(soft music) - Welcome to Raystown Lake.

Located in Huntingdon County, Raystown Lake has been part of the community for more than 50 years.

While this area has a complicated history, today the lake is alive with natural beauty and recreation.

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, Raystown Lake.

Support for our town, Raystown Lake, comes from Seven Points Marina offering wet slips and rack storage along with pontoon and houseboat rentals.

Information at sevenpointsmarina.com.

Jim's Anchorage Hesston, a family owned business providing boat sales, service, and accessories to the public for more than 70 years.

Information at Jimsanchorage.com.

The Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau, engaging in tourism related projects designed to be beneficial to the visitor, the region and the members it serves.

Information at Raystown.org.

Juniata Brewing Company, Huntingdon, now with a second tap room in Duncansville.

Westminster Woods at Huntingdon, a Presbyterian senior living community.

Cisney and O'Donnell remodeling and pool builders.

Cisneyremodeling.com.

Lake Raystown Resort, information at Raystownresort.com.

Arise Federal Credit Union in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, the Happy Valley Adventure Bureau, and viewers like you.

Thank you.

- My name is Lizza Gutchaw and I'm here today to talk about fun activities on Raystown Lake.

(soft music) There's so much to do on Raystown Lake.

I'll start at the Northern end of the lake.

You can float the Raystown branch of the Juniata River, whether it's on an inner tube, a canoe or kayak.

You can hike to Hawn and Ridenour overlook.

And those are some of the most stunning views of Raystown Lake.

You can go Eagle watching at the top of the Raystown dam, where the pagoda is, and there's some stunning views there as well.

There are also two public recreation areas, Seven Points recreation area being the largest.

They have seven different campgrounds, hence the name Seven Points, large public beach that has a concession stand and water trampolines, lake house adventures.

There's also Seven Points Marina, where you can rent a houseboat, to pontoon boat, a fishing boat.

You can rent canoes, kayaks, stand up paddle boards and paddle around the lake from Rothrock Outfitters.

There's the Allegrippis Trail System where you can mountain bike.

It's an award-winning trail system.

One of the other public recreation areas is Chapman run.

That's a smaller beach.

It includes a playground and a picnic pavilion.

Boat launches.

There are seven different boat launches at Raystown Lake.

They're free to use.

You can launch any kind of boat, pontoon boat, houseboat, fishing boat.

So there's just so much to do.

I work for the Huntingdon County visitors bureau.

This is my sixth year promoting the region.

And my goal is to increase visitation.

We see hundreds of thousands of visitors every year who travel from all over the nation really.

I've seen people from other countries come to Raystown to enjoy the pristine undeveloped lake that we are so lucky to have in our backyard.

A lot of locals love it.

I've lived here my entire life, and some of my best childhood memories are swimming at the secret swimming holes and kayaking on the lake.

And now I get to do that with my family and teach my kids the swimming holes, and find the secret rope swings and whatnot.

One of my favorite things about living here is the sense of community and how much we take pride in our area.

And we want to see people enjoying the outdoor recreation opportunities and the small businesses that are in the area.

- Hi, my name is Nelson Wort, and today I'm going to talk about the Pennsylvania Striped Base Association.

(soft music) The Pennsylvania Striped Base Association.

is a all volunteer nonprofit organization that's engaged in a number of activities here at Raystown Lake.

But perhaps best known for our efforts to stock striped bass fingerlings in the lake each year.

Raystown Lake is regarded by most anglers as the premier lake to fish for Striped Bass in the Northeastern United States.

The fish grow large here.

Our Pennsylvania state record is a fish that weighed over 53 pounds.

The Striped bass thrive here, but they do not reproduce naturally in the lake.

Hence we have the need to, along with Pennsylvania fish commission, stock Striped bass fingerlings in the lake each year.

And we do that by two methods.

One, we operate a hatchery where we bring fish in from the lake, spawn them and put the offspring back into the lake for the general public to catch.

And secondly, when they're available, we may purchase fingerlings from outside sources and bring them to the lake to stock.

The spawning season is about six weeks in May, the first two weeks of June.

Our guys will go out on the boats to try to catch Striped Bass to bring into the lake.

These are big fish and they fight very hard.

And when we do get them on the boat, we put them in a special tube called a striper tube.

When the fish get to the hatchery, the first thing we need to do is to determine if we have a male or female Striped Bass.

At the appropriate time, the males and females are placed into the large 1200 gallon spawning tanks in the hatchery.

10 pound Striped Bass female will produce a million eggs.

So 20 pound striped bass female will produce up to 2 million eggs.

When the (indistinct) are very little, and as you look at the video, you can see the little fish swim up the top to the top of the hatching jar, where they're carried over into the aquarium.

We take some of those young pride to our pond and raise them to about three to four inches.

Other of those fries are stacked at various coves along the length of Raystown Lake.

When the fish are large enough to stock in the lake, we use trucks to bring them from our pond to stock up in the lake.

All, there are between 250,000 and 300,000 fingerlings stocked in the Lake each year.

Most of our volunteers enjoy fishing.

They enjoy time in the lake, but they realize that if you're taking from the lake, you need to put something back in.

And so that's what we do here, particularly since these fish can't reproduce themselves, only way we can maintain this quality fishery is to continually stock it.

And the goal of all, everything we do is to help maintain a vivid Striped Bass fishery here at lake Raystown and to hopefully provide an enjoyable fishing day for you and your family.

- I'm Ted Simpson.

And I'm here to tell you about my family's involvement in the original Raystown dam and the building of the first hydroelectric power project in our area.

(soft music) In 1904, my great great grandfather, Warren B Simpson and his brother, George Ernest Simpson were fishing on the Juniata River.

