Lou’s View – Sept. 15, 2016
The Secrets of Lock Haven
by Lou Bernard
So how many things do you notice as you go about your day? Don’t answer that. I’m sure you think you’re amazingly observant, and have noticed thirty-two new items while you read this paragraph. But I guarantee you, there’s stuff you haven’t spotted, right in front of you as you go about your day.
Every community has these things—Little hidden secrets, details that nobody will pick out unless they know to look. If you live in Lock Haven, you’re lucky—You can learn about these things on my walking tours, or by reading my columns. Things like….
The secret code on the Lock Haven Post Office. The next time you go to pick up a package, stop and look up before you enter. There’s a carving above the door. Old Victorian buildings used to use these to conceal messages; every fruit, leaf, seed, or flower meant something. On the post office, you can pick out pinecones, which mean “messenger” and walnuts, which mean “trustworthy.” So “Trustworthy messenger” is not the worst code to have on the post office.
While you’re there, look down and to the right. There’s a small metal disk in the concrete. This is a survey marker, placed there by the government. There’s a similar one on the north wall of the Henderson Street railroad station. So, speaking of these….
There’s a hidden government benchmark on the Civil War monument. The National Geodesic Survey has put markers all over town, actually. The two disks I mention above are one example, survey markers to record elevation, latitude, and longitude. The Civil War monument on Bellefonte Avenue has one, too, but it’s not a metal disk. It’s a small carved rectangle, on the northwest corner. The really entertaining part of this is that the government has the wrong coordinates on file for this one—The monument was moved in 1969. Your tax dollars at work.
The tree line that marks a cemetery. At the very eastern end of Jordan’s Alley, you come to a line of trees. These are mostly maples, all growing in a straight line. They didn’t get this way by accident. This likely marks the edge of what was once the Hunt Family Cemetery.
The cemetery was begun back in the early 1800s—One gravestone said 1826. In the 1930s, when the Constitution Bridge was being built, they pretty much went right over it. It’s backyards, now. But the cemetery was surrounded by a fence, and seeds will blow up against a fence and take root. And then, when the fence is taken down, the trees will be growing in a perfectly straight line.
The Hill Section is littered with old storage cellars. On South Fairview Street once stood a brewery, operated by Matthew Flaig in the 1800s. Flaig needed places to keep his beer cold, so he had two choices: Wait around until someone invented electric refrigeration, or dig a series of chilly cellars and let the earth do his work for him. He chose option two.
Most of these have been built upon now, but still exist underneath buildings. (Including my own house, I’ve recently discovered.) I’ve had people tell me that they’ve found sinkholes that turned out to be those old cellars, falling in, and I’ve seen articles where these have been stumbled upon later. So if you live in that neighborhood and tumble into a sinkhole, look around and see if there’s anything there to drink.
The bricked-up back door on Mill Street. In 1893, Calvin F. Yearick built his store on the corner of Main and Mill Streets, known as the Racket Store. I have no idea what that entailed exactly, but later it was a furniture store. For both of those enterprises, they must have needed to carry large items in through the back, because there was a huge, curved door along Mill Street.
You can still see it, if you walk past. It’s all bricked over now, and functions more as a wall than a door. But you can easily see where the door used to be, until about fifty years ago—It appears in a photo from 1966.
History is all around us. And the secrets don’t stay secret—All you have to do is look for them. All of these secrets are there to discover, in front of us, over us, under us. Just look.
