The Townships

By Christopher Miller

Porter Township, the subject of this week’s Townships series, was named after the ninth governor of Pennsylvania David Rittenhouse Porter. He must have been a notable fella’ to have had a township in Clinton County named for him.

The township was formed and carved out in 1841. By 1842 there were 144 names listed in the township assessment record book. Almost one third of these were farmers. “Everyone had at least one horse that was assessed. Horses were assessed from $20 to $60. The most horses owned by one owner was six. Some 143 men were assessed for at least one cow. A cow was usually assessed at $12.”

This township is flanked, or graced (whichever way you want to look at it) by the Bald Eagle Mountains and the Nittany Mountains on the northern and southern ends.

An early settler recalled the earliest days of Porter Township:
“(The first winter they spent here was a very hard one.) Some of the settlers near Jacksonville had to go to Penns Valley for a little straw to feed their cows, and one winter the turnips did not get taken in and the deer found them, pawed at them and ate them.”

An interesting note was the proximity to other neighbors.
“In early days families living within two miles of one another were considered near neighbors. They would go that distance at any time to a house raising, wood chopping, stone hauling, or log rolling, and the women to quilting or spinning bees.”

Porter Township, way back in the day, was a dry area! “Porter township has a new poor house and a few acres of land with it, which is cultivated by the inmates. There are no hotels or liquor saloons in the township.” Needless to say, this does not mean that the township was dry, but perhaps nobody had decided to open this sort of establishment there.

Early industries of Porter Township included mining and digging for iron ore, and something known as “denuding” which is best used in this sentence, “denuding our woods and mountains cutting wood for charcoal, the only coal used to melt ore and transform it into metal.”

There’s gold in them there hills? Not quite. “Today, people living in the Lamar area sometimes find pieces of a bluish-green “rock.” This isn’t a rock, but a piece of slag, the waste product from the Washington Iron Furnace that had its beginning in 1809, and continued until 1899 when it closed following the disastrous 1889 flood.”

There were also two axe factories in the township, so axe making was also a notable employment for those in the township who could not farm. Of course Porter also had the usual industries, such as a tannery, grist mill, saw mills, blacksmith shops, and religion.

One of the biggest things to hit Porter Township was the 150th anniversary which was held in July and August of 1991 which consisted of dances, parades, historic tours of the township, the growing of long beards (because why not?), and a special day set aside specifically for family reunions, something that used to known as Old Home Week.

Fast-forward to 2022, Porter Township is a flurry of activity with agriculture primarily at the helm. Its gentle, rolling hills still give off images of “days gone by.” Close to 1,500 people call this township “home.”