Editorial policy: where the facts come from and how far they were checked

The eleven documents

The site's source register holds eleven documents, all published by public bodies or on their behalf. Each topic page names, at its foot, the ones it draws on.

Forums, tourism promotion, business directories and unattributed websites were not used for any statement.

What the check did and did not do

Each of the eleven documents was requested once by a script on 2026-10-26, with no retries, and every one answered normally. It then searched each document's text for the short facts the pages take from it, such as dates, lengths and names: 54 such facts in all, and all 54 were found. For the two Library of Congress reports the search ran over the text layer that comes with the scanned PDF.

That check has limits worth stating plainly. It confirms that a fact appears in its document; it does not confirm that every sentence around the fact is fair to the source, and most sentences were never tested at all. The documents have not been fetched again since, which is why every topic page still gives 2026-10-26 as its review date.

Their facts, the site's wording

Dates, distances, heights, counts and population figures come from the named documents and are paraphrased, never copied. The sentences that join those facts together and explain why they matter are the site's own. So is any arithmetic, such as a percentage or an average grade, and the page says when a number is a calculation. Census figures carry the year they describe, and an estimate is called an estimate.

Records that disagree

When two records give different answers, the page shows both and says which source gave which. Horseshoe Curve's landmark designation is an example: the PHMC marker essay and the National Park Service list give different years, and the site follows the Park Service because it keeps the list. Accounts that cannot be settled, such as where the city's name came from, are told as accounts.

Left out on purpose

• Opening hours, prices, event dates and anything else that goes stale within a season.
• Businesses of any kind, and the names of people now in office.
• The city's present charter, officials and county services. The city and county websites could not be reached while the pages were researched, so the site makes no claim about them; the county seat and the county's formation come from the State Archives guide instead.

AI drafting, and the review still missing

An AI system drafted every page from the documents above. No independent human editor and no historian has reviewed any of it, so treat it as a starting point and the documents as the authority. The pictures are vector illustrations made for this site and stand in for no photograph, map or measured drawing; the about page says more.

Standing and links

The site answers to nobody: it is not the City of Altoona's or Blair County's website, and no railroad, museum, historical society or government body backs it. It has no tie to the earlier website that used this domain. Nothing is sold, advertised, sponsored or earned on commission.

In this first edition the documents are named but not linked, so each page can be read in full before any outbound link goes in. A link added later will be there because it helps the reader, and a paid one, if one ever appeared, would be labelled on the page.

If a page has gone out of date

The eleven documents were read once, on 2026-10-26, and nothing is set up to read them a second time. Any of them may have been revised since, and the Census Bureau may have issued newer population estimates, so a figure here can fall behind without anyone noticing. Readers have no way to report a problem either, which means an error may simply sit on the page. Before leaning on a date or a number, look at the publisher's current copy of the document; where it and this site part ways, the publisher is right. Should a page ever be corrected, the change will be dated on that page.