It's lure of the time that George looked at WB and said, this would be a great location for a hydroelectric power project.

And being great promoters as they were, they decided to go ahead and see if they could seek some public money here in the Huntingdon County area, which they did.

And they started out building the dam.

The original dam, they started building it in 1907.

It was completed in 1911.

My son is Liam Hatcher Simpson.

And Liam was able to do some of his own research, and we went over things with him and it was pretty interesting because he was able to capture that kind of spirit that I talk about.

- My great grandfather's handwritten journal recalls in November, 1911, the water crest, the stairway, and by December electric lights were turned on in Huntingdon and (indistinct) area.

- There was one of the very first hydroelectric power projects east of the Mississippi.

And I think that our area should be very proud of that.

For a number of years, there had been building pressure to go away from the private dam, which was probably nine to 12 miles.

And there were a lot of other communities that were involved when the Harbor Control Act of 1961 was used by eminent domain to enlarge the current lake into the watershed that it's at now.

I can remember my grandmother taking me by my hand, walking to the family cabin and saying, I want you to look at this.

And I want you to remember this the way that it is.

That was 1971.

I didn't quite understand what that meant, but it was very compelling years later to understand that there's half of that cabin under 65 feet of water.

And I currently live in the other half of the cabin that my family moved.

I have so many people that come up to me and say, I remember the old dam and my family had a cabin there, or they would say I had friends that would have my family down on specific weekends.

It was kind of a magical place where everybody could go and have fun.

It was our own version of the shore, our own version of the Jersey shore, or maybe Florida, right here in PA. - I'm John Lynn from James Creek, Pennsylvania.

I'm a retired dairy farmer.

And I'm here to talk about a barn moving that I did in the early 70s.

(soft music) My wife and I owned several small farms.

And one of them happened to be in the (indistinct) of the Raystown dam.

One farm, they needed 50 acres of it and they needed it for wildlife mitigation.

What that means is the water would probably never be up where my property is, unless it would be a hundred year flood, and they needed it for the wildlife when the dam was filling up to go to.

The property also has the house and barn on it.

The house is a solid brick house and the barn is a unique, big barn.

It's 50 feet wide, 85 feet long with a 20 foot wagon shed.

The army Corps, after several negotiations with them, we couldn't come to an agreement where they'd gimme enough money to build a new barn of similar size and of unique qualities that it had.

In the early 70s there, I read an article in the Pennsylvania Farmer Magazine, where a guy had to move a house in a barn away from a road construction job.

I jotted down his name, phone number, and I called him and I asked him if he'd be interested in looking over my project.

So he came and looked it over and said, there's no problem.

He says, I can have the barn out of this (indistinct) in four days.

I said, well, then get started.

He moved in 27 ton of steel, steel I beams, and a 350 John Deere high lift and four big tripod hydraulic jacks with a central pumping system and a gauge that could tell you how much he was lifting when he jacked the barn up.

So while he was getting the barn prepared, I contacted a local saw miller by the name of Glen Baker and he brought his D8 bulldozer over and leveled a new spot up on the remaining ground that I own.

So when the barn mover got the barn ready to go, the 50 foot direction over the barn, he put smaller I beams.

And then the main beam where the dollys would be hooked to was like a A frame.

And there was two dolly at the back and one dolly up front.

They started up to the new location, which was about three to 400 yards.

And when they got to the new location, they parked the barn there and then they jacked it up a little higher than what we wanted.

And then a contractor from Alexander, Paul Hagus come and build a new foundation under, and that's where the barn sits today.

- Hi, I'm Susan Penning, and I'm here to talk about the Allegrippis Trail System.

(upbeat music) This was a collaboration between mainly the friends of Raystown Lake and a number of other nonprofit organizations that serve the Raystown Lake region.

But honestly, the magic of this project was really in the countless volunteer hours that were put in to make these trails possible and continue to make them more popular and expand what they offer here.

There's 36 miles of world renowned trails here, and they were built four mountain bikers by mountain bikers.

And there are anything from beginner to advanced, and you can just slow your speed down if you need to do that, based on the difficulty that you're running into.

We live about two miles from the Allegrippis Trail System.

And my son is essentially growing up on the trails.

His name's Eli, and he rides with his dad very frequently, and with myself occasionally, although he has surpassed my skill a long time ago.

So it's just really neat to see him ride the trails because here's this nine year old and he's offering riding tips and his stories to these adult mountain bikers when he is on the trail.

And it's just been really neat to see how he's invested his time in the trail system.

Eli loves the skills park.

That's where he starts.

And that's usually where he ends when he is finished in the day.

The Raystown mountain biking skills park is one really cool way that riders can expand their skills, can get comfortable with the trails.

They've got turns and jumps and all different kinds of fun things that anyone can do at any skill level.

Eli now has this little YouTube channel he calls Eli Outdoors, where he chronicles his Raystown adventures, and we're really blessed to live right down the street from this and have it be a part of our lives.

- Hello, my name is Max Prosser.

I'm a part of the Filson family.

And I'm here to talk about Jim's Anchorage and Seven Points Marina on Raystown Lake.

(soft music) I was born in Winchester, Virginia, but then moved back to Huntingdon when I was younger and immediately was a part of the business as a young kid.

Jim's Anchorage was started by my grandfather, Jim Filson in 1946.

The business has been around for over 50 years, at this point 70 years, providing boat, boat sales and boat rental on Raystown Lake.

Jim's Anchorage was started on the old dam on Raystown Lake.

The idea was to rent out little Jon boat skiffs so people could view the lake and have fun and also store their boat somewhere on the lake in a wet slip.

As the business progressed, and Jim was able to quit his job as a history teacher, he invested fully in the business.

