Everett, Pennsylvania: From Bloody Run to Everett

The town now called Everett earned its original name honestly. In seventeen sixty, a skirmish between settlers and Native Americans left a creek running red, and locals called the crossing Bloody Run. A tavern keeper named Widow Betsy Tussey briefly lent her name to the place, but Bloody Run stuck until the borough, incorporated in eighteen sixty, changed its name to Everett in eighteen seventy-three.

The town straddles the Raystown Branch of the Juniata River in Bedford County, and the Pittsburgh-to-Chambersburg turnpike ran through it by eighteen nineteen, feeding a string of taverns and tradespeople. By the Civil War era it had twenty-five dwellings, three churches, three stores, and three taverns. Iron furnace work arrived in the eighteen eighties.

Today it is a small Appalachian borough, its creek long clear and its colonial name quietly retired.