History provides connections and contexts for us to understand why things are the way they are. Too often we only come together and patch up tattered senses of community when we face disaster and misfortune. But the Aaronsburg Story was entirely different. Looking back on it years later gives us a glimpse into Penns Valley’s mindset.

Many early towns west of the Susquehanna derived their names and locations from their water-powered mills. Aaronsburg – the first town founded this far north and west between Sunbury and Pittsburgh – had no reason to exist. There was no nearby stream to run a mill, flood the town, or encourage termite populations. It was a political creation by an 18th century land speculator named Aaron Levy.

In the spring of 1949, Arthur Lewis, Governor Duff's press secretary, was traveling through Penns Valley. He was struck by the seeming incongruity of a town, founded by a Jew, situated in the middle of Pennsylvania German farmland.

We know little about Levy before his 1760 arrival in Philadelphia from Amsterdam. Within nine years he was a leading merchant in the frontier town of Northumberland. Levy eventually became involved in the post-Revolutionary land boom, acting either for himself or as an agent for well-connected friends.

Levy believed one particular Penns Valley tract, then known as Whitethorn Grove, could become a future county seat, so he planned extra-wide streets and reserved lots for schools, churches and public buildings.

Today we tend to emphasize “planned” at the expense of “community,” but Aaron Levy left a different legacy. He gave the German Protestant settlers a communion set made by Philadelphia’s premier pewter smith, William Will. This simple ecumenical gesture reached across not only two religions; it also bridged two centuries of misunderstanding.

We have no record of any speeches or ceremony that day. There’s only a plain statement inscribed on each of the four pieces: “This gift to the German congregations in Arensburg from Aron Levy.”

Recent scholarly studies in Germany indicate that a centuries-old tradition of tolerance and mutual gift-giving once existed between rural German Jews and Protestants struggling with everyday survival. This simple Pietism persisted throughout the nineteenth century as substantial numbers of rural Germans aided runaway slaves in their flights through central Pennsylvania. It continues today among the Amish, Dunkard and Mennonite communities.

This idea of a Jew presenting the centerpiece of Christianity to a community of Protestants struck a long-lost chord with Americans in 1949. We have only to recall the temper of that time: world-wide anguish over the horrors of the Holocaust and a grudging, but growing respect for racial, ethnic and religious differences. Roundtable discussions of social issues, largely unprecedented, were certainly preferable to lynching and state-sponsored genocide.

True revolutions only last when the conscience of the middle class is aroused. Throughout the summer of 1949, Lewis, Rev. James Shannon and others orchestrated what became known as the Aaronsburg Story. Levy’s gift became a springboard for one of Middle America’s earliest mass expression supporting civil rights. The idea quickly gained county, state and nationwide support.

On 23 October 1949, leading representatives from every economic and political group – including Governor James Duff, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and U.N. negotiator Ralph Bunche – joined more than 30,000 people to witness rural America’s rejection of racial and religious intolerance.

Four years later, Ronald Reagan came to Centre County to narrate a similar event, The Aaronsburg Assembly.

In 1997, the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission dedicated a roadside marker commemorating the Aaronsburg Story and its ideals.

The Centre County citizens who participated in the Aaronsburg Story were the same people we had the honor and privilege of knowing and working with over the past 30 years. They passed on a quality standard of neighborliness. They embodied the values that flowed from this valley to spread across and permeate this nation’s moral conscience.

Aaronsburg was never just some Brigadoon of brotherhood. “Neighboring” is the cornerstone of human decency. Any town can be, as Albert Einstein once called Aaronsburg, “a meeting place for all people of good intent,” but only if we remain vigilant against the ever-present forces of economic exclusivity and division.

To understand ourselves, our values and our communities we must know what came before. We are the harvest of our collective pasts. The lure of this region is in its resistance to reckless change. The area has been a place to learn about returns: a return to the values of land, work and community; a return to living relatives and long-departed ancestors; a return to the traditions of neighborliness and self-reliance; a return to a pace of life as it should be.

The forces that bind our communities together are as strong as the rock beneath our feet. Both, however, can be undermined when we take them for granted.