And right about the time that he really went full into it, the US Army Corps of Engineers came and renovated Raystown Lake and made it into the project that it is today.

So whenever the US Army Corps of Engineers came to Raystown to make the Raystown recreation area, our business was destroyed.

Jim put 10 to 15 years of hard work in, and he had to kind of erase that and restart.

Mid 70s to late 70s, the process of bidding for the land for Seven Points Marina came, and then around 76 Jim's Anchorage and Seven Points Marina both were existing once again.

My title was four generations of family business.

So the first generation I would say was Jim Filson and Peg Filson, who is my grandfather and grandmother.

The second would be my mom and my aunts and uncles, which is Pam, Cis and BJ.

Third would be the kids of my uncles and aunts, which would be Melissa and Ben.

And then I'm the fourth.

I'm a solo fourth generation Seven Points Marina, Jim's Anchorage, marketing assistant.

I would say the thing that I like the most about Raystown Lake is the community, the people that have been developed over however many years this place has been here.

There's so many people of different walks of life and different backgrounds that all come together to have fun on Raystown Lake.

There's a lot of people that have a lot of anger behind what happened.

And a lot of people that were affected and their lives were destroyed.

And there's also a lot of people that were able to benefit.

Our family was one that was able to benefit.

It's gonna mention that not everyone had it like we did.

As a business that emphasizes having fun on the lake with the boat sales and the boat rentals and people being able to have their slips down on Raystown Lake, I just really like that we're able to foster a community on the lake for people to come and have fun and have a weekend to not think about anything, but just the views and the fun of having a lake in your town.

- Hi, my name's Dylan Baker and I'll be talking about Lake Raystown Resort.

(soft music) Lake Raystown Resort located at the Southern end of the lake.

I'm opened at stores in 1984, kind of as a campground.

I later added the lodge, which is kind of like a motel room.

From there we added 24 pine cabins.

We have six maple cabins.

We have 25 villas, 12 Oak Park cottages, 12 beach from bungalows, two yurts.

We do have a conference center which holds very elaborate weddings and business meetings.

We are known for our Proud Mary, which is a tour boat that takes tours of the lake.

We are also known for our firework display that we have three times a year.

Lake Raystown Resort is one of the only resorts that is waterfront.

So people can pull their travel trailers, campers right up to the water.

We have a wild river water park, which currently has a very large pool as well as two water slides.

We are one of the only water parks in our area.

We also have boat rentals, so people can rent pontoon boats and fun ships for the day.

People do tubing and skiing, water skiing.

We have Portside Rentals, which is a separate company that's located on our property.

They do jet skis, they do paddle boards, they do kayaks.

We also have daily activities with our activities department.

Kids 12 and under can come by free of charge, of course, to do different various activities with our activities, director and intern.

We have awesome views.

The staff is very welcoming, very hospitable.

It's just a great place to come for for anybody.

I live in Huntingdon County, just a few miles from Lake Raystown Resort.

So I grew up in the area.

I grew up going to the water park and camping at the resort.

I love the area.

I stuck around.

I started a family here.

I have a wife and a daughter.

It's just a great place to work and a great area to live in.

- Hi, my name is Mary Kelly, and today I'm going to talk about Trough Creek.

(soft music) Trough Creek park is part of the Rothrock State Forest and that there's recreation, there's camping and hiking and fishing and all kinds of fun recreation, all along the beautiful Trough Creek.

It was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps and it opened in the 30s.

It was initially part of the industrial revolution.

There's a furnace there that was used for the workers to produce their coal and iron ore. My favorite thing about this area is that it's where the woods meet the water and you get the best of both worlds.

So you can go boating and you're always surrounded by the woods as well.

I am not from the area.

My husband is from Pennsylvania.

His family settled here because they wanted to be closer to the Raystown Lake recreation and everything that the beautiful area has to offer.

And the Trough Creek State Park is my favorite place to go for hiking.

My favorite trail is the balanced rock trail.

You walk over the Trough Creek over a suspension bridge, and then you're walking on a trail right along the beautiful trough Creek.

You walk by the rainbow falls, which is beautiful.

And then you keep going up up, up until you get to the balanced rock, which is a huge boulder that's balanced on the side of a cliff.

And it's really cool to behold.

What keeps us here is isolation from the rest of the world.

It's nice to have space.

It's nice to be on the east coasts and close to the bigger cities, but far enough away that we can still find our peace and tranquility.

You can keep on going and going and going and run into nothing but trees and animals.

- Hi, my name's Matt Price.

I'm the director of the Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau.

And I'm gonna talk today about the current Raystown Dam.

(soft music) I think it's kind of critical to this whole story of our town, Raystown Lake, because it's the reason we're all here.

This dam was built in the late 60s, finished construction in 1973 and was dedicated by vice president, Gerald Ford in 1974.

And it holds back 8,300 surface acres of water, which creates the lake that we all know and love today.

When you look down from right now or overlook, from left to right, you're seeing the stone work, which is the actual constructed dam.

There's no concrete in it.

It is literally a pile of stone.

That is what obstructs the river.

Then you have the top of the dam in the pagoda, which is kind of visiting area.

And then there's the regular spillway.

And then the far right is the, what they call the unregulated spillway.

And kind of in the middle of that, there's this kind of concrete boxy looking structure, that's the intake for the Matson power plants.

So now that is what we would consider the main spillway because the normal flow of the river goes through that power plant instead of out over the Army Corps of Engineers spillway.

The power plant produces power for about 8,000 homes.

And that power plant is a run of river power plant so it can handle up to somewhere around 2000 cubic feet per second.

Normal flow is somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 to 2000 cubic feet per second, depending on what's going on upstream.

