HISTORICAL HUB CITY
HISTORICAL HUB CITY
History
From the days of its first founding in 1639, great things were expected of Hub City. A Dutch trader named Peter Hubbel founded the outpost and named it after himself, and for the first few years of its existence, the trading post of Fort Hubbel lay at the delta of the St. Mary River where it branched off into the smaller Green River as they both fed out to the sea, a short hike inland from the coast, easily accessible by ship and still defensible against Indian uprisings. Hubbel planned for the fort to be a building block on which a great city could spring, and he was rewarded for his vision as the settlement soon blossomed thanks to its advantageous location. It grew from a small bastion to a settlement of 600 in just a few years.
The Dutch, however, began to have difficulties holding onto their American assets, and in 1664, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, it was forced to cede Fort Hubbel, along with a great many of its American holdings, to the English. The English, as they did with many of their newly-won assets, changed the name of the settlement from Fort Hubbel to Hub Town, a suggestion of the thriving settlement they thought it could become so close to the conflux of two navigable rivers. At the time, Hub Town was a small community of Dutch settlers and English newcomers. It soon grew to the scope of what the English envisioned, and blossomed into one of the more thriving towns in the colonies, and a center of commerce and trade equivalent with the larger seaside towns of the Eastern seaboard... just in time to breed rebellion as the colonies became embroiled in the American Revolution.
Hub Town became a hotbed of activity and bloodshed during the Revolution. The town was home to a fairly staunch Tory population, especially in and around North End and the area around the confluence of the St. Mary and Green Rivers, where most of the town's urban area was located. But as the Revolutionary War began to close in, more and more colonists began to embrace the cause of freedom, and the Tories began to find themselves treated more than a bit like treacherous outsiders in their own town. Businesses and houses were burned, and Tories who were noticeably vocal in their support of King George were tarred and feathered... and in at least one case as the war began to rage, hanged. Tories, with support of the provincial governor of Hub Town, retaliated; one such retaliation was the murder of the Chambers family, who were not only supporters of the Continental Congress, but had helped store arms on their farm for use by the Continental Armies. Adding to the vengefulness of both sides was the fact that Hub Town was considered a strategic point during the war, and as such, the town changed hands from the British to the Americans several times. The Revolution made deadly enemies of townspeople who once were friendly neighbors, and by the time the colonists had won their freedom, Hub Town itself was war-scarred and few believed it would be able to recover.
The few who believed it would turned out to be right. Despite the pitched battles that took place in its very limits, and the destruction caused by them, the position of Hub Town along the rivers was too advantageous to let the town fade into obscurity. By the turn of the century, Hub Town was well on its way back to being the center of trade it once had been, and by the Civil War (1861-1865), its population had boomed to the point where calling it a town was a misnomer. Union soldiers returning after the war now called their homeplace the city of Hub, or more accurately, Hub City. Like many towns in the northeast during the Reconstruction Era, Hub City experienced a boom period as homeless war refugees and freed slaves made their way north to try to eke out a living.
Railroad and shipping booms accelerated Hub City's growth, and the fairly small city limits first began to stretch outward from the original borders during the mid-to-late 19th century as people began to move to the north, south and east of the crowded city centers. While those centers of business boomed, what is now known as Historical Hub City remained in a relatively stable decline. By 1950, what had once been the center of commerce in Hub City was falling to ruin while the other districts were experiencing the boom of post-World War II population. By 1961, even the government facilities were moved to the more progressive Midtown District, which had taken over as the City Center.
Events at that point would have likely ended with the most historical district in Hub City becoming a poverty-stricken slum, except for the work first started by former mayor Henry Blaine, who headed up the Hub City Historical Foundation in 1964. Using his own invested money, and later, money donated by civic organizations and businesses, Blaine used his government connections to introduce a foundation devoted to the restoration and renovation of sites in the Historical District. Since 1965, the Hub City Historical Foundation has had a hand in making sure the Historical District hasn't fallen into further ruin, and paved the way for its renaissance in more recent years.
Modern Day
While-- as its name implies-- the oldest of Hub City's seven districts, the Historical District is far from defunct today. Rather the opposite. The Hub City Historical Foundation's efforts to raise awareness of sites of historical interest and the general renovation of the district's Victorian homes and 19th century edifices has in fact brought in new businesses and residents with its traditional, old-fashioned charm. The close-knit neighborhoods of the early 1900's have been expanded and spread out. Law firms, banks and white-collar businesses have taken up residence in the refurbished buildings, some of which still retain outer shells of their antiquity. Even the costumed heroines of Hub City have moved into the Historical District and embraced it. Miss Spell's Aerie is located in Centerton, and Miss Rhyme has been known to frequent the Historical District as though it were her very own.
