- Hi, I'm Jennifer Fulmer Vinson, I'm the mayor of Clarion and welcome to our town.

(soft music) - Welcome to Clarion, Pennsylvania.

Originally settled around 1840, this borough was named after the river that flows through it.

The people of Clarion celebrate the arts, education and nature while respecting its storied past.

Join us as several residents show and tell what makes their community a great place to live.

Your friends and neighbors welcome you to our town Clarion.

(soft music) support for our town Clarion comes from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, shaping leaders since 1867 and redefining the college experience.

More information can be found at clarion.edu.

Ride ATA, operating Clarion area transit.

F.L.

Crooks and Company serving Clarion and the surrounding area since 1905.

Tom and Linda Bowman, proud alumni and supporters of Clarion University and the town of Clarion.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

- I'm Brian Heuer and my story's about the Clarion River?

I'm not a native, I've only been here for 45 years.

I taught at the university for 27 or 30 years, retired.

And then now I do a lot of things around the river.

We own some property around the river, we have some rentals and do some dock rentals and things like that.

You can look at Clarion River a couple of different ways.

You can look at the upper Clarion and the lower Clarion.

The entire Clarion River runs for about 80 miles, but about 50 miles of it runs from Ridgeway, Pennsylvania to the Clarion dam.

14 miles of that is the back water, which we would refer to as kind of the Lower Clarion Lake.

And then the upper is a free flowing waterway that people use to float, to kayak, to fish.

We have many eagles that nest on the river and they're apparent everywhere.

You see a lot of wildlife deer, bear, the eagles are probably the most notorious for people to want to see.

The river's special, you know, and it's always been special for a variety of reasons.

This river right now is the hub of Clarion in my opinion.

It's special because people gather there.

Whether it's the spring, when they're getting ready to get their docks out, get their boats in shape, fishing on the river starts.

So it moves right into summer fairly quickly, where families coming to the river, you have people that we refer to as Mappiers, coming up from different areas, water ski, to fish, to swim, to jet ski.

So the river's a really busy place in the summer.

My favorite thing would be just visiting with family, visiting with friends and the grandkids, watching them on the jet skis or fish.

We do a lot of fishing off the docks.

You know, there's a lot of activity to see wildlife and people life.

This is my home.

I've lived here longer than any place.

In my mind, it's the river that attracts people and it's the river that should be the attraction because you don't have another like it and the Clarion River makes this place special.

- Hi my name's Cynthia Chandra and my story's about being a boomerang artist in Clarion.

I grew up in Clarion and I studied at Clarion High School in art and that's when I started having a really big passion for my art.

And the art teacher here, Ray Jones, was fantastic.

He had a huge impact on this community.

His art program was huge part of my wanting to teach art and becoming an artist.

After I graduated from college, I worked at an art gallery.

Then after that, I moved to Japan and I studied under master Potter who lived in Hagi, Yamaguchi and his name is Natomi Susamo And he was fantastic.

The place that we worked in was his sixth generation studio, and he had all these beautiful old wheels and old kiln that he built with his great grandfather and just some incredible history from Japan.

So it was really neat to be a part of that.

I'm an acrylic artist.

So most of my paintings are very large scale.

It actually took me a long time to paint smaller.

So my paintings now that are smaller are 30 by 40 inches.

I am working with the AABC, which is the local art council, and we are applying for grants to start working on local, large scale murals and then also working on holding and hosting children's classes.

Lot of my pieces are really big and I focus on animals and 10% of all of my profits go to animal rescues and wildlife sanctuaries.

When I moved back here, I started teaching art to local kids and then also doing online art classes during COVID.

My family has been here for generations.

And my son is five years old and I was very much so missing living in the woods and having my son grow up in the woods.

So we actually moved back to our original house and our original land.

I think that Clarion has this feeling of home that I absolutely love.

And that's why I came back.

- I'm Trina Hess and my story is Clarion's oil history and how it helped five generations of fathers and sons work the land together.

The heyday of Clarion's oil history was about 1869 to 1879.

And during that time, Clarion produced about 12,000 barrels of oil.

The oil boom days were a time of lawlessness.

If oil was found in a certain town, the town would just draw hundreds of people, sometimes thousands of people.

And these were small rural towns that normally it would be just farmland.

It was a time of lawlessness, but also of risk taking.

People weren't afraid to try something.

If they heard that oil was struck it in some place, they would go there and try their hand at it.

If they didn't find anything, they would go and join the union army and fight in the civil war, do their three year service and then come back and try their hand at drilling oil again.

And one of those people was my great-grandfather, Henry Hess.

He grew up during these oil days and so for him, that was a normal thing that that's just the way you lived.

You tried things out.

My grandfather learned the oil business from his father.

And so my grandfather learned when he was about 15 years old how to do all the equipment and eventually he opened a shop in Clarion where he supplied tools and equipment for the oil and natural gas and the coal industry.

Then in 1954, my grandpa Ed Hess, he purchased the land around his homestead.

He didn't tell my grandma that he was gonna buy it because she would've told him to get his money back.

It was filled with abandoned buildings because it hadn't been farmed in 30 years and there was a lot of equipment left over from the oil and gas well drilling days.

So my grandpa and my dad together cleared the land in about nine months and my grandpa bought nine horses and he made a dude ranch just to see what would happen.

At one time, he would have 400 people coming for picnics, for their company outings, and then they would have a dinner and they could ride the horses and then they might have a barn dance in the barn.

And he was even featured in the Pittsburgh Parade Magazine because of what he wanted to do with this farm.

Well, my grandpa had a brother-in-law who always gave him a hard time and he said to my grandpa, "I bet you couldn't build a golf course on this land."

And my grandpa said, "You're on.

I will bet you $5 that I can build a golf course" Now my grandpa had never golfed and had never even been on a golf course, but he and my dad together started building a golf course.

