- Hi, I'm Kami Rocker-Lidwell mayor of Portage borough.

Welcome to Our Town Portage on WPSU.

- [Narrator] Welcome to Portage, Pennsylvania.

Located in Southeastern Cambria county Portage was formed in the mid 18 hundreds along the Allegheny Portage Railroad.

The people of Portage take pride in the town's coal and lumber heritage while celebrating the successes of today.

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 Portage.

Support for Our Town Portage comes from Rosebud Mining Company of Kittanning a producer of metallurgical coals used for steel-making in Pennsylvania and Ohio who appreciates the community at Portage and all of their employees and families that call it home.

Information at rosebudmining.com.

Mount Aloysius College online at mtaloy.edu.

Staggers Store 696 Dulancey Drive information at staggerstore.com.

Pennsylvania Highlands Community College, online at pennhighlands.edu.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Hi, I'm Irene Huschak, I'm president of the Portage Area Historical Society and I've asked to tell you a little bit about the history of Portage.

In 1834 a 36 mile railroad was built over the Allegheny Mountains and it connected the canal system across the state of Pennsylvania and that's where Portage began.

It was the first mountain railroad in the world.

And to make the line faster and safer the Pennsylvania Railroad built the main line that we have going through town today so that cars would not have to stop for every train.

They started it with the two underpasses that we have and then they covered it with dirt.

This new line took us all the way from New York to Chicago.

Portage was such a busy place.

Trains stopped in Portage every 45 minutes.

Our hillsides were covered with timber and that was much in need so saw mills started to pop up everywhere in Portage.

And then in the late 18 hundreds, coal mine started and we ended up with over 60 coal mines in our community.

We also had a silk mill that was the largest throwing factory in the nation hiring hundreds of people.

There were so many jobs in Portage.

People came from all over the world to work in Portage.

When immigrants came to the area they had a tendency to gravitate to their own nationality.

We had hunky hill with the Slovaks, and we had Dutch settlement with the Germans.

And these people they started schools and they built churches.

In the 1930s Portage was in Ripley's Believe It or Not for having the most churches per capita of any city in the nation.

Our first church, the Lutheran church is still used today.

It's still has the same stain glass window and the bell in the steeple steel rings.

We had 147 businesses in Portage in the 1920s lots of mom and pop stores.

We still have Porinchak's which is one of those first mom and pop stores.

Portage had its own airport.

It was a primitive unmanned airport but we had pilots like Ross Mickey who told us that they landed there.

The post office would send their mail daily attach it between two 16 foot poles to a rope.

A single engine plane would fly across the country pick up that mail by dropping a hook, pull it back into the plane and off it would go.

We had one of the first airlines pickups in the nation.

Portage had its own semi-pro football team.

They were so good and they never lost a game in eight years.

Believe it or not but the Pittsburgh Steelers, then called the Pirates, came to Portage to play against our Bulldogs.

They played down in the Moose Field.

We were growing so rapidly and we were such a sports community that president Roosevelt sent the WPA to Portage to build our stadium.

Our stadium that's almost a hundred years old is something that our community is very proud of.

When I retired my husband and I joined the Historical Society and I had no idea what an amazing history our community had.

Portage people are proud people.

We're a close knit community.

We like our history, we like each other.

We're a very sociable community.

- My name is Gary Gouse.

I've been the head football coach for the past 29 years and I'm going to speak to you about Portage football.

When I took over my first year, there was only 16 players on the team.

And our philosophy was to bring the community back to football.

And as we did, I got coaches that were in the community that taught with me and they helped build the program with me.

We ended up having three undefeated seasons in a row.

We were WestPAC champs, nine times.

We went to the district championship twice.

In 2008 we were 12 and two and runner up in the district.

In 2014, we were 11 and two and also runner up in the district six.

So we've got a lot of pride and we had a tremendous following with our community.

One of our teams, we had 70 some players.

We actually split the squad and had two JV teams and played an upper class level with Altoona and Johnstown.

And then we had a smaller team that would play local JV teams.

So we grew to be a pretty well-known football program in state of Pennsylvania.

Some of the proudest moments, in the mail came a plaque I didn't know what it was about or what it was.

I opened it and it was a player of mine who just graduated from the Marine Corps.

And I guess in the Marine Corps they give you a plaque for when you finish.

And he wrote me a note and said I wanted you to have this for what you did for me.