So anything above that then is diverted through the Army Corps of Engineers spillway, and that has three shoots.

It's got a center shoot, which is kind of their temperature control shoot.

So that has basically a big long tube that goes down and can pull water from various depths of the lake and kind of mix them in so that the downstream temperature is regulated.

The far right, there's the diversion tunnel.

So the diversion tunnel was used during construction to literally divert the river away from where they were building the dam.

So it's literally a tunnel that goes through the mountain and while they were constructing it, the river went through that tunnel.

It would be the equivalent of the bathtub drain for the lake.

And then above that is what they call the natural spillway or the uncontrolled spillway.

So that is where they cut into the mountain and used all that rock to make the dam.

But where they cut into the mountain, it's a natural stone surface that's part of the mountain, it's not constructed.

And so that spillway it's at a lower level than the manmade dam.

So that if for some reason, the inundation is so bad that the two regulated spillways can't handle it.

So the power plant and the Army Corps of Engineer's main spillway, if they can't handle it, then it would overtop this natural spillway.

And it's not going to erode very fast, it's solid rock.

Where if it were to rise to a level where it would overtake the manmade dam, the rock pile, that would've erode very quickly.

That's what causes catastrophic dam failures.

So they've got a number of ways to protect that and to protect the downstream areas from a massive failure.

We welcome about a million visitors per year.

For 2020 and 2021, we had so much visitation in this area, because we're such an outdoor recreation spot, and that's what people were seeking to do during the COVID pandemic.

So we're now seeing more demand on a regular basis coming to the area.

And we love to see that.

That's why the Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau is here.

- Hi, this is Ron Rabena, and I'm gonna talk about the Friends of Raystown Lake today.

(soft music) Friends of Raystown Lake was started in 1989 as an annual lake cleanup on Saturday of Labor Day.

We do a lot of things there.

We have interns from Juniata College give the conservation environmental talks to all the visitors in the place.

And we take care of the mile marker lights at night and out here on the lake, and sponsor a bunch events, Close Swim, Chalk The Walk.

Probably our biggest deal is that we own and operate the Allegrippis mountain bike trails.

We're up to 36 miles, plus the skills park.

We do a lot of things in partnership with the Army Corps of Engineers.

We're at a 501C three corporation, and so able to secure these grants that the Corps can't go get.

We're in the middle right now of about a hundred thousand dollars worth of grants to improve the shoreline stabilization and the fishery habitat.

We also lease and operate a former boy scout camp down in the Southern part of the lake.

Putt's Camp is a place for Scouts, nonprofit groups, church groups, and things like that, that they can camp kind of primitive.

But we just received a grant from energy transfer.

They gave us a complete solar system.

So we're starting to get things electrified out there to make it a whole lot better.

Friends of Raystown Lake the chance for me to give back, I've been involved since the beginning.

I've been president since 1990, except for two years when I ran the campgrounds out here.

I've seen this place really become busy.

It's quite the place to be now as far as the destination to go to.

And that's part of something that we helped and along with a lot of other outfits that are partners here also helped.

This place is really a magical jewel.

And we're just trying to keep his place nice and make it better.

- My name is John Leslie, and I'm here to talk about the Raystown Dam Divers.

(rhythmic music) We are a group of friends who got together starting in 2019 and started diving the old powerhouse that has been flooded in the new lake.

We started diving the dam.

Four of us went down and tried to navigate.

We all saw the exact same thing, but we spent two hours afterwards arguing about what we just saw.

And we realized we needed to know what's down there.

So we started mapping out things, building models to get an idea of where to go, what to see.

We realized there's a lot of stories that we didn't understand.

Then we started pulling more information together and doing research to get the whole story.

No one has really done a lot of research on the old powerhouse since the internet came around.

We reached out and found a lot of obscure things that hadn't been put into the current books about the area, and really just pieced together how that world worked and what the old lake life was like.

There's a few individuals who have a large collections of old pictures and photos.

We'd kill to see some video from before the old dam was flooded in '72.

Diving conditions there are pretty grueling.

Everything we do starts at about 120 there.

The deepest is about 160 feet below the surface, average temperature is about 40 degrees year round, visibility ranges anywhere from two to 15 feet.

We like to compare it to walking around in the backyard with just a cigarette lighter, trying to navigate.

So if you want to get around, you really have to put it all together in your head one small piece at a time.

We get asked a lot, do we see fish of any sort?

And the answer is pretty much no.

We see little ones at the surface.

Every once in a while, when you're down deep and dark, you'll see this kind of shadow off in the distance that maybe might have been a fish.

They're scared of our bubbles.

They come nowhere near us.

And I mean, they may be close to us, but if they're more than 15, 10 feet away, we can't see them anyway.

Raystown Lake is actually one of my favorite places to be.

The feeling of being on the lake with without houses around in any commercial.

It's so quiet and everywhere you go, there's always a quiet corner to find.

It's just beautiful year round.

It's an amazing place.

It's got so much history in the area and a lot of underwater now that keeps us fascinated.

- My name is Jud Millar, and I own and run Stone Mountain Adventures and Overnight Summer Camp for teenagers.

(soft music) My parents started Stone Mountain Adventures in 1983 when I was 10 years old, so grew up at camp.

And my wife and I have been running camp since 2001.

And my wife and I took over the family business in 2008.

The purpose of Stone Mountain Adventures is to provide growth experiences for our campers, teenagers, through our awesome camp activities and the cooperative group process of living together at camp.

We primarily focus on outdoor adventure activities, such as mountain biking, horseback riding, and rock climbing, water sports, including wakeboarding, water skiing, sailing, standup paddle boarding, white water rafting, canoeing, kayaking, traditional sports, community service, and creative arts.

