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Mackeyville Area
THE MANY NAMES OF MACKEYVILLE by Lou Bernard
Community names can come from some odd reasons. Over the years, none of them have been quite as strange as some of the names for what is now Mackeyville.
Today, Mackeyville is an unincorporated community in Lamar Township, which was itself named after a Revolutionary War soldier who never set foot in the area. The community was founded in the early 1830s by grist mill and sawmill owner John Reeseman, mainly as a place for his employees to live. The material used for the mill was mainly slabs of wood, which is what led the place to initially be called“ Slabtown.”
Some years later, the name changed. At that point, the community was called Hamburg. You’ d think that this was after Hamburg, Germany, especially as nearby Salona was named in a similar fashion after a community in Greece. But you’ d be wrong. A local judge, Judge Quay, proposed naming the place Hamburg after he had persuasive reason to believe that some of the local citizens stole some of his hams.( This information comes from John Blair Linn’ s History of Centre and Clinton Counties, published in 1883, just so nobody thinks I’ m making it up. Page 631.)
It stayed Hamburg for a while. And then came 1889, and the death of Levi Augustus Mackey. Levi Mackey was a banker. He was a large part of the success of Lock Haven in the early days, helping business owners out financially. And then he became Lock Haven’ s first mayor when Lock Haven incorporated as a city in 1870.
When he died on February 8, 1889, he’ d been such a good mayor that an entirely different community named itself after him. Mackeyville changed its name to remember Levi Mackey, who is buried in Highland Cemetery. And he was such a good mayor that the name remains today. Of course, it’ s also possible that they just wanted to forget the whole ham thing.
- Lou Bernard is a local writer and can be reached at loulhpa @ gmail. com.
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