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Axemann
Centre Daily Times February 23, 1938
History of Axemann, Centre Co, PA
By Mrs. Myrtle Magargel
"The proper spelling of the name of this place has never varied. Named for the Manns and the tool they manufactured, we find that Linn's "History of Centre County" spells axe with a final "e" and that people who have been familiar with the place from the beginning agree with him. Without exception, the 10 or more folks who were consulted, as being the ones likely to know, said, "Axemann has always been spelled with an e." Linn does not refer to Axemann, save as Boiling Spring, because the post office and railroad postdate his history.
The story of any pioneering people must take into account its springs and waterways for they are the hostelries of the new land. The little hamlet we now call Axemann is no exception to this rule. Its first surveys were along Logan Branch and its first settlers made their homes beside its great spring.
After the Indians, the first owner of this area was Edward Crawford. His warrant from the state was dated 1784. It comprised a part of the Williams or Waddle farm on which Clayton Walters has lived for the past 38 years. Fringing the bank of Logan Branch it slopes up over the hill to level acres on top. Its successive owners have been Col. Thomas Hartly, Joseph Allendar, General Philip Benner and Beneval Clapp.
General Benner bought it in 1805. He came to Centre County about 1782, accompanied by Evan Williams, Thomas Waddle and Mordecai Benner. Waddle was the general's business manager. Williams was a forge builder and wheelwright. These three men, who represented capital, labor and management, so built up the successful business that their respective abilities would generate when pooled.
The Indians had passed from one hill to another by a path that crossed the Benner, or Williams, farm. The spring was a favorite Indian camping ground. Many relics of them are said to have been found near it.
All this happened, of course, before the Revolution, for after that, all the Indians were sent farther west, and the settlers could live in safety and peace beside such choice sites as even the great spring. Up to the time of the Revolution no white settlers are recorded, and so Centre County has no part in the Great Runaway which depleted little colonies farther east.
Not so long after the close of the Revolution, an old man, named Kinnear took up his abode near the big spring. He was a devote Methodist, and thus the history of Methodism in this community is bound up with its settlement.
The early Methodist preachers, as most folks know, were circuit riders. They came once a month to hold what Wesley called preaching services, and where there was no meeting house or church, they preached in a private house. Besides delivering a sermon, they baptized children, married young people, and sometimes older ones, who had been living together until such time as the preacher should appear. Often they preached a funeral sermon for the dead who had been buried weeks before.
Centre County had not yet been created out of Northumberland at that time and it belonged to the Baltimore Conference. The boundary between the Baltimore and Genessee conferences lay somewhere in this section, so the Northumberland circuit, as it was then called, was at the extreme end of the Baltimore Conference which had been established in 1791.
Two preachers who rode the circuit during 1791 were Richard Parriot and Lewis Browning. A different man came each successive year until 1799 when Northumberland and Wyoming circuits were joined after which only a six weeks' itinerary was maintained. This means of course, that the minister came only once every six weeks, and the miles he traveled and the hardships he suffered in the meantime were known to none beside himself and his Master.
By 1826 the circuit had shrunk three times and what has been Bald Eagle Circuit was called Bellefonte. John Rhodes had charge, and Marmaduke Pierce was presiding elder. There were 364 white members and 11 colored. Bands of Methodists who were to far from the regular preaching place had been formed into classes under leaders and met at least once in two weeks.
Under such conditions the old Mr. Kinnear lived at the "boiling spring" and followed Methodist customs. Whenever he heard that a preacher was to come into the neighborhood, he made efforts to have him come to his own home to preach and sent out invitations to everyone to attend. He was a quaint old gentleman, this man Kinnear. He delighted in old-fashioned customs and wore knee breeches with long stockings and silver-buckled shoe. What finally became of him history does not say, nor does anyone remember as much as his name. Such account as given here was learned through Linn's history, which is the source of most of this very early material. A monstrous sized scrapbook containing data and collected by Edwin Garman was most kindly lent to the writer by Mr. Garman. It, too, is the source of much interesting material and for the rest, interviews with the older residents of Axemann completed the tale.
Another early settler near the spring was Alexander Biggs. He was an Englishman who tired of archial government and so he came to the land of freedom. He had been a soldier, was made a prisoner in an Indian campaign of the Far East and so learned of Oriental life at first hand. He saw services in Europe as well as with the British army. Experiences of great wealth and deep poverty had both been his before he chose this remote spot to end his days.
Tradition say he gave his daughter a coffee pot filled with gold pieces for her marriage dower. She married a man named Allen. His sons left him and at last in the 90th year of his life, he died and was buried in a lonely grave on one of the hillsides. Its site has been forgotten and few today have ever heard his name."
Centre Daily Times February 24, 1938
(Second installment)
"The first beginnings of community life here came when Gen. Benner built a sawmill, a woolen mill and a few houses for his workers on Logan Branch at the present site of Grif's Turn.
The woolen mill began to operate July 5, 1824, under the direction of William G. and Ephraim Williams. It burned down seven years later, but was rebuilt at once, this time of stone. After the Williams brothers gave up the making of cloth, as they did in 1834, the building was rented by Henry Brockerhoff and used as a distillery.
None of the residents of the village remembers the distillery when it was running, but some do remember when it was torn down. It stood a little back of the house that Harvey Griffith built and some of the stones from the razed building were used as a foundation for the house.
The saw mill was operated by the general himself. The power that ran these mills was water - water going over a huge wheel that was built by a man whose special trade it was. It is said that the man of those times was Mordecai Williams, and furthermore, that he built all the water wheels in the country.
Be that as it may, it took a skilled worker to build them. They were set in the fall of the stream, so placed that they would turn as the water ran over them. It was necessary for the water to be much higher than the wheel, and it was arranged by building a dam in the stream. Sometimes a "race" was drawn off from the regular stream, wooden "gate" regulating the flow of water to the mill.