I really took to kids that were underprivileged and I really grew close to those kids.

Summertime was my favorite time.

We would take kids to Lock Haven University for a camp.

I had kids go to a movie, I'll never forget this one, we're standing in line, I said, we're going to movies.

He says, what's that?

I said, we've never been a movie theater?

He goes never been to a movie theater.

I said, well, you're really going to enjoy this.

Those are the moments in taking them swimming in the river and at Lock Haven and taking the Pittsburgh seven on seven just seeing the city, it just wasn't football for us, we're very involved in the community of Portage.

It's a small community.

I married my childhood sweetheart.

I got a job here right out of college.

And you know, it's just a really nice place to live.

- My name is Tammy Crum, and we're gonna talk about Lilly Mountain Alpacas.

I moved from Altoona to Lilly in 2002.

And in 2012, the first six alpacas came.

We're now at 26 alpacas, that's 10 females and 16 males.

We also have a few births that are coming in 2021.

My niche in the alpaca industry is agritourism.

I have a small farm store here that supports the alpacas, buys their supplies, food, whatever.

And my job is to take care of the alpacas and educate people about alpacas and what we do with them.

They are cute and they're a lot of fun but they do have a purpose, they have a job.

They also are very therapeutic.

We take alpacas to schools, even nursing homes.

We have gone to festivals, actually Portage Summerfest is one of our biggest outreach because we do reach a huge number of public.

It's really awesome to go there with the alpacas and the Portage folks look for them and they come to visit the alpacas.

We educate, promote the alpaca industry not only the alpacas, but the reason for having the alpacas, and that is the fiber and the uniqueness of the fiber.

Alpacas are shorn once a year, that's our harvest.

And not only that, but it's in the best interest of the health of the alpaca to be shorn, they cannot tolerate the heat.

Alpaca fiber is an insulating fiber.

It is hypoallergenic.

It's water, repellent, odor repellent and it keeps you warm even when wet but it's an all season fiber.

You can wear it 365 days a year.

The farm store supports the alpacas and that's a very important part of the farm.

I always tell people whether you purchase something or you don't, you need to come into the farm store and look at what we do with it.

You need to touch things.

I have yarn here that were made from my alpacas.

It's just another way for them to learn that they do have a job.

And it's just amazing to take a filthy dirty alpaca that's been rolling in the dirt for 355 days wash that fiber up, it comes out sparkling clean, and then have it spun into yarn.

I like the rural area, if you can't get it from Preston, you can get it in Portage.

Everything is pretty much here.

- Hello my name is Austin Rodgers.

And today we'll be talking about the Somman mine explosion.

Portage was developed from the Allegheny Portage Railroad.

They found coal in our area and it's anthracite coal which is the best around, it burns hotter than other types of coal.

Railroads and many of the industries around they wanted that anthracite coal to help power their mills and their locomotives.

On Monday, July 15th, 1940, approximately at 10:40 AM a mine cart was traveling through the Somman mine and a spark from that mine cart caused a methane gas explosion.

The biggest thing is that the methane gas can cause the oxygen levels to drop which can cause asphyxiation and that's what happened in the Somman mine.

63 miners ended up being trapped in the mine.

There were some that did escape.

The miners that were off duty that day and other professional rescue workers came in and assisted in the mine explosion to try to go back and to save these 63 minors.

Sadly though it took them longer than they hoped to get to them.

And it was around 1:29 AM the next day on Tuesday they finally did reach the coal miners sadly, only to find that they perished.

This is the largest number of coal miners to perish in one accident in 20 years I believe in Pennsylvania.

The Somman mine disaster is still frequently talked about in Portage.

There's a Memorial down at Crichton McCormick park.

The Memorial has a picture of a coal miner on it and it also lists all the deceased coal miners in the '63.

That Memorial is a very prominent part of the park.

Without coal Portage wouldn't be what it is today.

I am a fifth generation resident from Portage.

I enjoy learning about how my ancestors really lived what they had to go through.

I'm vice president of the Historical Society.

Every day somebody comes in and they have a story of historical significance to the area.

We just love whenever they tell us these stories so then their memory won't be forgotten, will live on for future generations to hear.

- My name is Devonie McCabe and I will be talking about the Portage Public Library.

I am currently the library board president.

Libraries are not about books, it's about the people.

It is community driven.

Without the community the library doors would close.

Most people think libraries are state funded or federally funded.

Only 40% of our budget comes from that.

