The Kintzler house sat on the slopes of Jack’s Mountain, a ridge that runs some seventy miles from Huntingdon County to Snyder County. The landscape was a combination of dense woods and fenced-in farmland. The Kintzler cabin was less than 400 yards from the main path that led over the mountain from Troxelville to Laurelton. That’s not to say that the Kintzlers lived amid the hustle and bustle of a major transportation route; although a traveler could see the house from the road, it was little more than a traditional dirt trail worn over the mountain by generations of human and animal movement. The Weekly Blade of Kane, PA, called it the “roughest road in America.” The entire mountain slope was dotted with huckleberries; residents who lived down in town walked up to pick them in the summer.
The Kintzler homestead was ten acres surrounded and divided by split-rail (or worm) fences. The property was rectangular, measuring longer east-west than north-south. The main barn sat above the house, up in a field where the Kinztlers kept cows and took neighbors’ cows for pasture. The house was plainly built, with hewn pitch pine logs surrounding a simple floor made of boards. It had a half-attic or garret, which no one except the couple seemed to have seen inside. Jacob Schrader told the jury at Jonathan Moyer’s December 1880 trial, “It was an old house and an old door.” On the south side of the house, the Kintzlers kept a small garden, and a crumbling wagon-maker’s shop stood just to the east.
The Kintzlers’ nearest neighbors were the Schraders, to the southeast, and the Erbs, to the west. In the map below, the red/white X shows the approximate location of the Kintzlers’ house. Click on it and neighboring houses for a better sense of who was where.