Because most of the people didn't know how to golf at that time, my dad got his PGA teaching license and he started giving lessons.

And so eventually my dad taught all of us how to work on the golf course and I started in fourth grade picking up golf ball on the driving range and we all learned how to do that.

(soft music) My brother now is teaching his son how to work and doing all the landscaping and the greens keeping and things like that.

And we have a lot of golfers that bring their kids over to learn and one of our golfers, his son is now the same age that my great-grandfather was when all of this oil mania started too.

He's 11 now too.

So it came full circle.

I like Clarion because they maintain that whole oil boom mentality that they're not afraid to try out new things.

And we'll try this business and if this doesn't work, we'll try this and they keep experimenting and building the town and people really enjoy it here.

- Hi, my name's Isaac Leonard, I'm here to talk about Clarion University.

Clarion University has been around for quite a long time.

It was founded back in 1867 as Clarion Teaching College.

So it has a very strong history of teaching and education, which is still one of our top programs at Clarion, along with a few other great programs like business programs, science, biology, of course nursing, speech pathology as well.

Currently I work as the associate director of diverse enrollment initiatives.

Been here professionally working at Clarion for about six years, but I'm also very proud alumni, graduated back in 2011.

Coming July 1st of 2022, we will be integrating with Edinboro University and California University of Pennsylvania, where we will become Penn West University, but we will still be Clarion Campus, still keeping our name and a big part of our identity as well.

So with integration, it's a lot of changes, but it's a lot of exciting and good changes.

Really what the hopes of this is to bring our resources together to better support our students and offer more to the community around us, as well as our students at Clarion.

It really should open up our students to a lot of things in and outside the classroom where they will be able to take classes that maybe we don't offer here at Clarion.

They can take virtually at either Cal U or Edinboro University, as well as just the internship partnerships that each campus has that opens up our students to thousands of more internships and co-op opportunities that they can take outside of the classroom.

The exciting part is that it really should provide more for our students as they come to Clarion.

Clarion University is a big part of the community.

I always tell students that we have just a big impact on the community as the community has on us.

With incoming students, I always let them and their families know this becomes more than just a school that you go to.

This really becomes your home away from home, and you become a member of the community just as much as you become a student at Clarion.

Campus is nice.

I always tell students that small town feel that you kind of get in town, you kind of get that on campus.

It's very easy to kind of get used to it, find your way around, which I think again, just makes it a little bit more comfortable for our students coming here and it's a nice mix of like old and new buildings.

Since I've been here as a student, there's a ton of new buildings.

So they've done a really good job with updating it, but also keeping a lot of our history as well with some of the older buildings.

I met some of my closest friends here that I'm still friends with today, and then working here now, being able to work with incoming students through the process of getting them everything that they need to have a successful time at college, give them kind of the lay of the land so they know the ins and outs of Clarion and they're not as lost as I was when I started here I think it's just an awesome opportunity to do that.

So it just holds a very special place in my heart, just 'cause of again, being here as a student and then now working here with incoming students.

- My name's Chelsea Crooks Alexander, and the story is about boomerangs and coming back to Clarion and investing in our community.

(soft music) I graduated from Clarion University and after graduation, my husband and I moved to Washington DC.

And when we got pregnant with our first child, we thought let's come home to Clarion, let's be with family and let's set roots here.

So my husband is a environmental engineer and has a background in chemistry and I have some very strong roots in business.

So I thought, George, you make the beer, fill the cold room and my job is to sell it.

And so we kind of have our different roles in that way, where he really focuses on the beer, makes the best, he's obsessed with the best, and I'm kind of obsessed with the business, the marketing, the people, the events, things like that.

So it works out really well.

Summertime is really when we come alive.

We definitely have a lot of different events going on since we don't have a kitchen in house.

It started out bringing outside food vendors in is like a popup.

So they come, sell their products and we both benefit off of each other.

Another event we do on Thursdays through the winter is trivia.

The winter time is a slow time for us because our main focus is our patio area outside.

So to kind of get through those winter blues and get people out of the house and people coming together and celebrating, especially now after COVID, celebrating, being together, trivia has been a great way to like meet new friends and see your old friends and learn something.

It's really entertaining, and the questions are really good.

It's amazing how people have met other friends at the brew pub, which I love that.

Clarion loves Clarion.

We're really proud of our town.

We love bringing people together.

The people have brought me back to Clarion and has kept us going.

It's motivated us to keep making better beer, keep doing better events, just make it bigger and better than before.

So it's the people that really give us the energy.

It's our neighbors.

- Hi, my name is Nancy Hannah, and I'm talking about being a boomer boomerang.

I moved back to Clarion, my hometown.

I was in the Chicago area for over 20 years as a TV producer and then COVID hit.

And I started looking more and more at Clarion.

There was this amazing house for sale.

This house was on this beautiful street and had two beautiful apartments, and so I decided I'm gonna put my house for sale and just see if they would give me a little mortgage on this big old house.

And they approved me.

(laughs) So the first thing I did was renovate the apartment for Airbnb.

Had so much fun, painting and redecorating and I just look around and I'm pinching myself.

It's above and beyond my dreams.

A high school friend and I met together and I said, boy, the downtown is so quiet.

It's not as I remember as a child.

And I said, what if we did some popups?

Well, popup shop is a shop that pops up and then goes away.

It's not a brick and mortar store.

The blueprint committee said, hey, we're giving away some money.

Why don't you go after some money for popups?

And so I went after one of the grants and I got $5,000.

So we had 17 popups.

Everybody came out on the streets, everybody was so ready to get out and have some fun.

It kind of was a simple idea, but the right idea at the right time.

I was like, what about summer?

I came up with this idea of doing Clarion summer fest and it would be the first three weekends of all the months in summer.