The rest is raised through fundraisers and through donations.

The library is a central part of our community.

And when I first moved here with my small children that was where I began my social life.

Our library hosts a lot of community events.

I heard someone say that we get them as toddlers and they come until they're senior citizens, we have events all the way through.

In the last couple of years we've been hosting a food service in the summer so that students under the age of 19 can come and get a free meal.

We've had Lego club, a game club.

We also have career link that comes in so people can come in looking for jobs and get some help through that.

We've had a group of women who hosted a Pinochle club.

We have book clubs.

I mean, the list goes on and on.

And a lot of these are not library sponsored events they are community led events.

It's the one place in the world where everything is still free or nominal and there's no selling, there's no commercialism in it, it's just a place to be.

Portage reminds me of where I grew up because I lived in a bigger city for 20 years but I am from a smaller community.

The people of Portage truly love each other.

The ones that I've come in contact with, you know truly love each other.

And they love their community.

- My name is Bonnie Fox and I'm here to talk about the Chatter Box on Main Street in Portage.

The Chatter Box is a dream of mine.

My husband was still in the military and he was getting ready to retire and he said, you know, we've done 20 years let's go live your dream.

The biggest part of my dream was being a coffee shop where people would come in, meet, relax, talk to other people who come in and that's what I enjoy.

That's what our business is about.

We serve coffee, I bake in the mornings three days a week we're open.

And then I've started selling what I call treasures.

I mainly find my treasures at auctions.

I go find more as I need more.

And I really enjoy talking to people when they find a treasure.

I love to know what they're gonna do with it.

Do they have a collection?

I believe every object has had a life and they call it evidence of life.

A lot of times there's a nick or a chip.

You think what happened?

What happened in its life?

And there is, there's a feel to everything I believe.

And when you buy something that's older, that has a life, you bring that life into your life.

And there's just a good feeling with that.

We do a lot with our windows.

We like to do the holidays.

Christmas is really big for us.

Santa sits in a window Christmas Eve.

He takes a break from delivering his presents and he waves as people go by.

And we're open some family stop in.

It's a special evening.

And we have a band they dubbed themselves the Chatter Box Brass that plays here occasionally.

And we have a folk group Corn Silk.

There's the saxophone quartet.

We've had a day of music where we've shut off the street and had different musical groups perform.

The community band.

We've closed the street off for our first birthday party.

We had Portage's largest sundae.

We sanitized a kiddie pool and made a huge sundae and everybody got a sundae out of that.

Our windows were actually painted for the first year with our sign Chatter Box, coffee barn, soda fountain.

And then for our first year party we unveiled our Chatter Box sign.

My husband and I are both from Portage.

He grew up in Ben's Creek and I grew up down the street.

We lived a lot of places, we traveled a lot, but my vision fit in our hometown.

It's where your memories are, your connection is, and it's a really great town.

We've had such wonderful support not just the people of town, but the businesses, the local businesses all seem to support each other.

And it's just a really good feeling.

- Hi I am Ryan Weakland.

And I'm going to tell you about Weakland Farms' corn maze.

My grandfather bought the farm in 1960 and he was raising beef, potatoes, and corn.

Then down the road, my dad bought the farm afterwards.

After he bought the farm, my mom (indistinct) and started her own vegetable market on the side.

At the market my mom had hay rides from the house to the pumpkin patch and third a pumpkin patch for people to go pick their own pumpkin.

During that time we was looking at growing bigger operation and started a corn maze.

We open the second week in September to Halloween.

We roughly run from 500 people to 2000 people a day.

We have music to listen to.

We have the bounce obstacle course.

We have a corn box, the hay ride and animals they can visit.

And we have a craft show.

It brings all ages.

Grandparents, bring the kids out.

The grandparents, go to the craft show when the kids play.

Teenagers come out and enjoy themselves in the maze.

And you have all the time with your family.

First weekend of May too, we have a car show.

We're starting to do weddings and bridal parties.

We do birthday parties.

Once in a while, we might have a prom here for the school.

The farm's been in the family for so long it's almost like another person, part of the family.

It's our livelihood.

This is where I grew up and there's really nothing else like it.

- My name Isabella McCabe and I'm here to talk about Porinchak's Market in Portage.

The original owner which my husband and I both apprenticed under him his great grandfather opened it in 1900.

And to this day, it's 121 years old actually.

