Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I give a lot of walking tours, most of which are centered around the buildings. I mean, if you know what you’re talking about, it’s easy to stand on the sidewalk, point to a building, and give a history of it. (This is also true if you don’t know what you’re talking about, but it’s likely to be less accurate.)

The oldest building in Clinton County is on the corner of Island Route and Harley Road. It’s in Pine Creek Township, built in 1760. It’s called the Chatham -Ferguson House. It’s old enough that it wasn’t even in Clinton County when it was built, because Clinton County didn’t exist yet. At the time, this was all Berks County.

The newest building in Clinton County was the new gas station on the corner of Bellefonte and Commerce, but that’s changed in the time it took me to write this sentence.

When Lock Haven was growing, back in the 1850s, the first of the business mansions was the David Jackman House, at 118 West Water Street. It was built in 1853. The funny thing about this house is that it still exists, but you can no longer see it.

Jackman sold the property, and it wound up in the hands of William Simpson, lumberman. Simpson took some teasing because he was a lumberman who owned a brick house, and people haven’t matured any. So he sent his wife away on a trip to Europe, and remodeled the house entirely.

He had wood panels carved to look like stone, and more or less wrapped up the Jackman Building. It’s still under there, but covered up with the more elaborate structure. Simpson’s wife passed out in the street when she returned and saw how her house looked now.

The building next door, at 104 West Water, is the Peter Griffin Building. I always have to stop at this point on my tours and reiterate that it’s all documented, and I don’t make anything up. This is because Peter Griffin is a cartoon character, in addition to being a businessman from Lock Haven’s history, and it does nothing for my credibility that it’s next door to the Simpson Building.

The Griffin Building was built in 1903, and it contains parts from the Queen’s Mansion. When Queen Maria Christina of Spain invested money in Clinton County in the mid-1800s, she had a mansion built in Farrandsville, in addition to the Fallon Hotel. She never managed to visit either one, and though the Fallon still exists, the mansion hasn’t been there since about 1910. Parts of it, though, were worked into other buildings in the county, including the Griffin House. The curved upper windows and the pillars in front were once owned by the Queen.

Another local building I get asked about a lot is the Shaffer House. You’d know it as the castle-like structure on the left side of Bellefonte Avenue. When Arthur and Martha Shaffer were at a Chicago tour in 1929, they saw a very similar house, and hired George Tidlow to replicate it. Tidlow, who lived right up the street, built the house with stone ferried in from the McElhattan Reservoir. The property had once been Great Island Cemetery, and when they dug out the basement for this house, they found some bodies that had been left behind, in case your day hasn’t been creepy enough yet.

If there’s any local building that represents all of Clinton County, it has to be the courthouse. This one was the final courthouse in a series of either two, or four, depending on how picky you want to be. It was built in 1867 to replace the previous courthouse, which was in bad condition by then. The courthouse was made from stone shipped in from Farrandsville.

This concludes our little mini-tour of whatever building grabbed my attention today. There are plenty more interesting buildings around….But that’s another article.