The Penn Stater Magazine

When the Hotel State College was the ‘Nittany Inn’

January 16, 2011 at 5:18 pm Tina Hay Leave a comment

I was weeding some papers in one of the many over-cluttered corners of my house this weekend, and I came across a folder called “Uncle Bill.” I had forgotten about that folder—a collection of historical tidbits that my uncle, Bill Wolfersberger ’49, has sent me over the years. In the folder I found some family tree info, a Polaroid of an antique dresser he was proposing to give me, that sort of thing.

(One particularly gruesome item was an 1892 newspaper clipping that describes in rather explicit detail the death of my great-great uncle, Ed Wolfersberger, in a railroad accident in Somerset.)

Uncle Bill has been a postcard collector for many years, and in that folder was a Penn State-related postcard he once sent me. As you can see above, it’s pretty striking. It shows a building called the “Nittany Inn,” which looks a heck of a lot like the Hotel State College to me.

You can click on the postcard above to see a larger version of it—note the pool hall on the left and the sign for “R.C. Pearce” on the right. I’m thinking that the latter might have been Pearce Dairy or a related business.

The back of the postcard is below, with a postmark from 1914:

I looked up “Roy Kerns” on our alumni database and, sure enough, we have a guy by that name who got his bachelor’s in 1917 and his master’s in 1921, both in a now-defunct major called railway mechanical engineering. He is long deceased, of course (he was born in 1895), but the last known address for him was “General Delivery, Altoona, Pa.”

Fun stuff. I wonder what other gems are lurking in my house?

Tina Hay, editor

Entry filed under: College of Engineering, Penn State alumni, Penn State history. Tags: 1914 postcards, Altoona, Hotel State College, Nittany Inn, old postcards, railway mechanical engineering, Roy Kerns.