History & local legend
Mount Nittany, the ridge overlooking State College and Penn State, is associated with a story popularized by Pennsylvania writer Henry W. Shoemaker in the early twentieth century. Its central figure is Nita-nee, a queen whose care for her people eventually changes the landscape.
In Shoemaker's telling, an elderly couple asks for help after the north wind destroys their corn for three successive years. They have only enough seed for one more planting and are too weak to build shelter for the crop. Nita-nee orders a hundred soldiers to cut cedar poles and construct a windbreak. The corn survives.
After the queen dies, a storm passes over her grave, and a mountain rises there overnight. It shelters the whole valley as her windbreak once sheltered the couple. Shoemaker was circulating the story by 1915, and a version appeared in Penn State's 1916 yearbook.