The first one in June is called the big outdoor festival and all the trails, north country trail, rail 66, the loop and even a new kayaking company down at the river are all gonna participate.

And all of a sudden, we're kind of activating all these different groups.

Another opportunity was the owner of C 93, Bill Hurst, said, "Why don't you come and do a radio show?"

And so I started this thing called the Local Clarion County.

And now I'm doing interviews with all these entrepreneurs, the vice president of academic affairs at the college.

You know, I came back here to retire and I thought I would be living the easy life, you know, renting my apartments out, you know, getting the checks, but I'm busier than I've been in years.

And I am really loving it.

And that's the opportunity of a smaller area.

And people here have been so gracious.

And I'm so thankful for that.

The Autumn Leaf Festival has been around since 1953.

It started out as two day event, went to three days, four days, seven days, and now it's a nine day festival.

And it was a couple times we've taken it to 10 days and we've realized we can't do 10 days.

Nine days is enough.

We have about 55 different events.

A kids carnival, cornhole tournament, the car show and even on Sunday the last day we do an antique tractor show.

- I'm Tracy Becker So we do events for people of all ages.

Autumn Leaf Festival.

Friday is probably our biggest day.

That day alone, we will put 366 crafters right on Main Street.

At eight o'clock is when the craft show starts.

And by nine o'clock you cannot even see the pavement.

Our attendance can be anywhere from 60,000 on car show Sunday up to 200,000 people on farmers and crafters day.

My favorite part really is when I see everybody that comes together.

Anybody that's gone to any of the local schools that have graduated that have moved away, they come back because the autonomy festival ties in with homecoming week.

They have the homecoming parade, the homecoming football game and a lot of homecoming alumni activities.

In June, we do a cheers and beers event where we have local wineries, distilleries and microbrews community downtown Clarion set up in various businesses.

All the tickets from that event goes to pay for the I love Clarion fireworks that we do then on July 3rd.

What is my favorite part of living in Clarion?

Oh wow, there's so many different things.

You have amazing shops, great restaurants but I think it's just the idea that it's a small community with a big heart.

- Hi, I'm Jim Crooks and today I'm gonna share the story of F.L.

Crooks and Company, 117 year old family-owned business in downtown Clarion.

My great-uncle, he was clever and he was very good with people.

And so he was a young man entrepreneur and he risked everything, all his saved pennies and opened up a store and it started from there.

He was very successful during the 20s especially and he sold out to my grandfather, his younger brother and then my grandfather carried the store all through the depression.

In the 20s, you know, the boom years, he was selling silk shirts to the coal miners here.

It went from selling 50 silk shirts in the 20s to selling bib overhauls for 50 cents during the depression.

My dad took over in the 50s.

When my dad came home from World War II, the store virtually was empty because the entire economy of the United States had turned a war economy and that was his challenge is how he filled the store and how he was able to get merchandise.

Each generation had their struggles.

And each had their good times and their bad times.

I was a Clarion grad in marketing and I always knew I was destined for retail because I love people.

And I like clothing and fashion and it was just a very natural thing for me to do.

And so I started working there in '74 when I graduated from college.

And I started purchasing this store in '84.

I worked with my parents all those years, all those great memories and challenges of the '70s, the challenges that I've faced is so different than the ones that my father and grandfather faced but still very challenging.

The biggest challenges that I have faced is the opening of the Outlet mall in Grove City.

the Clarion mall, the Cranberry mall and then the Outlet mall, those were real challenging in the '70s.

The year that the Outlet mall opened in Grove City, we lost 20% of our volume in just like a solid rock dropping.

So we had to switch gears.

We had to become different.

- Isn't that cool?

(indistinct) - In the '80s my son Nathan started selling online.

We were one of the very first stores that had an online presence in the state of Pennsylvania.

Looking at the history of our business is really a history of the country and really a history of what happened in town after town, all across the country.

We never closed the store ever during the depression.

The first time we closed the store was we were closed for two months with COVID.

I really am so touched, just like every community, the enormous amount of support that the community has come around and cheered and shopped and spent and they don't wanna lose all these businesses.

And I think that's been the greatest challenge in every community from big cities to small towns is, you know, we don't have what we used to have.

We have to think not necessarily buying local, but we have to think about buying small and supporting small businesses and supporting entrepreneurs that have a dream and wanna build something.

- Hi, I'm Elizabeth Fulmer, and I'm here to talk about Fulmer House, the building where we are right now and our family's connection to Clarion University.

We started Fulmer House 17 years ago.

The house was a fraternity house from 1963 to 2003.

It was a theta chi house and had an animal house reputation in town.

When we bought the building we had to use a crowbar to get in the front door because it was a little rough inside.

So we had a lot of work to do to bring it back.

We wanted to save the building because it's such a neat building.

It's part of the history of the town and we wanted to keep it.

And since the fraternity had a little bit to say about who bought the place, we got it because they liked the idea that we were going to save the building and they could come back and visit.

Which they do.

We started out, my husband and our daughter Jennifer and I.

We wanted to be a used bookstore because we're all readers and we have too many books and we also have auction fixation and we have too much stuff.

So it became a book and antique store so that we could kind of unload some of the stuff that's been cluttering up our houses and let it clutter up somebody else's.

And we've been open for what going on 16 years now I think and having a lot of fun with it.

We have a lot of ties to the university.

My husband, Bill Fulmer, was on the faculty for many years.

I was a student here in the early '60s and when we met and got married while I had just graduated from Clarion State College.

Goes back further than that though, his aunt Flossie, was a 1916 graduate of Clarion normal school.

And then his mother returned to college as an adult in the '50s.

She had had to drop out during the depression.

And graduated from Clarion State Teachers College in 1959.

