Most readers won't remember Hurley, who died over forty years ago, but he was a well-known craftsman and farmer in Central. He owned and operated a general store in Central from 1906 to 1912 and during the 1890s he farmed and operated a blacksmith shop. At times he operated the carpentry shop at the Benton Foundry and served as a Sugarloaf Township Road Supervisor. Hurley Shultz, assisted by Warren Kocher and Joe Daya, built a large stone house over a three-year period along a mountain stream near the White House in Jamison City when he was about 70.

Most readers will also not remember Charlotte and Ernest Biddle Heg for whom the house was constructed by Hurley Shultz. Biddle Heg was a graduate of Swarthmore College and an instructor in the English department at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. His great grandfather was Colonel Hans Christian Heg, the commander of the "Fifteenth Wisconsin" in the Civil War. Joe Daya worked with Hurley and Warren on the construction of the stone house for the first year, but then left the project. Hurley and Warren finished the house. It was a "masterpiece of cut stone, knotty pine paneling and oak flooring." Electrical power was not available at the time the house was built, but the house was wired for that eventuality. Hurley and Warren did all the work.

Biddle Heg was working for a small advertising firm in Swarthmore at the time he met Charlotte. He had left the University of Pennsylvania by this time. As Charlotte and Biddle's relationship grew, he became Assistant Dean of Students at Lafayette College, about the years 1946-47. They married sometime in 1947.

Inscription on the side of the Heg House

At the time prior to their meeting, Biddle had been working on a "camp" above the site where "The Stone House" Hurley built now stands. When Charlotte's father died she received quite a sum of money from his will. Biddle used this money to build "The Stone House." The marriage lasted ten years, but son George remembers it was not a happy marriage. Sometime during George's assignment in Europe (1953 to 1956) with the U.S. Air Force, Biddle left Lafayette College.

Charlotte's son, George Heg, was fourteen when the house was completed. Many of the Heg details for this article come from him. David Dinsmore, who provided the details for the Hurley Shultz side of the story, was a very young boy when the house was finished. I remember hearing Hurley tell of all the rattlesnakes unearthed during the construction of the house, although we no longer hear of these snakes at that location.

The Heg family stayed frequently at The Moses Van Campen Hotel during the beginning of construction of this house. Later the family stayed in the original Bloomsburg and Sullivan station house in Jamison City. At that time Biddle Heg owned that building and had attempted to make a livable house of it. The building was later sold to Bill Mather. At times, the family stayed with Albert and Liz Ashton at their house in Jamison City.

The 1925 Dodge conversion Hurley had was the first motor vehicle George Heg ever drove. George remembered helping Hurley make hay in the fields by the house pictured with David and Jane Dinsmore in the Personalities Section on the side panel. Hurley used the same old Dodge as his tractor. George attended Benton High School and would have graduated with the class of 1952, but left early and joined the U.S. Air Force. He last visited the Benton area in 1965 and chose to live in the state of Mississippi, living on the gulf coast, where he still resides.

Biddle and Charlotte Heg owned about 250 acres of land in the Jamison City area at one time, according to George Heg. Bill Mather acquired the Bloomsburg & Sullivan railroad station in Jamison City "when he built a small house on the property Biddle owned in the valley across from Vansickles."

When Biddle Heg sold the property, it went to Otto Little. The property later transferred to Ed and Betty Groy, now deceased, whose children now own and enjoy it.

Following Biddle's retirement, he compiled his grandfather's letters written during the Civil War. His grandfather was a colonel in the Union Army and was quite respected from his successes in battle in the Civil War in the south. He suffered a wound to his abdomen that killed him in Atlanta, GA.

The rest of the story of the stone house in Jamison City is not entirely upbeat. The marriage of Biddle and Charlotte Heg did not survive, and as a condition of the divorce George Heg changed his name to Phil Nickolai, the name he still uses. Phil is now 71. Charlotte left Jamison City about 1965 after renting the second floor of Bill Mather's store for a time. During a period of illness for Charlotte and while she was hospitalized, "Biddle sold all of the property in Jamison but a section called "Maple Grove." He also sold or gave away much of mothers' personal property," according to George. She relocated to Sciota for a brief time, then she lived near Scranton, then lived in Dallas, Texas, until she retired and moved to Rockport, Texas. She died six days before her seventy-sixth birthday in Corpus Christi, Texas. Biddle Heg died in January, 2005, eight months before his ninetieth birthday in La Jolla, California, according to the Social Security Death Index.

George returned from Europe in June of 1956 and stayed in Jamison City for a thirty-day leave prior to returning to Keesler Air Force Base, Biloxi. George did not return to Jamison for nine years. Biddle had gone to La Jolla, California. Charlotte told George in 1977 that Biddle had requested that George change his name as "he didn't want me to carry on his family name were I to marry and have children. "

"Philip" was the first and only child of Charlotte and Philip Grant Nikolai, Charlotte's first marriage. Philip was his fathers' namesake but for one teeny element. Philip tells us that "When Biddle Heg requested that my name be changed I simply went back to my original birth certificate, a simple court procedure and my name was changed back to when it all began. I thought. Strangely enough the name was spelled wrong on the birth certificate by whom ever filled it out and that went unnoticed. Fifty years later mother asked me why there was a "c" in the name. She said it was supposed to be "Nikolai". I simply explained "Mother, it is Nickolai on the certificate. She said nothing. So things have been messed up from the start."

George's mother's maiden name was Valentine. Her father, Warren P. Valentine, Philadelphia, was an inventor and his name is in the records of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia for certain of his accomplishments that were manufactured by the Valentine Refractometers, Richmondville, New York, which he had designed and manufactured in the 1920s.  There are three Valentine instruments of this sort in the collections of the National Museum of American History. 

George's father was second generation in this country from Russia. He, recently, died at age ninety-four in 2001 in Tennessee.

The Heg House, Jamison City
Picture couresy of Walt Davis, Manassas