So lots of fun.

Our goal is to get kids outside unplugged and excited about something.

I think we're able to fulfill our mission every summer, every session.

About 60% of our campers return each summer, and we hear back from campers all the time that attended Stone Mountain Adventures 20 years ago.

And I have a series of questions that I ask, one of which is always, so 20 years on, how often do you think of Stone Mountain Adventures?

And they're often like, about once a week.

Which is pretty remarkable to think about something that happened 20 years ago, but it's still a part of your daily, weekly consciousness.

I do love what I do.

I call it an occupation, and I get to be a small business owner, but make a real difference, positive difference in kids' lives.

The amazing thing about living in Huntingdon County is our geographic location, with the rivers and the mountains and the lakes, and just the lush wilderness.

We're able to do all the awesome activities that we offer right in our backyard.

- My name is Lois Wilson, and I'm gonna talk about the Old Raystown band.

(soft music) Oh, it was wonderful.

I've done everything in the old day.

I'm swimming, canoeing, tubing.

There wasn't nothing I didn't like to do.

And I really enjoyed floating from the of the dam down to the Juniata river.

That was a great thing to do to pass time.

I'm probably one of the survivors of the old dam.

I am 96.

When we first got married, we lived right off of Hawn's Bridge.

And every time it would rain too much, my husband would go out the middle, might put a stick along the water, and then we'd go back to bed for a couple hours.

Then they'd get up to see how fast the water was coming up, whether we were going to move out or up.

And we only had water in the house once.

But usually up until you have dam, I don't think we had a phone then.

They would come down and tell us as the boards were about to come off.

that means the water was going to come up.

Sunday morning, the whole neighborhood was there to help pose the place down.

Everybody was so friendly and so nice at the old dam.

We knew everybody.

I knew every part of the new dam pretty much too.

I love it today.

At first, I wasn't too sure I liked the idea.

We were gonna lose a lot of property.

Our family lost a little over 300 acres gram, and my husband was living then and we were gonna lose a lot and I was a little sad, but I got over it.

I got over it.

One of the first experiences was when we were loud on at the dam and no motors.

We canoed from Snyder's run down to James Creek and I fell in love with the dam.

The swimming area looked like a landing strip for an airplane.

I really fell in love with the dam.

I just loved it all because I traveled.

I love to swim.

I just love water.

- My name's Dwight Bill.

And I'm gonna talk about arriving at Raystown and starting to form partnerships with other groups.

(upbeat music) I'm a graduate of Penn State University, degree in forest science.

And I got on with the US Army Corps of Engineers as a ranger/forester.

Being a Penn State grad, I was in love with Central Pennsylvania.

I wanted to work here and luckily got the job.

Upon my arrival here in 1987, I felt there was such a passion from the local community for this project.

There was a program back then called Take Pride in America.

And so we started a cleanup day.

We started recruiting volunteers to help clean up the lake, the grounds, the waters.

We decided to try to organize our group, which we called the Friends of Raystown Lake.

Well, one thing led to another and the friends got involved in other things, fish structure, navigation lights, things like that.

And we actually formed a paper partnership that made the friends a management partner with us.

The friends was the tip of the iceberg.

It certainly it wasn't the only partnership that made a difference in Raystown.

But one of them is the Raystown Visitors Bureau.

We managed to incorporate the Raystown visitors bureau into this building.

They greet every visitor that comes in, so that in and of itself, they have become a partner, not only in the operation of this building, but through other programming, they've become a partner in a lot of the things that the Corps does.

Then I think there's another great partnership that we established.

Juniata college has 400 acres leased on Raystown Lake.

So they have a new field station out there now.

Not only is it a Juniata college asset for their students, but we felt that there was a great potential to invite secondary and elementary students in to start learning about process particularly.

The Field Station's got complete lab, kitchen, meeting spaces, dormitories, and everything else.

In association with the friends and the Field Station, we created another program called RACEP, Raystown Conservation and Education Program to use some Juniata college students through the summer.

And the focus is on STEM, trying to get young kids interested in the biological and physical sciences and get them enamored so that maybe someday they'll pursue that course of study.

And the last one I wanna talk about, which is really near and dear to my heart.

Wheelin' Sportsmen is a one day controlled hunt for people with mobility issues.

A lot of them are in wheelchair, haven't been able to get in the woods.

At the end of the hunt, when you see the smiles on the faces, the participants, especially those that may have got a shot off that day, there's not a dry eye in the house.

I always enjoyed the planning, the working with people to get things done that people said couldn't be done.

So that's my fulfillment.

That was my own personal satisfaction to go home at the end of the day, with a win, knowing that I overcame an obstacle.

- Hi, I am Scott's Odyssey.

And I'm here to tell you about the displacement of all the families before they filled the second part of the big lake.

(rhythmic music) The Simpson family had the Raystown dam and there was a lake behind it, and people were visiting that all the time.

Along came the Army Corps of Engineers and under the guise of Safe Harbor Act and flood mitigation decided that they had a better plan.

And what they ended up doing was displacing a large number of people through essentially eminent domain.

The event of moving these residents was very traumatic to them.

I've spoken with a few of them who are still around and some that have actually passed on now.

And the stories are similar, where they state their voices were not heard at the County or more so they were likely heard, but they were ignored.

And then the Army Corps of Engineers came in with a plan.

The plan was to essentially give equal property asset to each owned home, give the residents a comparable home on their new property or enough money to build a home on their new property or move the actual home to the new property if it was possible.

And that's the good part of the story.

There's a darker side to that story though, that people like to ignore.

The parts where if you were a resident and you didn't accept the original plan, your home, or as it's stated in the records, even though the pictures show you houses, they call them cabins.