And then our daughter graduated from Clarion University in 1986.

So he likes to say that all the important women in his life are Clarion graduates from one state of Clarion to another, from the normal school days to the university.

He came back and got his master's degree and became a faculty member and became active in the faculty union while he was teaching here, I went back to school and got two master's degrees just because I like going to school.

And Clarion is here and Clarion is my school.

I love small towns.

I grew up in a small town.

To me a Friday night traffic jam is having to wait through two red lights at fifth and main.

It's just a very, very pleasant place to live and I'm happy that we've been here since 1979.

- My name is Prince Brooks and my story is about the White Pillars Building at 650 Main Street.

I had the opportunity to interview Zach Arborino about the White Pillars Building, a building that was in his family for years.

- Hi, my name is Zach Arborino and I'm here with you today to talk about 650 Main Street.

It was constructed by Walter Graham, my great grandfather.

Walter Graham built the house after a successful run in the stock market in 1904.

The home still stands today, having various owners or renters.

We've had the Clarion Republicans, they had the Dietz Family that's most notable and now the current owner uses it as a bed and breakfast as well as a part-time residence for herself.

It also houses the Clarion Chamber of Commerce.

The home originally had seven fireplaces and 11 rooms.

At the time the third floor was used exclusively as a billiards room.

After a while they decided they needed some more space so they split it up and it was divided into seven rooms.

The home originally had an elevator in it but at a particular point in time they decided it would be better used as storage closets.

So they took the elevator out and made four storage closets.

Currently there is an elevator in the home to meet ADA compliance.

So that's behind us in the kitchen here.

The house is all constructed from brick that was manufactured at the same facility.

The facility was actually owned by Walter Graham.

Walter Graham was originally from Fryeburg.

His wife, Catherine, was from Oil City.

After having children, they purchased this home.

The children of the Graham family continued on from where my grandmother picked up and married my grandfather who opened the Garby Movie Theater which is directly across the street from this location.

One of the coolest things about this home to me that is very sentimental is my father grew up here.

My father passed when I was young and I never really got to meet him as an adult but he grew up here with my aunt, one of my uncles, and my grandfather and grandmother.

(soft music) Though the home was constructed in 1904, you can still visit the structure on Main Street Clarion.

You can visit it as a bed and breakfast or you can come visit the chamber.

It's been here for a significant period of time, serving as a fixture on Main Street Clarion, Pennsylvania.

- My name is Carl Jacobson, I am here to tell a story about my father and I coming back together after about a decade apart to start an art studio and a new life in Clarion.

(soft music) I think it's kind of been a dream for us.

It's been the one thing throughout our lives that has kind of brought us together.

We may not see eye to eye on everything but when it comes to art, we could sit down and talk for hours.

So that part is really special.

There's a certain unspoken joy that we have with each other when we're working together.

I sat down with my dad one day and we just started talking about what was next and we were in the studio, and he's here, well, why don't you just come on board.

Let's see what we can do with this thing and see if we can grow it and grow you and that was where it started.

And it kind of has blown up since then.

My father's a traditional Scandinavian wood carver with his own twist on things.

It's very of the area, it's got that primitive feel to it and it feels like Clarion.

It feels like western Pennsylvania.

But it has all those nods to his heritage.

He's really made it possible for me to succeed at what I'm doing and he's just kind of constantly been a support system for me to just follow that dream.

My artwork, I typically work in oils and I was working on a series about the working class in western Pennsylvania and a lot of the struggles that people that don't grow up in small towns don't understand.

And then during the pandemic, I switched gears and really focused on community and what the community is and what it was when I was a kid and how that's changed over the years.

So a lot of my work is buildings in town and going back in time and doing ones in the present.

So a lot of my work centers around the community, the river, and places that hold a special memory to the people that grew up here.

I really resonate with the idea of community and I've gotten to see it in full force the last couple years as things have been struggles.

This community really rallies around its people.

If somebody's in need, they're gonna come out in full force.

Something very special about living in a town that is full of people that just genuinely care about each other.

- Hello, my name is Katie Roth and today I'm gonna be talking about the Clarion County YMCA.

(soft music) The Clarion County Y is a wonderful asset to this community.

We have opportunities for individuals who are eight weeks old all the way to 105 years old and everybody in between.

And so we do youth programming, we do senior activities, we're very family oriented providing every possible thing that you could imagine for our community members here.

I am the program director at the Clarion Y and I oversee the wellness department as well as the aquatics department.

We have a variety of opportunities there but within the wellness department, we have personal training, our group exercise classes and just welcoming and encouraging people to live a healthier lifestyle.

And on the aquatics end of things, we also have group exercise classes in the pool, we offer aqua therapy and swim lessons for little and old members as well as just family swim and exercise.

Jesse Kelly is our branch director of the Clarion County YMCA.

- The new YMCA opened January 31st, 2019 and I remember that day very vividly because it took almost nine years to basically fundraise for the new YMCA, when it started out as just a dream.

At the Y, type of programs and services really revolve around what the community's needs are and so really the YMCA exists to strengthen the community and to provide programs that build the community, to be able to open our doors to the community and offer truly a full-service YMCA with a full-size gymnasium, swimming pool, we have state-of-the-art, wellness center, group exercise, studio, intergenerational room, full child care center, kindergarten readiness classes, older adults, silver sneakers, we have a lot of wellness challenges, youth sports.

Membership at the YMCA includes a lot of different opportunities to become involved in various group exercise classes, personal training.

It gave a lot of pride to people in Clarion county to be able to have this type of accomplishment in our community that we really could rise up and do something great for our people.

- We're just so excited to be a part of a small community with wonderful goals and achievements and love and excitement and just so happy to be a part of Clarion.

- Hi, my name is Jessica Carbaugh, and I'm here to talk about the Clarion Central Wildcats.

