Pennsylvania

In April of 2012, we were excited to receive the below message about the Pennsylvania Merci Train history:

Greetings, I work for The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and wanted to let you know of some archival holdings at the Pennsylvania State Archives that may provide additional information regarding the disposition of the contents of Pennsylvania's Merci Train car. The records are part of the former Executive Director's files (1946-1949). Below is a link that should help anyone visiting your website locate the files if they are interested in doing further research.

Please check the website for hours, directions and parking suggestions.

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Pennsylvania State Archives

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I also wanted to let you know that the State Museum of Pennsylvania has among their holdings, an album of paintings and letters from school children in France. It apparently took a route to Harrisburg, different than that of the railcar, as the album arrived after May 1949, whereas the contents of the railcar had been dispersed to communities within Pennsylvania by April 1949. Thank you for your work on this topic.

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Sincerely,

Mary Jane H. Miller

Head of Collections Management

Bureau of The State Museum.

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Here is a downloadable PDF of the 2008 invitation for the presentation of a historic plaque donated by the PA state chapter of Questers International.

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Jake and The Merci Train - The story of Jake the buffalo and the Merci Train car.

By Lou Bernard

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To the right of my desk, up on a shelf, sits a clay buffalo sculpture. He is about a foot long, about six inches high, and covered with fading green paint. He is overlooking me as I write this column. I happen to know that he is French, and his name is Jake.

Surprisingly, I didn’t make up any of that. A retired library employee once told me that they’d named him Jake, after Jake Kohlberger, who owned the Buffalo Inn in Wayne Township. It makes a certain amount of sense. After all, I have a small toy alligator that goes with me on paranormal investigations, and I named him Brutus after Brutus DeVilleroi, who designed a submarine called the Alligator. So I can see the logic there.

As for the French part, I had to do a little digging.

Turns out, Jake came in on the Merci Train. You’ve never heard of the Merci Train, I’m sure. I hadn’t,until I started digging into the buffalo. But this is part of Lock Haven’s history, and it goes back to the 1940s.

In 1948, relief goods were sent to France by the Americans. Mostly contributed by individual citizens,there were over seven hundred train cars with food and supplies. Clinton County chipped in on this, sending acarload of flour donated mostly by people from Lock Haven and Renovo. This was called the Friendship Train.

In response, the French sent gifts in gratitude. Forty-nine railroad cars were packed with gifts, andshipped to America. I am assuming that a portion of this train was also done by boat, because on February 3,1949, the shipments arrived in New York Harbor. The individual boxcars were shared among the forty-eightstates at the time, and the last one was split between Washington DC and Hawaii, who had to share. So Pennsylvania got a boxcar full of thank-you gifts from the French.

Lock Haven, it seems, shared in that.

Jack the buffalo came in on the Merci Train. He seems to have been made in Paris by an artist named E. Borga in 1948, because that’s what’s scribbled on the bottom in pencil. None of this has exactly taken any research genius; I found out most of it by turning Jake over and discovering the newspaper article taped underneath. It was from the Lock Haven Express on April 1, 1949, and a photo shows the unpacking of the Merci Train gifts at the Express office. The picture shows Express employees Patricia Bacon (whom I knew personally to be a sweet woman), Martha Zeigler (whom I know by reputation, and she was awesome), and Collette Haag (whom I’ve never heard of, but if she was hanging out with the other two, she had to be really cool too.) The three of them were unpacking the gifts sent from France.

Yes, gifts---Plural. In addition to Jake the buffalo, the shipment included a photo of the capitulation signing of Germany in World War II, a figurine of a French couple, and a set of booklets describing French life. I have no idea what happened to the rest of that stuff; the article says it all would be located in schools and libraries within Clinton County. So this stuff is out there, somewhere, if I could track it down.

Huh. A quest. Challenge accepted, past French people.

Interestingly, while looking up the Merci Train, I realized that there is an official effort to track down the location of these items. The boxcar itself is displayed in Fort Indiantown Gap, and some of the artifacts have been traced to Blair and Lycoming Counties. But the majority of them haven’t been located; there is speculation that many of the artifacts are stored, unknown, in garages and attics.

Jake the buffalo seems to be one of the missing ones. I e-mailed the organization, and caused something of an international incident. A few hours after I sent the initial e-mail, I was getting responses from all over America and France, excited about this new information. They are delighted to know that we have a confirmed location, and are cheerfully investigating further information on the Merci Train.

I’m happy to have supplied them with at least one answer they seek---Six feet from my desk.

Thanks, Jake.

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A Brief Summary of the history of the Pennsylvania boxcar of the Merci Train

by Dorothy Scheele

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Pennsylvania's Merci car, filled with 10,000 gifts, made only two stops before reaching Harrisburg, its final destination. Philadelphia was the first stop on February 5, 1949.

In the City of Brotherly Love, on a cold, clear day, 2,000 people greeted the bright red boxcar when it arrived at the Broad Street Station at 11:45. Legionnaires from the 40 & 8 were among the spectators, plus 1,000 school children, waving French and American flags. The Police and Firemen's Band played, and the Breen-McCracken Post of the American Legion provided the color guard.

The next morning, the train stopped in Lancaster. The city's one-half hour celebration of France's Merci train began at 9:30 a.m.

As in most states, the largest celebration was in the Capitol. Several thousand watched the parade as it wound through the downtown streets of Harrisburg. The parade ended at the State Museum where the acceptance ceremony began at 3:00.

Despite a complete inventory of the gifts, their whereabouts now are almost unknown. The most noteworthy is an automobile. An electrician in Rouen gave one of the first petroleum operated vehicles ever made in France. The whereabouts of this car is a complete mystery.

Almost certainly it is under wraps in a corner in a garage somewhere, and at the present time no one is aware of what it is or of its importance. With a prayer, it may eventually surface.

All of the state's gifts, until recently, shared this same fate. Despite the inventory of the French treasures, no record of their disposition in 1949 nor of their current whereabouts has yet been located.

However, about 50 small items in two counties have been recently located. Blair County Historical Society has 20 Merci gifts and Lycoming Country Historical Society has about 30. The latter's are mostly postcards. To date, these are the only gifts known to exist. Most likely, the institutions which received the Merci train gifts, tagged and displayed them, but as time passed, their importance and significance faded. Eventually the gifts and their origin, forgotten, became nondescript knickknacks relegated to attics, basements, and storage rooms. In all likelihood, many gifts are still in these forgotten corners, obscured under the dust of time. Searching most certainly would bring results. Perhaps if enough are found, they can be displayed for their historic and humanitarian worth.

Like the gifts themselves, Pennsylvania's Merci car eventually drifted into obscurity. The Preservation Committee and the Pennsylvania National Guard rescued the car from oblivion and raised funds to restore it. A dedication ceremony was held in November 1986. The boxcar, looking brand new and bearing shields of the French provinces on the sides, is on display at Indiantown Gap National Guard Post near Annville, PA.

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This web site has a picture of all of the Merci boxcars except for the six. Three of these are destroyed. The fate of the other three is yet to be determined. Much thanks to Dorothy Scheele, a resident of Pa. for contributing this summary.

A coat of arms from an unidentified cathedral in France, originally owned by John Branyon of Harrisburg for his work with the Merci Trains. Branyon later gave the arms to Philip Hensel of Palm Beach Gardens, FL the current owner.

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The Merci Artifacts below are housed in the Blair County Historical Society in Pennsylvania.

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Merci Artifacts in the Lycoming County Historical Society - Williamsport, PA.

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