And now your cabin was condemned through easement and eminent domain.

One of the Simpsons buildings, their actual cabin was condemned by the Army Corps of Engineers who stated it wouldn't survive the move.

So the Simpsons actually took it upon themselves to load it up on the back of a truck and moved it to one of their other properties, 30 miles away on the top of the mountain.

The rest of the homes that remained in the valley after this were just raised and the rubble was removed.

Then there are the cemeteries which were all claimed to be moved.

H alone had 407 graves, and there are a good number of other cemeteries that we know of that are under the water.

And to this day, there are at least three other cemeteries that sit right on the edge of the water line.

I've lived in the area for cumulatively 20 years.

This is the only place in the world that I've ever lived, where there are four seasons and they're perfectly separated three months each.

You could set your watch by it.

It's just something new every three months.

It's quiet.

It's slow.

Not the people, but the lifestyle is slow.

And when I wake up in the morning, I make a decision, am I going to work or am I going fishing?

- My name is Kylie Hahn.

And I'm going to be talking about the former town of H. (calm music) What's significant about it is people who come to the lake who aren't from this area may have heard stories about, oh, there are entire towns that are underwater, and there are structures if you go under the lake.

and those are kind of legends you hear about Raystown Lake.

But in reality, there was a small village.

It was called H. And they were a small community that had a post office, that had a general store and a thriving community of people who took care of each other.

H was part of the land that was under eminent domain.

So the people who live there had to give up their houses and their land in order to move to other places.

You might be able to see some parts of the railroad that went through that area if the lake pools are really low, but other than that, you wouldn't know that there was once a town there.

One of the structures was a horse barn.

It was a place that housed Clydesdale's and other large draft horses.

And it was eventually one of the places that was moved to another location when people had to leave for the lake to come in.

The buildings into town were either moved or they were destroyed.

Like if divers would go underneath the lake right now, you wouldn't find anything.

But the Huntingdon and Broad Top railroad line was about one mile east of Markleysburg, and the railroad line crossed east over an area called Paradise Furnace, where a little station was built by a gentleman named Jacob Armen.

This brick building ended up being the general store.

It ended up being the post office for H. H had about 75 people who lived in a town.

And there were about 30 dwellings.

Towns like H are important to remember because there are generations of people who don't really know that there were people who lived along the area where the lake is and they gave up their homes and they gave up their businesses for the lake to come in.

I like that this is a community that truly does take care of each other.

If there's something that goes wrong with anyone, people step up to the plate and they take care of each other.

And it's not just in Huntingdon, but it's all of the communities along Raystown Lake.

We all are connected to each other.

- I'm Lonnie Smith Jr. And I'm with the Huntingdon County History and Heritage Roundtable.

And I'm gonna talk about heritage tourism.

(soft music) The Huntingdon County History and Heritage Roundtable kind of started in late 2018.

We are representatives from most of the museums and historical societies in Huntingdon County.

And we collaborate together on projects.

We came out with a wonderful brochure that has all our museum historical sites on it, along with the website to go along with it.

And we're working on documenting monuments in one room school houses now.

But we work together mainly to promote each other cause we're all in the same boat.

And just helping promote one each other so people know what's going on in every part of the County.

We have great attractions like the Swigart Museum, celebrating over a hundred years of being America's oldest car museum, to the East Broad Top Railroad celebrating 150 years, Rockhill Trolley Museum, the Isett Heritage Museum.

We just have some wonderful places that we welcome everyone to come and visit.

It's incredible the small little tidbits you learn, whether it's something famous or all the industry we have.

Everyone knows we're a farming industry, but we got the coal mining region.

The canal was a major part of transportation and shipping at one time.

And then the railroad took over and it was a major railroad hub.

Huntingdon County has lots of attractions and the Lake's popularity has really helped our historical attractions grow and increase visitors.

It's not just having the locals see what's in their backyard, but having people from all over experience what rich history and heritage we have to offer.

I've been into local history since I was 14 years old.

And now I serve on several boards and committees.

I just have a passion for our local history and heritage.

My family's been in the Raystown Lake region Woodcock valley area since the revolutionary war.

I have revolutionary war ancestors buried just down the road.

Our family was one of the ones that were removed from the lake when the lake project occurred in '74.

My ancestors, the Shells had a large farm that was taken over.

I definitely recommend when you come to the Raystown Lake region, visit as many attractions, museums and restaurants that you can because we have some wonderful home cooked meals and some great stories to go along with the area and the pieces we have to share with everyone.

It definitely is a small town feel.

A lot of people know each other.

Most people are very friendly in this area.

You could walk down the street and get several hellos.

Hi, how are yous.

And here at the lake, you definitely say hello and get a lot of friendly faces from the tourists and the locals.

We just wanna make you feel welcome.

- Hi, my name is Claire Grove, and I'm going to speak about the manufacturing aspects of this Woodcock valley.

(soft music) My family was connected with about everything that went on in the manufacturing things.

From that point, Tussey mountain had a lot of iron ore.

It still does.

It's high grade ore, and we had Paradise Furnace.

They mine iron ore.

But the Grove brothers from Montour County, they bought most of the leases from the iron and they shipped the iron ore up to their places at Burwick.

The others went to Johnstown by mule train or the Huntingdon broad top railroad come in 1855, and then they shipped a lot of it to Johnstown.

And then of course from the iron industry, we did have timber, there was sawmills by the dozens.

Most every township had three or four sawmills in it.

My father had a sawmill and my grandfather had a sawmill.

The agriculture of course was a big thing.

Along the river, the soil was rich.

There was farms all up and down along the river and limestone over in the valley here.

The railroad of course gave you plenty of room to haul it wherever you needed.