The Wildcats are a new football team.

They are comprised of the Clarion School District, the North Clarion School District and the Clarion Limestone School District.

This is kind of a project that was started around 2017.

School districts began to look and see that their programs needed more structure, they needed more things in order to be successful.

Mainly enrollment had started to decline and in order to give the opportunities and the success for the players and just really to have that strong football team, they needed to be proactive.

The main idea behind all of this was rebranding and creating that strong unified bond.

They opened up the ability for people to submit ideas, for a new logo, a new mascot and I had tons and tons of ideas.

But the one that really stuck was tying in our civil war roots from this area.

And that was the 105 Wildcats.

The union civil war regiment from this area.

Some of the people that were really instrumental in this whole idea was the hall of fame coach Larry Wiser.

He kind of got the ball rolling for all of this.

- I think it was pretty amazing how everything merged together, the parents, players, the student bodies as students were 100% behind it, you know.

And I think we just, we, you know, we've had some people that have been bobcats over the years and see our lines over the years and those people I think soon got on board and I think the program with the fact that we are doing this for the students was a key component of this.

- Ken Burkett is a historian, he's an award-winning historian from the area.

He came in and really made sure what we were doing was true to the history of the area, that our logo was accurate, that everything that we were doing held the history and preserved everything.

- I think it was decided on to take a look at the Wildcat monument at the battlefield in Gettysburg and use the wildcat face, that's part of that monument as at least an idea for the logo and then we also included some crossed officer swords on the logo which is the straight sword that the officers carried forward in battle.

- Also at Clarion School District, we have an award-winning volleyball coach.

Our volleyball team has successfully won three state championships, multiple league championships and multiple district championships over the career of 22 years where coach Jerry Campbell has led them.

- What motivates me as a coach is the people that these young women become.

The court really is a great classroom and I love to see what these graduates go on to achieve, the people that they are, they're doing amazing things.

- In the district we strive for excellence.

So when you walk through the doors of the high school, you'll see academics hanging on the walls, you'll see a trophy case that displays our academic awards, you'll see art that fills both our high school and our elementary.

And that artwork has spilled down to our downtown area.

So if you drive through the downtown Clarion area, you'll find different pictures and different paintings that hang on the sides of the buildings.

And that artwork that you'll see is artwork of students that have come through our art program at Clarion.

- My name is Elaine Maddox and I wanna talk about the First Presbyterian church of Clarion's Food Bag Ministry.

Our church is the Clarion First Presbyterian Church.

We've been a solid member of our community for about 175 years.

The food bag ministry began when the pandemic began.

The minister emailed all of us and said if there's something that you want to do to help people during the pandemic, please show up at the church.

So I said to my husband, I'm going to the church I'll be back.

We came up with the idea of having a regular food distribution.

We quickly learned that most food distribution programs only give out non-perishable foods like cereal, soup, pasta.

Those kinds of things.

So we aim to be a little bit different.

We give away milk, we give away butter, cheese, ground beef.

On holidays, we give away ham or chicken.

Those kinds of things.

We really want to meet a niche that other food distribution places don't do.

The best thing about our Food Bag Ministry is that it is a self-sustaining project.

In other words we don't rely on any church budget monies to fund it.

It is fully funded by donations from our congregation and from people in the community.

(soft music) We have a dedicated army of fantastic volunteers.

There's about 40 people from our congregation that help.

In addition we have people from the college that help occasionally, we have people from the community that help us.

So it's been a great experience for everybody.

We probably have helped about 210 families over the course of the last year and a half.

Food insecurity is a big thing.

We didn't know that at the beginning but we know it now.

Our dedicated army has realized that and they're committed to continuing the project.

It's kind of humbling to be able to see the difference that you make.

(soft music) Well, Clarion is a small town and most of us are very fortunate but we are aware that some of us aren't.

And it is a community and a church that wants to be part of that process of helping those who need help and there's no shame in needing help.

If you need help, we're there.

There's no pre-registration required, there's no proof of income, they just need to show up.

And we wanna be that kind of resource that people can trust and they don't feel like they have to jump through hoops to get help.

When you move to Clarion, you start to make friends, people care about each other, they look out for one another.

Every little town has problems but I think Clarion is a unique thing that we keep going, we keep regenerating ourselves.

So I'm proud to be an almost native of Clarion.

- Hello, my name is Jason Floyd Lewis and today I'm going to talk about my artwork.

Out of high school I was very interested in art and I had an excellent high school art teacher and didn't know what I wanted to do at first, when I left I just knew I liked art and became interested in landscape painting.

After the second year of college, I think I tried my first landscape painting and I was home for the summer so it was a painting of mill creek where it enters into the Clarion River.

After that I took courses in landscape painting.

Going outside the city around Columbus it was kind of hard to find inspiration after having lived in Clarion and the majestic forests and the streams and rivers that we have here.

So even though I was satisfying, what they wanted I was always trying to do paintings of Clarion using photographs which I still use today.

By the time I graduated from college, my artwork was about entirely Clarion River and Clarion area landscapes.

More recently in 2019 when they built the new scenic rivers, YMCA, I was asked to do a mural of the river.

They provided me with a picture that they wanted.

It was a fall picture of the Clarion River in Cook Forest and as soon as they gave me the picture, I knew where it was because it's right beside the road and it's really scenic and really perfect spot.

I was honored to be involved in that.

Currently, I'm finishing a large painting, it's 60 by 80 inches of the Clarion River and it will be hung in the Clarion county courthouse courtroom.

It's being commissioned by the Clarion county bar association and the courts.

And judge Sara Seidle-Patton suggested that I do the river and wanted a recognizable location so I selected down near the mouth of Deer Creek.

It's very picturesque, there also the valley widens out and if you're there in the morning and the sun's shining, it hits the distant hill before the valley gets any light and it's just really beautiful.

