjamin Perry, who worked in the iron industry out there. Perry was buried in Great Island Cemetery in Lock Haven, and when the cemetery was moved, his gravestone was lost and didn’t turn up for almost a century. It finally appeared, inexplicably behind a shed in State College in 2014.
We rode out into the remote forests of Grugan Township. And when I say remote, I mean I’d never even come close to being there before. I’ve written about some of the history out there, but the easiest way to get to some of these places is to ride up the Renovo Road and swim across the Susquehanna. We didn’t choose the easy way, we went up Rattlesnake Road, which is only named “road” because “Rattlesnake Long Strip Of Mud And Rocks That You’ll Never Pass By” is too long to say.
Some of the spots were challenging, and I wouldn’t have wanted to ride up there without a four-wheel drive vehicle. Preferably someone else’s. We had eleven of them riding in a row up there, and the noise may have frightened off Bigfoot, who I was hoping to see. Bryerton knows I’m interested in cryptozoology. Every time we heard a noise, he turned to me and teased,”Think that’s Bigfoot?”
“We can hope,” I said. My perfect day would be to find Bigfoot and a buried treasure simultaneously, and make him carry it home for me.
We didn’t see Bigfoot. We didn’t even see any rattlesnakes, to my relief. In the 1800s, the community of Whetham was called Rattlesnake, because of the frightening number of rattlesnakes that were there. We passed the Whetham fire tower, which is more or less all that remains. It was a busy lumbering town once, named after the Whetham and Price Lumber Company.
We also passed through Ritchie, which once had a post office and a train station. These days, Ritchie looks an awful lot like a bunch of hemlock trees and some mud. Ritchie was named after Edward Hood Ritchie, one of the early settlers in the area, and sits in Grugan Township, a bit north of Glen Union.
Glen Union. There’s another community out there that’s impossible to get to. I’ve always felt fairly safe poking fun at Glen Union in print, mainly because nobody’s ever figured out how to deliver a newspaper out there. Unlike Ritchie and Whetham, the road to Glen Union isn’t always a road, in the sense of being physically above water and made of something solid. At times, the road to Glen Union has been actually under the Susquehanna, a location you may recognize as being a poor idea for travel.
We took some paths that led us through Colebrook, Grugan, Chapman, and Woodward Townships, and got back to the museum about 4:30. There we had a dinner and hung out in the hangar, celebrating a successful fundraiser while my son looked at all the planes.
It was a wonderful day. I’m happy to encourage people to support the Piper Museum. That wasn’t the only reason I was there, of course. I was there because I’m a history and paranormal writer, and I was hoping to spot Bigfoot in an abandoned historic town. That didn’t happen. But support the Piper Museum anyway.
