Penns Valley Historical Museum Opens with New Exhibits

The Penns Valley Area Historical Museum, located at 244 West Aaron Square in Aaronsburg, recently opened for the season and features two new exhibits for 2021.

The first is a collection of ladies’ feathered hats, most of them hand made by Sarah Burd Fiedler and her sister, Mary Burd Leidacher Fiedler, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when elegant hats were a fashion staple of women’s attire. The feathers came from pheasants and grouse hunted in the Woodward area by Sarah’s husband, Ray Fiedler. The hats and hat boxes are on loan from the collection of Georgene Searfoss.

The second exhibit features artifacts and memorabilia from the Kerlin Grandview Poultry Farm, which was located in Centre Hall from 1900 to the early 1950s. In 1900, A.E. Kerlin acquired a small farm in Centre Hall and started a poultry business. Kerlin realized that progress could be made by concentrating on one breed, and he began working on breeding a “business hen,” which would be a prolific egg-layer. He chose white Leghorns, which soon became known as the “Kerlin Strain” of Leghorns, with a reputation for prolific egg laying.

In 1929, A.E. Kerlin turned the business over to his son William W. Kerlin, and the business expanded greatly, becoming essentially a poultry empire. Thousands of the Kerlin Leghorns were shipped to locations worldwide for decades.

According to James Kerlin, a grandson of William W. Kerlin, the poultry business began to decline in the late 1930s due to the advent of home refrigeration and other food processing technology. The Kerlins business hung on until the early 1950s, then ceased operations.

In the mid-1950s, the former poultry farm land took on a new life, becoming Centre Hall’s first residential development, named Grandview Terrace. By 1956, houses were being built there, located on streets named for William W. Kerlin’s grandchildren, Patricia, James and William. About 60 homes were constructed, and still exist, with many of the original residents still occupying them.

The Penns Valley Historical Museum will be open on Saturdays from 1 to 4 p.m. through October. For more information, call Kay Gray at (814) 349-5740.

This story appeared in the June 17-23 edition of The Centre County Gazette.