And so I went there searching for inspiration and one morning it was pretty cloudy but the sky broke up with just the right time and I got some dramatic pictures of it and turn that into the painting that I'm finishing now.

As far as the landscape goes, I feel a deep connection to it and I think a lot of people do.

The rivers and streams create these rolling hills, they get these dark mysterious areas.

It's very inspiring and it becomes a part of who you are and I think most of us here feel the same way.

It's dramatic and it appeals to your sense of adventure.

It calls to you.

- Hi, my name is Mary Lee Lucas and I'm here to talk about the Clarion County Historical Society.

The Historical Society was established in 1955 and houses all of the artifacts and historical documents of Clarion County.

We have three floors of exhibits.

We have a military room honoring our veterans.

We have a DAR women's history room.

And our library is a genealogy and history library.

People come from all over the United States and even other countries to do genealogy research.

We also have exhibits for industries, oil, coal, glass even iron.

At one time Clarion county was known as the iron county because there were more iron furnaces here than any other place in the state.

Clarion county was established in 1839 and it was carved out of dense woodland.

Lumber was a big industry, rafting was very big.

Lumber yards were everywhere.

They would harvest the wood, create a raft and take it down the Clarion River, to the Allegheny River, to Pittsburgh and then they would walk home.

The house itself the Sutton Deets House was built in 1850.

And the man who built it was Thomas Sutton.

He was a prominent attorney from Indiana PA.

Unfortunately, his six-year-old son died of scarlet fever and many people that visit our museum have seen little Thomas.

I even had an experience with Thomas in a telephone.

It was several years ago.

I was there preparing for the next day, it was late at night.

Well, the telephone rang.

Ring!

Ring!

That phone is only there for our alarm system.

It has an unpublished number.

I went back, I answered the phone and it was all staticky.

And then a voice a little boy said mother, mother.

I ran out of the building.

I was, it really startled me.

And I thought what in the heck, but other people have seen different things happen.

We just like to think it's Thomas.

I was born in Clarion and we had relatives all over Clarion county.

We love it here.

One thing that really always makes me feel so good is when we get our visitors from out of town, they always say, what a lovely adorable little town, it's so welcoming and everybody's so friendly.

And it really makes me happy, you know, that it's our town.

- My name is Brenda Sanders Dede and my story is about the Blueprint Community in Clarion, PA.

The Blueprint Community is a new non-profit organization within Clarion borough, made up of borough council members, university members and county community members.

The purpose of the Blueprint Community is to revitalize the community by bringing in new businesses, new adventures, new ideas and to make Clarion borough a better place to live.

Thus far, the Blueprint Community has put up some signage in the borough we have helped the Clarion River brewery get funding through the federal home loan bank, we help the regency commons, new housing complex for seniors and then our major project that we're working on now is a multi-generational park.

Then we have a few other things that are bubbling up, starting to do projects around the river area to make more people want to go to the river in the summer having kayaks down there, better in the boat launch, those kinds of things.

Efforts like this are important because the changing demographics of the area, the change in economic status and economic position of the community members and we want to keep Clarion vital.

We've got to do things to make our community inviting and make people want to stay or move here.

Even after retiring from the university in 2018, I'm still here.

I found it to be very warming, welcoming place to come.

Crime free, pollution free, and also to serve on the Blueprint is just an added value because I can do more things for the community by bringing in new businesses and helping to revitalize the community.

- Hi, my name is Melanie Parker, I'm a lifelong resident of Clarion county.

As a matter of fact my family goes back seven generations.

Today I wanna talk to you about the railroads in Clarion county.

The first rail that came into town came from Knox and it was a narrow gauge rail.

And it came across a trestle.

That ran for just under 20 years and they decided that the trestle wasn't strong enough to bring it across the river anymore but the town refused to put up the money to build a new one.

So 1896 it just shut down and then the railroad opened in 1904 from Clarion to Summerville.

But it was so hilly and it was so hard for that train to get up and down that they finally closed that port.

And it became the LEF and C in 1913.

LEF and C stands for Lake Erie, Franklin and Clarion.

You can still see LEF and C cars in use today.

The idea was to have it go further than Clarion and Somerville and it never did.

It was a passenger line to Summerville until 1942.

And that's when they closed the passenger line.

When it stopped carrying passengers, then it started carrying freight and coal and glass and all kinds of things.

So it finally closed completely in '93 because the coal industry went belly up.

And there was just no need for it anymore and now they've pulled up all the tracks.

So we have no railroad, we have a lot of memories but we do have a railroad.

Because we have a model railroad club in Clarion.

The Clarion model railroad club which is a hidden jewel.

You would only know it's there if you see this small sign on the alley side of the masonic building on Main Street.

And it's only open for visitors on Wednesday night but it does have a big Christmas show every year and has a huge animal festival show every year.

And that is a magical place down there.

(indistinct) I can go down there and when they get all those trains running at once and those whistles and I just, my head's going back and forth and you're walking around, it's so much fun to see parents bring their little kids in there.

It's wonderland for little kids that like trains.

But the railroad club is a wonderful wonderful place.

It's just fun.

It's different every year.

And they keep changing the displays down there.

They work on them, they change them, and they've got the whole LEF and C set up down there.

Really exciting.

So I get all giddy, I just love trains.

I'm one of four children and the other three took off for the cities.

One went to St. Louis, one went to Los Angeles, one went to New York City and I always felt really comfortable here.

This is home.

You draw a circle for an hour and a half and there's nothing here but God's country.

I just love it here.

- Hi, I'm Shawna Bish and I'm here to introduce Tom Bowman, our 1977 Clarion University graduate.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tom and interviewing him on his background with Clarion University.