The original owner, his last name was Oravecz and that was what it was before it was called Oravecz Grocery Store.

And then Mr. Porinchak, who we bought it from, he took it over and they called it Porinchak's Market.

The Porinchaks are like our honorary grandparents like they always called us their honorary grandchildren.

So when Mr. Porinchak offered it to us and we're like, sure we'll give it a try.

We sell all different kinds of meats from roasts, steaks, beef cubes.

We do hams for holidays, we do kobasi.

We have lunch, meat and cheeses.

We have canned goods, dairy, pretty much anything you really need.

We get our dairy from Vale Wood farms in Ebensburg, in Loretto.

And we get our kobasi and stuff from Fraylux in Johnstown.

People like it because it is such a small little store that it feels like their own little personal shopping space.

We literally have one customer at a time.

People they'll come in their pajamas be like, I'm so sorry, I just didn't want to get ready.

And I'm like, oh, I don't mind that, you come here anytime.

I'm originally from Portage.

My husband's actually from Savannah, Georgia originally.

His dad was here and he loved it so much that he brought his family back.

This is where I was raised and I grew up.

Portages is our home.

- My name's Cathy Krinjeck.

I'm here to talk about Germantown Winery that my husband and I started in September of 2014.

Tom was in construction for years.

Then he went into the maintenance fields.

So Tom decided he was going to give up his man-cave and make wine down there.

So that's where we were just started was an original construction garage and then we just continued to add.

The land was originally my husband's grandfather's farm.

We have 30 varieties now.

When we first opened we were doing like six and now we're up to 30.

We do whites, reds, and we also have a variety of fruit wines.

It's been fun, it's our fun job.

And it was fun, it's been fun to watch it grow.

And the support of the community has been wonderful.

We do what we call them Germantown festivals.

We have numerous acts, we do acoustic acts, full-sized bands.

Our larger outside events would be our October Fest and October Fest just keeps getting bigger and bigger every year.

We have a couple of food trucks.

We usually put maybe 400 people through.

We do specialty drinks.

We have the German dancers, which come up which they started working with us maybe five years ago.

And it's really a nice enhancement.

They do come up and do some dancing as well the old costumes, it's really a nice event.

We also do a nice cork and cheese which is a Christmas program.

Corn Silk comes up in place for us.

They do like a beautiful Christmas music.

And then we do like a cheese and crackers and different chocolates and chocolate dessert.

And then we have a Valentine's day dinner every year where Jim Cobin actually plays that for us.

We also do numerous showers, parties, weddings, we even do funeral dinners.

But the neat thing about Germantown Winery is we get people from all over.

We have people that regularly drive up from Pittsburgh.

We have people from all over the state that really just like to do wines and wineries so they do like a little wine tour of Cambria County so it brings people in.

It just never ceases to amaze me.

We've had people from all over the world.

It just brings people into the community.

And it not only benefits Germantown Winery they'll say to us, where can we go get something to eat?

Or where can we go see this or that?

So it kind of like is a nice draw.

I've lived in Portage longer than I lived where I grew up.

So I feel like I'm a kind of a transplant but I'm really been here so long.

It's a wonderful community, very close knit community.

Everybody knows everybody, very supportive of not only the winery but we try to support all of the businesses here in town.

Just a nice experience, just a, a very close, nice group of people.

- My name's Dustin Grush.

And I'm here to talk about the Bar Ann Drive-In.

The Bar Ann Drive-In began by George Wasco in the 1950s during the drive-in boom.

Across the country we went from zero to over 4,000 drive-ins in a span of about 20 years.

And returning GIs had new cars and needed something to do on Saturday night and the drive-in was the perfect place to go.

It's a family oriented business.

We meet a lot of people who came to the drive-in as kids and when they come back to the area or if they still live here, they bring their kids, even their grandkids.

Generally people come in about an hour or so before the movie starts they can gather, they can play down in the field.

They bring frisbees and baseball, soccer balls and we have a full concession stand offer many items for sale there.

They can eat, get together, enjoy, sit on a blanket and watch the movie under the stars.

We've had special events to the drive-in.

We've had boy scout groups in the past have come out they've watched a movie they've camped out overnight.

We've had a few businesses that have brought in their employees for a special event night for that business, they've rented out the theater.

Occasionally for holidays or special events we'll bring in a triple feature.

And for the past five years, every Saturday before labor day, we've had a dusk to dawn show.

So we show six movies.