I'm related to about everybody in the valley, as far as that's concerned.

And I don't know if there's any better place to live in United States, let's put it that way.

- Hi, my name is Jacob Swifmyer, and I am going to talk about the Isett heritage museum.

Isett heritage museum is open all months of the year.

It is on Stone Creek Ridge, right outside of Huntingdon.

The museum is central Pennsylvania's largest collection of memorabilia.

It started as a personal collection and it has grown quite significantly with donations that have come in from the community, from all around the state.

J. Melvin Isett, the founder of our museum, him and his wife Beulah collected for 70 years.

He had always had the idea of opening a museum.

He was able to open the museum in 2001.

We have three show buildings containing over 40,000 items on display that depict life of just average Americans from 1800s to now.

I am a docent.

So I am responsible for giving tours.

In pat up here, so obviously that's what holds the ink.

These rollers are down there.

So they're gonna go up ink on them.

So as they go down, you'll notice that the pad actually turns the same place is it getting rolled over all the time.

And then it rolls over (indistinct) have to place them backwards.

We also do some curation, just setting up the different exhibits and things of that nature.

We pride ourselves on what we have that people can remember from their lives, but also some unique items that they have never seen before.

We have a stone tablet from the original temple on the Island of Malta from the lights of Malta.

We have some of their wardrobe and stuff along with six human skulls and 12 human femur bones.

We're actually currently getting genetic testing on through Juniata college.

Most of our stuff is from the 1800s onward though, because this area was developed in the 1790s.

We also pride ourselves on the stuff that we can actually demonstrate that still works from history.

We are able to demonstrate some farm equipment that still operates such as a corn sheller and a 200 year old wooden fanning mill.

We have some tin shop equipment that is from the 1800s.

It also still works.

We have two operable printing presses.

We have several working victrolas, two working juke boxes, a working player piano, and an operable sawmill.

The lake being here has really benefited just the tourism industry around this area as a whole.

A lot of people are coming to visit the lake, but they also are coming to visit the surrounding attractions.

I really enjoy the nature of this area, the natural beauty of this area with the rolling ridges and it's beautiful driving through the woods and walking through the woods, just things of that nature.

- My name is Joe Vitel.

I'm here to talk about my family's life on the old Raystown and love of boats.

(gentle music) My grandmother who lived in California gave me my first boat for my 10th birthday.

And it was like having an automobile with a driver's license at 10, because I could run up and down the miles of navigable waterway on the old lake.

My brother is John, next brother, Andy.

We all just love being on the old Raystown dam.

We have a picture of us as kids trying to build the pyramid on the old lake with other boys who now still live around the lake, but we've been friends ever since.

My sister was married, was having a reception at the Raystown cottage of ours.

And my brothers and I decided that we would arrive at the reception in our tuxedos on water skis.

And many years later, I was in a bar in Philadelphia.

And the woman next to me at the bar said, where are you from?

I said, I'm from Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, Raystown Lake.

And she said, oh, one of the funniest things.

You'll never believe it, but I was there one time.

And there were two guys on water skis in tuxedos with another guy running the boat in a tuxedo.

And I looked at her and I said, well, you're looking at one of the guys who was on the water skis.

I love the Raystown area.

I've put 86 years in here.

And I've been all over the world.

I've been all over the United States.

Recently covered 9,600 miles in a motor home and found that Trough Creek valley is still the prettiest place I could find in all of the United States and Canada.

- My name is Reid Spoke.

I'm here to talk about one day that we had training for this annual ski show, which we worked hard at and never got to be in the show.

(calm music) That's all we did was ski.

Every day was skiing.

Everybody skied here.

The Filsons started a ski show and they were all excellent skiers.

And their main purpose was that they were gonna have professionals come up from Florida to do a five man pyramid.

My good friend, Joe Biddle said, well, we can do a five man pyramid.

Not that we've ever even tried it, but if it's on skis, we could do it.

So we practiced and practiced.

And finally, the day of the ski show, Joe said, well, we can do a five man pyramid.

And Jim Filson said, well, I don't care.

It's no local people, you're still not gonna do it.

And we had one picture of us doing it to prove that we did it.

And the biggest kicker was when we went to the ski show to see the professionals, they started off with five skiers and worked their way up and dropped their skis.

They held onto their rope, which we never even thought, why didn't we hold on our ropes?

So we were up there balancing ourselves and could have been a lot easier.

This was a summer home for me.

We spent our summers here, a wonderful place.

And then we lived here until the new dam came through.

And then you weren't allowed to live on the water.

We moved in New Jersey.

I came back here to retire.

Get a lot of people come in.

Surprises me how many people didn't even know about it, but it's a wonderful place to be and to grow up.

And it's just a perfect place.

- Hi, my name is Steve Grove, and I am here to talk about the history of my family's maple production in Raystown country.

(soft music) My great grandfather, Benjamin Fouse Grove purchased the first commercial evaporator in 1914.

He took a model T Ford truck and drove to New York, bought a king evaporator, 50 bucket spirals and lids and started commercial maple syrup production.

The next step was he did plant some trees, body expanded, as far as that goes, purchasing more buckets, starting to commercially sell syrup in a liquid form.

Maple is many different things, maple syrup, but there is also a lot of derivatives that can be made from maple syrup.

Originally, all the farmers made sugar out of maple sap, and that was what they did.

That was their sugar supply for the year.

Grandma who's in some of the photos making candy, cooked it on the cook stove, which takes a long time.

We average around 45 to 46 gallon to make a gallon.

So there's a lot of steam comes off of it and it loosens wallpaper and things like that.

Usually in a year, we average between 150 to 200 gallon, strictly gravity tubing.