- Always remember walking out of the admissions building and standing on the sidewalk and my dad saying, "Geez Tom, what do you think?"

And I said, "This is it.

I feel good.

Feels like home to me."

Graduated with a business degree and then eventually made my way back to Maryland where I've been living here for the last 40 years but I was always drawn to Clarion.

Clarion just never left me.

What makes Clarion different I think from other small towns and places that I've been is Clarion is just a peaceful and calm and special place for me.

So the first thing I do, I actually go to the gas station and I buy up all the newspapers.

I get the Clarion Call which is the university newspaper and I grab the Clarion News, I'm gonna head over to Michelle's cafe which is kind of the town center, the coffee shop and have a seat and catch up on all the news usually somebody's coming in and, you know, talking to somebody.

So Clarion has really everything that you would need.

I have a hardware store the famous bob sub shop.

Dan Smith's candy and gifts in selection of candy from dark chocolate which is my favorite, white chocolate truffles, all kinds of different kinds of candy.

The Clarion River Brewing Company.

The great food, they have a great beer selection.

Mechanistic Brewing, a great facility, they have great selection of beers, great selection of seltzers which I like.

Pizza pub and great subs in the world.

Kind of brings me back to my college days, kind of nostalgic.

I always try to stop at Port View winery.

Kind of a farm type setting.

You'll actually run into some peacocks and some turkeys while you're sipping on your wine.

Always head to the deer freak winery, it's out in the country, very relaxing place.

Just a great place to relax, have some wine, have some food and listen to live music.

So really you don't have to leave it's really a town that has everything that you might need.

I think Clarion are just so friendly and welcoming both the people that I meet in the town and people that I've met through the university it's just been a great experience for me over the years.

- Hi, I'm William Hurst and my story is about the Clarion radio stations on WWCH.

The stations were founded in 1960 by a number of community leaders here in Clarion one being my father William Hurst.

And the people that founded the stations, they wanted a radio station for Clarion.

That was something that they thought Clarion really needed.

- And delivered what it's built broadcasting- - Over the past 60 years, we've evolved but we still are doing the local product that those people felt that clarion needed.

- And all the great music right here on C-93 Clarion's best variety.

- I got out of college and I started helping my dad at the radio station back in 1978 and since I started, we added an FM radio station WCCR 92.7 and then just a year ago, we added another FM station which is 94.1 FM, The Goat.

We have a couple different formats on the station.

C-93 is all contemporary and we do a lot of sports and community events on the station.

And then WWCH which is the station that was founded by my father in 1960, it's country and we do have a real interesting radio show every Saturday morning.

- And we're spotlighting today here on the Saturday morning Classic Country Show mark- - Commissioner Wayne Broshes does a Classic Country Show and he's interviewed quite a few entertainers like Merle Haggard and famous entertainers that have been on the show via telephone.

So we're kind of proud of that.

We have a lot of local announcers on the station and really right from day one, we had a big partnership with Clarion University.

So we had a lot of staff from Clarion University, a lot of young students who were on the radio doing advertising sports and that has continued right up to today.

A lot of the students from the university, they have gone on to big major markets and advertising, TV, radio so we're kind of proud of that fact that we've been able to partner with this education part.

The stations are located out in Greenville Pike.

We're kind of an old farm house, we converted into a radio station and we do a lot of talk and a lot of information about what's happening in Clarion local news.

We partnered with quite a few local non-profits for public service announcements, talk shows.

Many of our employees are part of the community, they're part of the chamber, part of the rotary club.

So we have real part of our Clarion community.

Clarion is a special place because we're a real community, people know each other and I've seen just over the past few years, there's a lot of young professionals here in Clarion, a lot of young community leaders and they've kind of taken the ball and they're trying to make Clarion a really great place.

There's new businesses, there's breweries, there's small businesses that are all part of our Clarion community and I'm just excited to see the young people that are really involved in our town.

- My name is Leah Chambers and I'm here to tell the story of the community learning workshop.

The community learning workshop is a drop-in homework and tutoring center here in Clarion on Main Street.

I am the co-director of the workshop, so I co-direct it with my colleague Rich Lane, we both work at the university in English department and we co-founded the workshop together in 2012.

Rich had had experience with a family literacy center in Salt Lake City, Utah and then here in Clarion, we wanted to do a similar program to provide free educational opportunities to the community.

We don't have free after-school homework help here in Clarion, we don't have free tutoring services and we live in an area where we have a lot of working-class families who could benefit from such support.

For me as an educator, I think it's important to engage our students with the community through service so our learning workshop is staffed completely by university students.

It gives them a sense of looking at students as human beings and understanding students and families and that it's not just about education in terms of content but that when you're working with children, it's about the whole family.

So on a daily basis, we're open after school hours.

We're open from three to six, Monday through Thursday, we get about 10 to 15 children who come in every day after school and then we also have evening programs throughout the year.

So we did an American sign language workshop in March of this year and we had about 15 families come to that.

We've also done virtual programming too, we did that through the pandemic.

So I would say annually we serve probably three to 500 students, it depends.

And then university students right now we have on staff 15 students and then we also have some volunteers of about 20 university students who are engaged in service through the workshop.

For me it's about a commitment to everyone having access to free educational resources no matter your income level.

And I think that we need to recognize that in communities like Clarion or really in any community, having a community space where people can come together after school where they can learn, where they can play games, where they can interact I think community spaces like that are just very important in general.

I actually grew up in Metro Detroit and I came to Pennsylvania in 2006 to get my PhD from IUP.

What I like about Clarion is I like the close-knit nature of the community, I like now that running a community center, I have contacts in local schools, being part of the learning workshop has also helped me to be part of the community.

Because I was teaching at the university but those aren't always the same environments.

I mean the reason why the workshop is on Main Street is because we know that people in the community might not want to come onto campus in order to have those services or engage with those programs.