The Historical District's housing tends to be upscale, for the most part. Here and there one can find the more progressive ranches and newer housing and apartment developments seen elsewhere in Hub City's outskirts-- especially in the areas of Westfield and Green Township-- but by and large, the neighborhoods in the Historical District tend to be older here than in most places in Hub City. In some areas of Homestead and Centerton, for instance, that equates to older lower-income housing that is only a few shades above slums. In North End, however, the upscale refurbished Victorian and Colonial houses are spread out with spacious yards, and regularly have asking prices of several hundred thousand dollars-- and some within close range to the St. Mary River are even more expensive than that.
The Historical District is known-- quite obviously-- for its historical museums and sites of historical interest, which draw thousands monthly. Centerton boasts Hub Towne, a family-style ten-acre attraction where re-enactors give an accurate portrayal of Colonial life during Hub City's first few generations. Various other museums are spread throughout the District in sizable buildings and refurbished homes, catering to the multi-faceted history of Hub City and its citizens. North End and Centerton tend to do the most tourist business, but even Chambersburg's famed Chambers House (famous in that it was the site of the namesake family's murder in 1775) rakes in a modest profit during the heavy tourist season.
One thing that the Historical District is notably not is a shopping mecca. While smaller retailers and family-owned outlets have thrived through the Historical District's renaissance, most of the larger department stores and retail chains have stayed studiously away, opting instead for the bright lights and glamour of Hub City's more progressive districts.
Historical Hub City breaks down into the following sections:
NORTH END (12)
North End once rivaled the more blue-collar sections of the Wharf District for sheer number of warehouses, canneries and factories, and offered most of the jobs available outside the city center, but those times have long since passed by. With bulk transportation generally leading away from the St. Mary River and toward the ocean and the highways, North End's stacks quietly began to cease churning out smoke, and many of the warehouses and factories shut down and relocated to other areas. The housing there soon began to fall to ruin and slum, with the exception of some of the more outstanding river-view Victorians.
Once renovation of the Historical District was begun, North End was-- along with Centerton-- cited as one of the larger eyesores of the community. Although all of the slums on the south side of the End haven't quite been renovated, and a few factories and warehouse have survived the passage of years, North End is much better off now on the whole than it was even twenty years ago. Great vista houses-- some going so far as to be called mansions-- with sprawling yards line the upscale areas along the St. Mary River. A portion of North End along the St. Mary has also been fashioned into North End Commons, which boasts both an amphitheater-- used for the yearly Shakespeare Festival and other concerts and outdoor plays-- and one of Hub City's largest botanical gardens. Nearby is River Plaza, an artsy-nouveau manmade canal-style walk along the St. Mary River.
But even with such progressive aspects, North End's main donations to the Hub City community are largely historical. Several larger museums and historical areas dot the North End landscape, from the Gaffner Printing House, where colonists once printed leaflets and tracts against English taxation, to the Belle of St. Mary, a refurbished paddlewheel boat moored on the upper St. Mary River that acts as a historical walkthrough of Hub City's achievements on the St. Mary river throughout the city's history. Most of North End's museums, however, like the Hub City Museum of Natural History, tend to lie well off the shores of the river, which has been known to overflow its banks during Hub City's history... most often during particularly torrential spring rains.
It is rumored that Miss Rhyme is often seen hopping the rooftops of the more urban areas of North End at night. It is not clear whether her alter-ego makes her residence there or not, however.
CENTERTON (13)
For the greater part of Hub City's illustrious history, Centerton was where the city capitol was located, near the branches of the Green and St. Mary Rivers, and all the government buildings were located along Main Street, which crosses Centerton from east to west. Naturally, a great many businesses followed suit, and up until Hub City's population center began to move vaguely southeastern, Centerton was considered 'downtown'. Once the migration began, however, Centerton became, like most of the Historical District, a site for here-today-gone-tomorrow family businesses, second-hand shops, lower-income housing and well-intentioned but financially bereft family doctors and lawyers. When the renovation of the Historical District was first begun, Centerton was the place Henry Blaine most envisioned restoring to glory.
The changes from those bygone days to now are nothing short of remarkable. The tall buildings and flats of Centerton still stand, and most have been refurbished to states of their former glory, but with modern conveniences. However, museums and historical sites are still the most notable and moneymaking places in Centerton: most well-known are the Hub Towne Colonial Re-enactment Site; the Centerton Library, which houses the largest collection of pre-20th century archives in the city; and the Gladly Museum of Photography, which was Hub City's first photography studio and houses tintypes, photographic equipment and prints dating back to before the Civil War.
But those are far from the only sites of interest now. Also bringing in community awareness is the Hub City Historical Foundation, which is headquartered along historic Main Street near the city center, and WTPB-TV/WTPB-FM, Hub City's Public Broadcast TV station and NPR affiliate, which has resisted the yen for change and growth in the market which has caused most radio and television stations to move outside the Historical District. Thanks in no small part to their outreach, downtown Centerton has reinvented itself to house a new generation of history and art afficianados, and various booksellers, publishers, studios, offices and white-collar businesses have moved back into what was not long ago considered an eyesore.
