Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

Clinton County, Pennsylvania. If you’re any kind of regular reader of the Record, you’ll know all about it—I write about it every week. The history of Clinton County has always fascinated me, and to some extent, all of the connected facts: Highest point, lowest point, founding date, populations, and so on. I can’t help it; I love considering this stuff, because I have no life.

In his “Down River” column on September 29th, John Lipez threw out a question for me to ponder. He questioned exactly where we are, regionally, within the state. Central PA? North-central? And should Renovo area be considered western or northern Clinton County?

I get asked this kind of thing a lot, and I’m still not sure how I got to be the final arbiter on these things. But I’ll make a few observations here, before making my ruling on this, because, hey, I need a column.

To start, let me review the geography of Clinton County a bit—It’s always fascinated me. Where I-80 runs across the middle, we have a sort of “community strip”—A line where the boroughs and villages are the most dense. Beginning with Beech Creek and running to Avis, we have in between Lock Haven (the county seat), Mill Hall, McElhattan, and several others. Below that is Sugar Valley, which is mainly rural communities surrounded by a lot of farming. Northward, we have vast forest land, mostly punctuated by Renovo.

I’ve always considered Renovo and Chapman Township to be Northern Clinton County. I understand I’m going to get publicly flogged for this, because traditionally they’ve been referred to as Western Clinton County. Some of the area, specifically both Keating Townships, are indeed the furthest west you can go, and I would say that East and West Keating are Western Clinton County. Chapman Township really is to the north; it’s far from the western border of Clinton County. So there’s my ruling on that one: Chapman Township is Northern Clinton County, the Keatings are Western.

Now to the knottier problem of what region the county lies in within the state. The exact geographical center of Pennsylvania is in a forest area just south of Bellefonte. Working outward from that, you could easily graph off the state into a grid, with nine regions, each one depending on where in the state it lies.

John observed, in his column, that news agencies from Wilkes-Barre and Philadelphia tend to lump practically EVERYTHING outside their own region into “Central Pennsylvania,” and he’s right about that. I chalk it up to their apparent view that the big cities are what matters, and everything in between is just nowhere, Pennsyltucky, which I’ve never agreed with. There’s a lot to be said for the space in between Philly and Pittsburgh.

For this next part, I’m going to reference another writing job I do, for the Pennsylvania Wilds, and I hope it’s okay for me to sort of cross-pollinate like that. The Pennsylvania Wilds tourist region is separated into six landscapes, three of which cover Clinton County. The I-80 Frontier is down at the bottom, Lock Haven and points south. Dark Skies landscape is above that on the eastern side of the Susquehanna, and Elk Country landscape is to the north, pretty much any township bordering Potter County. (If you’d like to see my writing expand to twelve other counties, check me out at www.pawilds.com.)

Working from there, and looking at a map of the whole state, I’m going to declare the I-80 Frontier to be Central Pennsylvania. (John references Lancaster, York, and Daupin, which I’m declaring South-Central.) Moving north, pretty much once you’re a few miles north of Lock Haven, I’m calling it North-Central PA—Chapman and Leidy Townships are right up against Potter County, nearly to New York, which is a bit far of dead center.

So that’s my ruling—Anything along I-80 in Clinton County is Central, and what’s further north of that is North-Central. I didn’t mean to write a whole dissertation on this, but like I said, it fascinates me. What else you want to ask, John?