We are traditional evaporator.

We burn wood, where most of your larger producers use oil fired.

It is kind of a sideline, always has been as a part to the farm first crop of the year.

It's just what we do.

It's in my blood and it's probably gonna stay there as a generational type of a business.

I do enjoy it.

It's a good time of the year to be out in the woods, doing what we do.

And I'm my own best customer.

So it's a tradition.

- My name's Maria Africa.

I'm gonna talk about the old Raystown.

(soft music) My great grandfather and another man, Morris Dunn got together and bought a farm on the (indistinct) Ridge side of the water.

The farm consisted of nice log farm house.

It had a big house with a beehive bake oven in it.

It had a large fireplace.

From the beginning since they had it, there was a lot of cousins and friends and everything.

Wanna mention, especially uncle Edith.

He was a very popular place with everyone.

He was a two hold odd house.

This property was lost because of the construction of the new dam.

The farm was one side of the water and the cabin my father and his brother built was on the terrace mountain side.

It was supposedly the first log cabin built on the Raystown.

To get supplies over, you had to take it over in a boat.

I grew up there spent many summers there after my father passed away.

There was a road put in the early 50s and eventually they added on a kitchen and eating porch.

We had a lot of fun out there, a lot of swimming, canoeing, boating.

I think that Huntingdon County has a lot of things going for it.

I've been in this area for the last 76 years so to speak.

A lot of history in this area, I'm still learning.

- My name's Bruce Bergman.

And my story is about why I moved to Raystown.

(soft music) I moved to Raystown to continue the lifestyle I grew up with.

I grew up in Atlantic city around water.

The two main sports in Langley High School were swimming and rowing rather than football and basketball because it was an ocean area.

And the jobs for teenagers then, and a lot of people into adulthood was working as a lifeguard on the beach.

After I grew up, I moved into the Western suburbs of Philadelphia and raised my kids there, but there was no activities similar to what I was familiar with.

And I was a youth pastor at the time.

And one of the kids said there was a lake up here when we came to creation.

And I thought I could go back to continuing that lifestyle after my kids were grown, so I moved up here.

I've been here for 23 years, which is a record for me.

I've never lived more than four years at any place before that.

The reason I've stayed so long is the lifestyle, the people, laid back attitude, the cost of living and lack of crime.

The most favorite thing that I have is the lake itself.

I met my wife 17 years ago and our vacations are weekends during the summer.

We don't go anywhere except on the lake.

The other thing is I've started a number of businesses in the area.

Years ago when I came up here, I became a partner in a boat dealership and I realized that if you sell boats, you can't use them during the summer cause you have to work weekends.

So that didn't work out real well for this lifestyle thing I was looking for.

So I started selling used cars and I did that for 21 years.

And I just had an opportunity at 72 to take over a service department as well.

I think Raystown's a great area because the people are down to earth.

It's a rural agricultural area.

The number one business in the area is farming.

Farmers and their children grow up knowing what life and death's all about, what hard work's all about and what caring about people and animals is all about.

I think that if you adopt that as your lifestyle, you'll be pretty successful.

- I'm Tammy Hetrick.

And I'm here to talk about how my grandfather took his case to Congress to fight against the Army Corps seizing his ground.

(soft music) My great grandparents on my grandfather's side bought the farm in the 40s.

And after my great-grandfather died in 1959, my grandfather and grandmother decided that they would buy the farm.

And in the 1962 project of Raystown Lake, the army secretary decided to do a feasibility of recreation for the area and came back and decided that he would take 29,000 acres.

And on that 29,000 acres was all of my grandfather's farm that he had just put in since '62, a massive Christmas tree farm, built a new home.

And because it wasn't part of the flood plan or anything like that.

And so he fought them to Supreme court and then had the case heard before Congress again.

When my grandfather began fighting this in the court system, we had two sides of the Upper Corners Road.

And on the other side, they were gonna take all of that ground too.

So he started subdividing and he put 10 other people into the mix.

And that was how he ended up getting to keep the other side of the road, but they were still gonna take the 67 acres.

And then he fought for the money because he invested in this Christmas tree farm.

And my grandfather always said after paying the lawyers and the court costs and everything, he came out with $84 an acre for his ground and he moved his house.

You had to tear down all of your homes, your barns, and all of that stuff.

My grandmother was really upset about the whole situation.

But they moved their A-frame down to where it's still located today.

And they tore down the barn.

There was three triaxial loads of rocks, and two of them were dropped on the piece of property that I bought.

And my grandparents built a closed in porch out of them and used them for the floor.

My aunt just recently in the last few years put in a Stonewall.

And that's the reason why I have the ground that I have is because he fought them and we were able to keep a small portion of the ground.

He had told me that he felt like the lake was a good thing for the area economically wise, and that the value of the property had increased enough because of the lake being here, that he felt like he earned his money back.

The recreation aspect of the area, growing up, swimming in the lake boating, just all of the hiking and the new bike trails, it's a real nice resource for the community.

And I get to enjoy it too, and it'll be here for forever.

And it has been a benefit to Huntingdon County as a whole.

(gentle music) - And that's our town, Raystown Lake.

A look at this Huntingdon County region through the eyes of its residence.

Support for our town, Raystown Lake comes from Seven Points Marina, offering wet slips and rack storage along with pontoon and houseboat rentals.

Information at sevenpointsmarina.com.

Jim's Anchorage Hesston, a family owned business, providing boat sales, service, and accessories to the public for more than 70 years.

Information at Jimsanchorage.com.

The Huntingdon County Visitors Bureau, engaging in tourism related projects designed to be beneficial to the visitor, the region and the members it serves.

Information at Raystown.org, and viewers like you.

Thank you.