Most of the buildings also bow to the largest structure in Centerton-- a tall, ornate tower that seems oddly aged even compared to the older buildings. Set apart near the old governmental center, within a mile of the delta of the St. Mary and Green Rivers, and surrounded by a forbidding-looking iron-spire fence, Miss Spell's Sanctum seems to overlook everything and anything that happens in Centerton and all points beyond. Some folks seem to consider the sprawling tower an eyesore, but most others, knowing who resides there, are ambivalent about its presence. While the Sanctum takes up space and is forbidding enough to keep most people far away, the people know Miss Spell provides protection for Hub City, and the space her Sanctum takes up was not being used by anyone, anyway.
HOMESTEAD (14)
Homestead's name came from the early days of Hub City, when it was a launching point for recent arrivals to the new world who didn't want to remain bottled up in the town proper to purchase deeds to land, weapons, and various tools before heading out to make their living in the wilderness. In truth, that very well might have been the high point in its history. While Centerton was becoming the governmental center of Hub City, Homestead was already beginning to house the not-so-well-to-do that couldn't afford to live with the mainstays to the north. While North End was becoming home to a growing community of textile factories, canneries and warehouses in the late 19th and early twentieth century, many of their underpaid sweatshop employees came from Homestead.
It would be a truly grand thing if the Historical District's renovation had rediscovered Homestead, the way it did North End and Centerton, but in truth, Homestead still houses the largely underprivileged, the low-income and the unemployed. There are areas of Homestead near the Centerton boundary that can even be rightfully referred to as slum. But there are signs that Homestead might soon find the light in the darkness-- community outreach programs have targeted Homestead, and the City Council unanimously signed a bill to increase funding to the public schools in Hub City, citing the sorry state of repair and lack of modernization and adequate teaching aids in some of Homestead's public elementary schools. The Hub City Department of Urban Development has also lobbied long and hard for government assistance in bringing some of Homestead's tightly-packed neighborhoods more up to date.
Whether that will herald a major change in the community landscape is yet to be seen.
WESTFIELD (15)
Westfield is quite possibly the fastest growing suburban area of Historical Hub City, meshing the quaint beauty of the Historical District's Victorian homes and vintage shops with midsize ranch-style houses and growing neighborhoods almost seamlessly-- which is somewhat surprising, given the mostly less-adequate housing of surrounding Homestead and Chambersburg. Its population has risen steadily in the past five years, becoming a bit of a white collar urbania, and giving rise to newer housing developments and complexes that have crowded out a few of the Historical District's older buildings. Westfield High School, now with about almost fifteen hundred students, is the largest school in the area, and thanks largely to the growing population has completed a turnaround from a nearly-outdated rundown post-war edifice to one of the more up-to-date suburban learning facilities in the city.
Until she was forced underground some time ago, Christine Mueller (Frosteen) and her brother Michael made their home in the refurbished suburban neighborhoods of Westfield.
CHAMBERSBURG (16)
Named after Isaiah Chambers (1732-1775), whose family was killed during the American Revolution, Chambersburg was one of the more thriving farming community in the region for a great deal of Hub City's history. In the boom period during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chambersburg's farmlands were among the first scooped up as Hub City began to grow and expand, leaving farming families to pack up and go elsewhere or become part of the mercantile centre that Hub City was quickly becoming.
Today, Chambersburg houses a lot of the small, winding neighborhood roads and the closely-packed houses that were en vogue during the early-to-mid 20th century, and provides fairly low-income housing in the historic community. Most of the stores in the area tend to be smaller, family-owned businesses, second-hand stores, low-end merchandisers and antiquaries. The Chambersburg area is slowly undergoing the same style of renovation that the rest of the Historical District is, but not quickly enough to pull in the money from national chains that some other areas in the Historical District have.
GREEN TOWNSHIP (17)
Green Township-- which gets its name from the Green River that crosses it from north to south-- was the first area in the Historical District to embrace the idea of renovating its community to compete with the more urbane sections of the Highland District to the south, where larger businesses and the jobs that came along with them were drawn. Older tenements were restored and buildings were renovated, and the historical areas were marketed for their history, rather than just looming as forgotten eyesores. However, the hopping businesses and retail chains have never completely made their way there, and Green Township remains the butt of some knowledgeable townie jokes for trying to 'fit in' with the more up-to-date suburbs.
Green Township does boasts a bustling art community in and around the Kispoko Museum of Native American Art and the Chapman School of Art-- located just off the campus of tiny Granger College. It also boasts the Flanner Auto Museum and the Granger House-- named for James Esrington Granger, one of Hub City's first multimillionaires and the patron of Granger College-- as well as quite a few smaller and less well-known museums and places of historical interest.
Green Township, along with Westfield, is where many of the suburbanite families that wish to live in Historical District have settled down, and their money has helped make a difference in the community even with the lack of large multinational chains; Green Township High School has recently renovated to accommodate the growing number of students, and has become a staple of the community and a source of pride, especially after becoming state 3A High School Football Champions.
