Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania: Snowshoes Left Behind

The name Snow Shoe carries one of those origin stories that feels too good to verify but is too persistent to ignore. According to local tradition, white hunters or early explorers wandering into this remote Centre County highland came across an abandoned Native village and found discarded snowshoes left at the old camp, and the name stuck. An alternate version says a party of hunters were caught in a blizzard and had to fashion their own snowshoes to walk out.

Either way, the area was surveyed as early as seventeen seventy-three and the first permanent settler arrived in eighteen eighteen. Snow Shoe Township was formed in eighteen forty. The borough itself was not incorporated until nineteen oh seven.

It sits about sixteen hundred feet above sea level on what Centre County residents call the Mountain Top, overlooking the Bald Eagle Valley below.