When the mill had run long enough, the miller sent someone to shut off the gates and with diminished water supply, the wheel stopped turning. Starting the mill was a matter of opening the gates and so making the wheel revolve.
Sometimes the "race" was used for more than one mill, a portion of the water being drawn off through a secondary set of gates in the side of the stream, while the remainder went further to turn the wheel of the second mill.
One miller and wheelwright of the writer's early acquaintance in Sullivan County, used to boast that he could plow the ground, sow the seed, reap the wheat, build the grist mill, grind the grain to flour, bake the bread and raise the family to eat it.
While the Williams men were making woolen cloth, and Gen. Benner was operating his sawmill, another industry sprang up on the hillside above the spring. It was reached by a road leading up the "Hollow" and employed men in digging ore. Most of these men were Irish. They settled their families along the road for convenience and so the little ravine was called Irish Hollow.
There were found the names of Noon, Kane, Daugherty, Morrison, Mallory, Frost, Clotty, Welch, Kelly and Fitzpatrick. Out of all these families only one was Protestant. All the others were Catholic and walked to Bellefonte every Sunday to mass.
The Valentines owned the land on which the mine banks were located. They had ore rights to at least 10,000 acres. Their furnace was located at the southern end of Bellefonte and great wagons drawn by six and eight miles were required to haul the ore to the furnace.
About this time Abram Valentine invented an ore washer that simplified and cheapened the work and so revolutionized the industry. They began to operate in 1815 on the same site and with at least part of the same machinery that had been used previously by John Dunlop.
Dunlop's furnace had been built here in 1798. He also built Logan Furnace on the border of Spring and Benner townships about a mile south of Axemann. Both the Valentine and the Logan Furnaces were operated before the memory of anyone now living.
Logan furnace was closed in 1842, but its mile-long tunnel to the ore was open to curious-minded youngsters long after that. George Hughes tells of crawling into it when he was a boy. His grandfather had been one of the workmen. The ore was obtained from the hillside against which the furnace was built and was of a very rich quality. It was mined as long as there was enough profit to pay for taking it out.
Mule-drawn cars brought the ore to the surface where it was put into the furnace, whose ruins mark the bank of the hill across the creek on what is now the Jodon farm.
When Dunlop bought the land, he erected a very small stone house, a stone barn and an office of the same construction. The two latter have long since been demolished.
When Valentines came on, they built what is now the front of the stone house, and Gov. Hastings later added the large front porch. The barn that followed the stone one was frame and painted black. So the "Black Barn Farm" it became.
The barn was burned during E.E. Swartz's residence there as a tenant. The next one built burned since T.E. Jodon became its owner. Between the Jodon proprietorship and that of Hastings were the Pruners and Dr. Hayes.
After the iron furnace was abandoned, a cement mill was established, the hill is as rich in cement as it is in iron. The cement had first to be burned in a furnace which was built, like the iron furnace, against the side of the hill facing the highway. It was lined with bricks and the process of burning started by building layers of stone and coal alternatively, on a ground layer of wood. The coal and stone were laid up to the top of the furnace. Then it was lit and burned for 24 hours, after which it was drawn off from the bottom and more layers of coal and stone were fed into it from the top. Easy access to this top was gained by a road that led along the crest of the hill.
The product drawn off from the bottom were pure cement rock, all foreign substances having been consumed in the fire. This rock was hauled in a wagon to the mill nearby to be ground. The mill ran on old-fashioned burrs like a grist mill; in fact, it was so much like a grist mill, that the miller who could operate one could run the other.
The first man to own this cement mill was named Searfoss. From him it passed successively to Fetteroff, Dawson, Uhl and Uhl. The last Uhl was Henry, a nephew of John Uhl, who sold it to Henry. John had been his own miller, residing in Pleasant Gap at the time. Usually, however, a miller had been employed and occupied the stone house now part of Jodon's property across the creek, which is yet in sufficiently good repair to be rented, as it now is to a family named Lucas.
Henry Uhl had the mill only about a year before it was abandoned. This was in 1890. The same cause led to its disuse that is given for that of Logan Furnace, namely: the expense of getting out the ore in proportion to its value.
Up to a few years ago, the holes in the ground that had been made by shafts sunk therein were plainly visible. When Mr. Jodon began to farm, he went over the hill field to pick up stones. These he dropped into the holes, covered them with brush, put in more stones, and finally a good foot or more of soil, after which he seeded over the whole thing and now has no more productive field on the farm than this one. What was known as the "mud dam" was also turned into a productive field. To the casual observer, there is no longer any sign of buried treasure.
Not long after the place was bought by the Jodons; a number of men came out from Bellefonte to look it over. They were hoping to form a company and prospect for ore, which would naturally have implied rebuilding the furnace.
Mr. Jodon, who owns the ore rights, would have none of this and it took something more than gentle persuasion to convince them that he would not cede his mineral rights to anyone, nor would he have his farm overrun with mining operatives. They finally gave up the project. He is not interested in anything more than farming there, and until the property changes hands, such wealth as lies below the surface will remain undisturbed.
Centre Daily Times February 25, 1938
(Third installment)
Other old places adjacent to Axemann are the farms lying on the hill beyond Irish Hollow.
According to one authority, this land was bought by Thomas McClelland of Bellefonte. Another story has it that the brothers John and Daniel Weaver were the owners and that McClelland only occupied it.
Both agree, however, that McClelland was the first to live there and that he moved out from Bellefonte when that town was very small; that the new home was in virgin wilderness with no other means of access than a narrow path up from the great spring. His household goods were taken up the hill by pack horses because no wagon could make the trip, and saddle bags were used to transport provisions to the cabin afterwards.
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