Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

I have a small office up on the second floor of our house. It’s got all my files and books—Probably most local historians have someplace like this. All of the items I accumulate on local history go in there. And sometimes, when I’m trying to think of a column idea, I go pick something up at random and see if it would make a good article.

This morning, in this same situation, I picked up my copy of “Clinton County: A Journey Through Time.” I was paging through it, looking at all the information in there, when suddenly it dawned on me that I could do a pretty good column about the book itself.

“Clinton County: A Journey Through Time” was written by a committee of historians, which included Pat Tyson, who was like a cool aunt to me. It was written and published in 1989, when Clinton County turned a hundred and fifty years old. There was a book about Lock Haven published for the city’s anniversary in 1983, too. (It is a well-established fact that Clinton County’s history ended in the 1980s.) Clinton County was founded on June 21, 1839, and this book compiles its history a century and a half later.

Initially, there were a thousand copies published, all of them numbered. My copy is somewhere in the 200 zone. You may have seen the book, in the past. It’s a big volume, and it has the Sugar Valley covered bridge on the cover. Actually that doesn’t narrow it down much—Half the books about our history have the covered bridge on the cover. But the book, published by Olde Towne Inc., runs for 288 pages, all of them crammed full of local history information.

There are chapters about the creation of the county. There are sections that describe dairies, hotels, breweries, bridges, schools, and churches. There are a few sections that give details on more obscure local topics like specific lumbering tools and local bands.

I’ve been known to use this book for reference when I’m working on many of my columns. In the back, there are lists of the sheriffs, county commissioners, and other political offices from 1839 on, so if I’m working on an article about, say, a criminal who escaped from the old jail, and I need to find out who was the sheriff at the time, I can refer to this book. (Lock Haven’s mayors are listed in the other book.)

Also in the back of the book is an interesting alphabet list. Someone, in the writing of this book, decided to take the entire alphabet and assign each letter a local topic. The thing begins with “Axes” and ends with “Zig-Zags,” which was really kind of a reach. (The section refers to the zig-zag patterns that railroads use to get up steep grades.) My personal favorite bit is X, which refers to Peak X, the highest spot in Clinton County. (This is in Beech Creek Township.)

The book even contains a section of recipes, contributed by local cooks from a variety of restaurants and inns. There are recipes for baked spinach, corn bread, French onion soup, and potato chowder, all of them tested at one local business or another over the course of our history. (I just realized I’m using far too many parentheses in this column.)

It’s really an interesting book, and until I started writing this column, I didn’t realize just how often I use it in my research. So, hey, thanks to the people of 1989 for compiling all this useful stuff for me. I don’t know what future historians are going to do if they write about anything past 1990, but it’s not my problem, as I plan to be dead by then.