- So my name is Rogers Laugand and my story is about the Rising Stars AAU basketball program here in Clarion.

We're a basketball program and we work with kids throughout the area.

We've also tried to help student athletes who have aspirations of playing at the collegiate level.

We try to help them reach their goals and dreams.

The inspiration behind it was myself and coach Deas is we both had kids, so you know we wanted to provide a program for our kids but also we wanted to provide some more basketball for kids who would not necessarily have an opportunity to play early on during their elementary years and so forth.

We thought it would be something that the community here could benefit from.

We typically have tryouts every October.

We put out information through high school coaches via Facebook and other social media platforms to encourage student athletes to come out and try out.

Over the course of our tenure, we've played in national tournaments in North Carolina, in Florida, in Las Vegas, in Indianapolis, Chicago.

So we provide an opportunity for them to get exposure outside of our area and compete against kids from different regions of the country.

and a lot of times, you know, it's a good bonding experience because a lot of the kids who play together they're from different schools or different communities so they build some friendships and some bonds.

And, you know, we get a chance to meet the parents and so it's a good experience overall.

Now some of the older kids in our program have graduated from college.

We've seen kids, some of them they're married, they have kids, you know, family lives.

While we were teaching basketball skills, it was also a way to teach life skills.

It's been very rewarding to see them succeed in life after basketball.

It's a small community, obviously, so people know each other and are very supportive.

I know during my tenure here I've been here for 31 years and I've had an opportunity to get to know a great deal of people through basketball, through work, and you know I built some great relationships and friendships here.

And to gain, the opportunity to impact the lives of young people has been rewarding for me.

- Hi, my name is Ashley Eck, and today I'm gonna tell you about the Haskell House.

This is our entryway.

All of the woodwork in this room is original to the building in the 1860s.

It started as arnold's big store then became Haskell furniture store and then became Clarion County Probation.

We took the building over a few years ago right before COVID hit.

We really wanted to restore the historical aspect of the building so we kept as much of the original features as we could.

There's all original wood paneling in the entryway, original tin ceilings, original brickwork for the walls.

Replaced a lot of the foundation.

New flooring.

A really cool feature about our bar is that the vault door actually works so you can sneak through the hallway and go into the bar.

It's really beautiful, we kind of gave it a historical elegance with a modern twist on it with all the furnishings and things.

I'm the manager at the Haskell House so I take care of all of the bookings and making sure that everybody's comfortable and has everything in order.

The Haskell House is actually an event venue.

The building is used for weddings, showers, parties, proms, pretty much any event that life throws at you, we can have at the Haskell House.

There's about 10,000 square feet, we have two levels that allows for additional seating so the main floor is where you would have your traditional main party and then the additional seating is built above the kitchenette and the bridal suite is where we have the mezzanine level.

They can use the building for fundraisers, high school events, as far as fitting into downtown it's the historical aspect.

It's still one of the original buildings from Main Street.

It's a nice part of being a small town, you get to know everybody and you get to be comfortable with where you're at but then you also get to feel like you get to pitch in with things and help out with rotary or the chamber events or Autumn Leaf or school events.

Different schools have different things going on so it's always nice to help out when they need volunteers and things like that too.

- Hi, I'm Ryan Winter and I'm here to talk about local entrepreneurship and manufacturing in a post-rust belt era.

I've always been an entrepreneur by nature.

Throughout elementary school and high school I'd always had some sort of side hustle or business idea.

And as soon as I turned 18, I went out and started my first legal business.

In 2008 when the economy downturned, I got laid off.

That was kind of a blow and I had to step back and think what am I gonna do with my life from here on.

In 2011, working my dad's wood shop, we came up with a couple product ideas that we started having a local machine shop make and we kind of showed them on the forums and people were interested in buying them.

So I said maybe this could be a real business idea and that's how my company Seneca Wood work was born.

For the first few years, we just bought parts from a local machine shop.

I would assemble them in my clarion apartment and then ship products from my spare bedroom.

Had some moments where the landlord kind of wanted to come and inspect and I think they probably thought this kid was selling drugs 'cause there was no external means of support and he kind of wanted to come in and look around and, you know, the mailman was coming a lot, you know, it was kind of a weird situation.

I had kind of a realization when we started getting orders from India and China that with the right mix and the right strategy, we can make a product in the USA that creates value for people worldwide.

In 2016, I realized I had outgrown my inventory space so I went to look for commercial space.

There's a building in Clarion that used to be an old vinyl window factory.

They had some space available so I rented that.

And then later in 2016, we bought our first machine and then by early 2017, we were up and manufacturing our own parts here in Clarion.

2020 came and the pandemic hit and we just had a moment of, oh crap.

Our sales tank manufacturing was shut down in Pennsylvania so we needed a pivot to keep the company afloat.

I realized that we could help people with the shortages of PPE and other protective gear.

I partnered with a couple of the local schools, we borrowed 3D printers and we just started 3D printing face shields.

That kind of example is a testament to the new industrial revolution that we're in now, we need to leverage that to bring some financial life back into towns like Clarion and other towns that had a lot of their manufacturing leave.

We're still a small company but we're advocating to try and get more people into the area.

Clarion's a great small town with a lot of promise.

We have a university, we have a lot of talent that comes through here.

We're right in the middle of the wilderness we have a lot of outdoor activities to do it's a great place to live and raise a family relatively affordable to live here but there's a lot of opportunity.

(soft music) - That's our town Clarion, a look at the Clarion county seat through the eyes of its residents.

Support for our town Clarion comes from Clarion University of Pennsylvania, shaping leaders since 1867 and redefining the college experience.

More information can be found at clarion.edu.

(soft music) And viewers like you.

Thank you.

(soft music) (bright upbeat music)