We start at eight o'clock at night and we end up about six o'clock in the morning.

We serve breakfast after midnight and people come have a great time.

They bring tents and just really enjoy themselves.

COVID-19 brought on some challenges but when we were finally able to reopen last year we made a few changes and gave people an opportunity to come out social distance and get to enjoy a movie that they otherwise might not have been able to enjoy.

The pandemic has opened our eyes that there are more uses for the theater than just movies.

We were approached by a couple of companies that wanted to have things like concerts and other types of events at the drive-in.

Last year we did show several prerecorded concerts that people were able to come in and watch.

And we're hoping to be able to show some live concerts this year as well.

What makes Portage great of course is the people the work ethic, the businesses in the town.

And Portage is one of the great small towns in Pennsylvania.

- My name is Vince Golden and my story's about Golden Farms.

When my wife Loretta and I decided to get married I said that I want to purchase a farm near Portage.

And that's where I wanted to raise our family.

We started with the conventional farming, raising corn, and oats, and soybeans, and was quite profitable in the seventies and early eighties.

But then things changed.

Wasn't making much money.

So I started to investigate alternative crops.

My son was over in Afghanistan at the time and he called me wanting to know if he can come over and join, start farming with me.

And I said, only if we can tap into selling more directly to the consumer.

And so along with him, I made up a business plan and he eventually did come home.

We started with Golden Farms Milling and with the CBD, the hemp production.

- Innovative Extracts is a CBD company where we say that we are from seed to sale.

We grow the hemp that the ingredient for the CBD we process it on the farm and then we have our own retail line.

Just got started about two years ago with the passing of the farm bill.

- We're meeting a lot of people and we're developing a lot of cool things.

During the summer last year, we had a sunflower field that we opened up for people to come and just walk around with their families.

And it was so nice to see four generation families there at one time, getting pictures taken while the sunflowers are blooming.

And then the barn, we just put a new roof on it all new flooring, new beams.

We had a good frame.

Now we have an area there where people can congregate and we can have some social events.

The Portage community and all the people, the support they've given all of my family over the years, it is really helpful.

- [Andrew] I think that there's a trust with the public because they know it's coming from a farm where quality is known.

We don't use pesticides, herbicides or anything like that.

They understand our work ethic in terms of making sure that we have a good product out on the market.

The other advantage of having a small company like this in the area too is we have sales nationally now.

And so we are pulling in money and bringing it back to this area.

Starting up a business is not easy, but having the support from the community, having people encouraging you and pushing you to be better, it's very helpful.

- Hi, I'm Sharon Squillario.

I'm here to talk about Crichton McCormick Park.

I'm a member of the Portage Area Joint Recreation Commission, the PAJRC.

The PAJRC is a group of nine volunteers who are appointed by Portage Borough, Portage Township, and the school district.

And we're responsible for the upkeep and the activities in the park.

The park was actually established beginning in 1921 by land donated by the McCormick family.

Later on, there was additional land donated by the Crichton family and the park consists of over 62 acres of land now.

The most beautiful part of the park I think is the swimming pool.

Because of COVID-19 we had a lot of back fall we couldn't open when we were supposed to.

We usually open in May.

We weren't able to open then.

We opened the following month with all of the necessary precautions for COVID ID.

We took temperatures every day.

Hand-washing stations, things like that.

But our pool is one of the nicest pools in the area.

It's the gem, it's the gem of the park.

In the park we also have tennis courts.

One of our tennis courts right now is being replaced.

We got a grant through the state.

We have basketball court, volleyball court.

The biggest thing too is kids place which was a project completely funded by people in this community by donations.

And there was hundreds and hundreds of people that helped build project kids place which is in the park today.

As you enter the park, you'll see a canon from World War two, which was donated by the veterans groups.

There's also a Memorial to veterans who have died.

Family members can buy a brick and it's a monument in the park.

Our most recent one is a granite monument to all of the branches of the service, POWs and MIAs.

The Crichton McCormick Park, I can't put into words what an asset it is to this community.

If you walk into the park any day during the summer there's hundreds of kids in the playground people playing tennis, basketball it's truly a gem to this community.

- Hello my name is Cork Shuniak and I'll be talking about Cassandra Bottling.

Cassandra Bottling opened up in 1908 and it closed in 1984.

CR Sanders was the main guy, and then Harry was his son.

He was the owner of the place, CR and Harry.

