Her Stories

- Documenting the Role of Women in Local History -

Jane Davis Patton, the wife of Centre Furnace ironmaster John Patton, was born in Philadelphia in 1752. He was a prominent Philadelphian, a Revolutionary War officer, and a member of George Washington's Life Guard. He also was a land speculator. Jane Davis Patton, married at 25, was not quite forty when she moved far away from Philadelphia to the wilderness of central Pennsylvania because her husband was to be part of the management of a new charcoal iron making operation. This operation was the first to open, or "to be put into blast," in what would become Centre County's leading industry in the nineteenth century.

Little is known about Jane Davis Patton, but we do know that she was the mother of eleven children. Several of them remained in the region. Patton Township and Pattonville, the early name for Pine Grove Mills, are present day reminders on the Patton family's presence.

According to 1798 tax records, she presided over a log house and a log kitchen at Centre Furnace. The memoirs of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand describe Centre Furnace as a center of civility in the wilderness. While in exile from France, he visited Pennsylvania, engaged in land speculation, and spent the winter of 1795 with "John Patton at Centre Furnace."

Jane Davis Patton outlived John by 28 years and moved to Huntingdon, Huntingdon County after his death in 1804. She died in 1832 and was buried in Huntingdon. Through the efforts of the Standing Stone, Huntingdon County VFW, in 1938 John Patton's body was moved with a full military funeral cortege from a grave near Shingletown to Huntingdon and laid to rest again beside the grave of his wife.