It made 18 different flavors.

It had six different franchises but most of them was his own flavors.

It made Sundrop, double Cola, 76, squirt, Vernors, Moxie, cherry, black cherry, orange, cream soda, root beer, lemon lime, grape, pineapple, nifty, ginger ale, Derby shake, Pell ginger ale, Birch Brew, and white Birch.

If a kid would come into the soda factory you would get a soda straight off the line.

If somebody come in they'd give 'em a case of soda yeah, that was no problem, Harry was very kindhearted.

Most every kid in Cassandra at one time or another worked at the pop shop, we called this the pop shop.

From the time you started, you picked bottles, the trucks came in, you had to sort the bottles from eight ounce, 12 ounce, quarts.

You had to separate them from white to green and from there you separated them, then they went upstairs.

Once you worked downstairs for awhile then you worked your way upstairs to the filling machines.

And then from there, you worked to the bottle washer, or the filler, or the casers.

And then if you got a chance, maybe you went onto a truck.

That's how you made it through the pop shop.

I started when I was 16 and I worked until I was 19, 20.

I delivered soda as far as Cumberland, Maryland and as far as up to Jersey Shore.

At one time, Pepsi, Coke could not get into this area Cambria County, Harry Sanders had this district and nobody could get in here, nobody.

There's a lot of history in this area, a lot, you know, just a lot, a lot of history and Cassandra, Portage, Lilly all have great history.

- I'm Jackie Beck.

I'm here today to tell you a little bit about the background and history of the Portage Women's Club.

- And I am Ida Cargo.

And I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Women's Club today.

- The Women's Club got started back in 1947 when a group of women got together and decided that we should have a women's club here that would assist our town and promote volunteerism.

This club would be open to women of any sort.

The primary function of the Women's Club at that time, they devoted themselves to the library.

So they wanted to have what they called a Portage free library.

And they worked hard to get that going.

A second focus of the early Women's Club was to establish a well baby clinic.

This was a pioneer moment for them.

This was the only baby clinic in Cambria county at the time.

- Our Women's Club has very proud history of the things that have happened in the past to the present.

We're still offering women to join our Women's Club, the young, old, it doesn't matter.

One little project of one woman a year is help to our organization.

Our Women's Club has volunteered hours and monies to so many organizations.

We have given to the Scouts.

We have given to the volleyball teams in town.

We've supported the school.

We've spearheaded different events for the veterans of our town for the past present and future.

Years ago, the Women's Club had raised money and funds to add new swing sets and new slides to the McCormick park.

Later, we helped with Naomi Staggers project to put up the big wooden fence with all the playground equipment.

And we still continue supporting the park.

And our major event was our Easter egg hunt that we had in the spring.

And it served kids age one to 10.

It was one of our major purposes of taking care of kids in town and making them know that they're a part of this community.

As a club, we tried to beautify our town.

I think that's a little bit of the women in us.

We put flowers on main street and our ladies have taken care of them, watering them.

We've had garbage cans installed on the main street.

We've decorated summers, fall, winter and spring down at the arch and on Main Street.

And we've tried to make it interesting for the people that come to town.

It's so nice to see something and make you feel good and that's what we're all about.

We're thinking of them and just tying to put a smile on their face.

- The role of women has changed a lot since 1947.

The core values of our club still remain the same.

We hope these values will permeate our community and inspire future generations to give back to our town.

- Our members are proud of our theme, harmony, vision, and purpose.

Past president Barack Obama had said make a way of life because when you serve it doesn't just improve your community it makes you a part of your community.

And that's what our Women's Club is all about.

- My name is Karl Vickroy and I'm representing Portage Rotary Club.

We've had the club here since 1947.

Most of the things we do is we raise money.

We have pancake and sausage breakfast.

I've turned pancakes probably I don't know how many hundred thousand pancakes I turned in over the years.

We have golf outings, we do Golf-a-Ramma and all the money we raise goes to some project in town.

We have Crichton McCormick Park we're working on a project down there right now it's for black topping the roads in the park.

We give to cozy kids for the school for wintertime for clothes.

We give to the Boy Scouts.

We've given to the Girl Scouts over the years.

We send people to organizations to rally their rotary sponsors.

We give money to the food pantry.

We give money to the veterans association out of Johnstown.

It was so interesting to me that I could hardly imagine an organization raising money and not one penny went into their pockets, it went into somebody else's pockets that needed the money.

We've done a lot of good things for the town.

I started in 1972 and I joined because I'm not originally from Portage, I'm from Johnstown.

And I moved here, I bought ground here and built a house and I decided I had to get to know people cause I actually worked out of town.

I talked to one of the fellows I did know and he said, well, join Rotary, he says, that's one of the best ways to get to know people in town.

So I joined Rotary in 1972 and next year it'll be 50 years for me in Rotary.

People I've met in Rotary are just outstanding people.

That's I can't say anymore about them.

I have a lot of friends here.

My kids all went to school here.

It's just a beautiful place.

- Hello my name is Dennis Beck.

I'm chairman of the Trout Run Watershed Association.

I'm going to talk to you about the state of our streams in the area and our cooperation with the Portage area school district.

The Trout Run Watershed Association was organized in the year 2000.

We had a organizational meeting here in town and one of the teachers was there and he said, well the school's doing a week of earth week and we want to do an outdoor activity.

And I said, okay, we're going to do a stream cleanup on Friday for your outdoor activity.

And we did, we had approximately a hundred students volunteered for it.

And we did the entire length of Trout Run that year.

The next year, the school called me in February.

They said we have 180 kids who want to help out what can they do?

And I says, well, give me about five seconds and I'll tell you what we're gonna do.

It instills in them a sense of responsibility.

They're going out to clean this up but if everybody did their part we wouldn't have to clean it up at all.

We're a unique municipality because we sit on the Eastern continental divide which means that everybody's downstream from us.

Whatever we do to increase or improve the water quality here affects everybody from here all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

When the mining industry and the steel industry started declining those mines went out of business and they just walked away from them.

So they eventually filled up with water and the water would pick up pyrite and will combine with the water and with the air and form sulfuric acid, which drops the pH so that's your acid mine water.

And it's coming out of all these old mines that were dug and then abandoned.

The systems that we're having built here are all passive systems, so once they're built, there's very little maintenance on them.

Usually they're limestone ponds to neutralize it, to raise the pH.

They estimate that this is gonna run 10 to 12 years before we have to do anything to it.

If we get these streams cleaned up we can improve businesses or create businesses here in town.

I can't wait to have a trout fishing tournament on Trout Run coming through Portage.

This would shock everyone.

Very few people here remember when there was fishing in that section of Trout Run.

It's been 20 years I've been working on this and I see the light at the end of the tunnel.

- My name is Dwayne Dietrich and I'm on the Portage Area Summerfest Incorporated Festival Committee.

The Summerfest started as an idea back in 1986 to have a festival to celebrate the 100th birthday of Portage Borough.

The event was such a success that the committee decided to stay together and form a committee called the Portage Area SummerFest and have an annual festival in place of the Centennial and continue it every year since then.

In the 30 year history of the festival it has grown to become one of the major events in the whole region.

And we can attract upwards of 20,000 plus people in a weekend.

We make sure that we have activities for everybody in the family.

We have kids' activities, top-notch musical entertainment, other types of entertainment and activities, lots of different food vendors.

We do not charge people to come in.

We do not charge people for all the entertainment.

The main focus of the festival is to raise money to give back to the Portage Recreation Commission to help maintain and operate the Crichton McCormick Park.

We have volunteers who organize the event year round to help do fundraising because it costs a lot of money to run the business end of the festival.

And we hope to raise funds that we can put on a great event every year to the quality that we have.

It has grown quite a bit, but it takes a lot of volunteers.

There's a group of new committee members who have stepped up to keep the event going from this year forward, but we are on schedule to have the event full steam ahead in 2022, the second weekend in August.

We've had a lot of support from local businesses and community members for our event.

And that's part of why it's become such a success over the years, the people who've pitched in to make sure that we can keep it going and keep it at the level that it's been.

- My name is Andrew Gruse.

And I'm gonna talk about the Holy Cross Polish National Catholic Church.

I've been a church musician for several area churches around here.

And most recently I was asked to be the musician, the organist for the Holy Cross Polish National Catholic Church in town.

And what makes this church unique was I was baptized in this church, received my first holy communion in this church but it was when it was the St. John the Baptist Church.

At the turn of the century there were four immigrant churches in town for the Roman Catholics.

St. Joseph's was founded by the Irish.

St. Mary's was founded by the Slovak.

Sacred Heart was founded by the Polish.

And St. John's was founded by the Hungarians.

And of those four original Catholic churches that were founded for the immigrants Sacred Heart was recently demolished, and Assumption Church is slated for demolition.

The original Assumption Church St. Mary's is now an apartment building.

And St. John's is the only one of those immigrant churches that's still being used for worship.

St. John's the building dates back to 1923.

The church had its final mass said there in July of 2004.

And for 15 years the church building sat vacant.

In 2018 the current owner declared bankruptcy and the bank took possession of the property.

Around this time Holy Cross was exploring properties within the Portage area to move their congregation out of Johnstown into Portage, where many of the parishioners are from.

Church was sold to Holy Cross parish in 2019.

At that time, they began some renovations of it.

They repainted the church, put down new carpet, put in new pews, a new organ system.

And then they began the process of moving everything from their church in Moxham over to the current church in Portage.

Whenever we walked out the doors for the final mass in July of 2014 we never thought we'd see the inside of the church again.

And it's just kind of exciting whenever we saw in the paper that this congregation from Johnstown had purchased the church and was gonna plan to use it again for worship.

The first mass was said there in December of 2019 and then they completed inner renovations in January of 2020.

Unfortunately, whenever COVID hit in March we could not have in-person masses with the direction of the diocesan Bishop but we did resume our worship again in June of 2020.

Right now we have masses starting evenings at four o'clock and then Sunday mornings at 10:00 AM.

The parish is just about completely done.

There are some plans in the future to make improvements but the church right now, it's a beautiful church.

The altar that's in the building came from the parish from Johnstown.

There are some murals on the side of the altar that are original to Saint John the Baptist as well as the paintings behind the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the St. Mary statues.

It's a historic structure that's gonna be saved and it's actually being used.

- My name is Patrick Shuler.

My story is about the Quinn Inn in Portage, Pennsylvania.

The Quinn Inn is a bed and breakfast in Portage, Pennsylvania run in a historic home that was built in 1865.

The home was built by my great great grandfather after the civil war.

He was actually captured while fighting for the north.

He was released in March of 1865.

He rejoined his regimen and made his way home after the war to Portage, and then built the home.

It was the first home on the main street in Portage and my wife and I Taren remodeled it into a bed and breakfast about four years ago.

It was an easy decision to make the home a bed and breakfast.

We thought it was a good service for the community.

We want to preserve the home being that had so much history in it.

We didn't want it just to fall unmaintained over the years.

So this was a great mixture of both of being able to preserve the history of the home and also bring something back to the community.

The remodeling was interesting.

When we started taking down walls we would find insulation made of newspaper which kind of gave us clues into the dates of which certain parts of the home were built.

But it worked really well.

We had a lot of local folks helping us and it was a great success.

People come to town for a lot of different reasons.

Sometimes it's tourism to enjoy the natural beauty of the area like Blue Knob State Park for hiking or fishing or skiing.

Other times it's folks from town, or they have family in town that are here for family reunions, weddings, and sadly funerals as well.

But the nearest motel's about 20 minutes away so it's nice to be close to family when they're here.

All of our guests always have interesting stories.

Some of them stretch far and wide from across the world.

We've had tourists from Australia and Germany.

We've even had a New York Times reporter in town researching a story about her family's past.

So we get a lot of different people to visit and always very interesting stories.

When guests stay at the Quinn Inn we actually partner with the Chatter Box next door and so the guests actually get breakfast and a coffee.

They come over, they mention their guests and they can pick out whatever they'd like.

It's a nice relationship and it helps bring us both business and awareness of what all is available in the town.

A lot of our businesses and local entrepreneurs are very collaborative.

They've got great ideas, they like to work with each other.

They like to feature each other's products everything from Golden Farms products to, you know the Chatter Box's coffee, anything that we can help celebrate and share with our guests we love to do that.

I've traveled all over the country during my career but I've always kind of kept a foot in Portage.

It's a special place.

It's somewhere where everyone knows your name.

And it's got a lot of opportunity despite being an older town and not having a lot of modern industry there's still a lot of opportunity for people to start businesses or to find their own ways to make careers and a living in town.

- [Narrator] And that's Our Town Portage a look at this Cambria County borough through the eyes of its residents.

Support for Our Town Portage comes from Rosebud Mining Company of Kittanning a producer of metallurgical coal used for steel-making in Pennsylvania and Ohio who appreciates the community at portage and all of their employees and families that call it home, information at rosebudmining.com.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

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