The John S. Morrison Scholarship

John Shaver Morrison was born December 21, 1837 near Aughwick Mills in Huntingdon County. After serving as a First Lieutenant in the Civil War, he built a career in the paper industry — helping found the Roaring Spring Paper Mill, then organizing Morrison, Bare & Cass Co. of Pittsburgh, and finally moving to Tyrone in 1880 to build and run the Tyrone paper mill (still operating today as part of what became the Westvaco/WestRock pulp and paper works). He never married.

Morrison's sister, Jennie, was the mother of Oliver Leslie Etnier, born in Mount Union in 1868. When Jennie died in 1878, ten-year-old Oliver and his siblings lost their mother — and "Uncle John" stepped in as a mentor, eventually bringing Oliver into the paper business at the Morrison-Cass mill in Tyrone. That start carried Oliver to Pittsburgh, and by 1890 to Chicago, where he built his fortune with the Dearborn Paper Company and the Calumet Paper Company.

Oliver Etnier wrote his will in 1930, creating a trust in gratitude for the uncle who had shaped his life. He died in Wilmington, Delaware in August 1950 at age 81 and is buried in the Mount Union Cemetery. Once the last of his immediate family had passed, the trust — by then valued at roughly $9.5 million — became available to fund scholarships for the hometown he never forgot.

On August 28, 1989, the Mount Union Area School Board unanimously approved the John S. Morrison Scholarship program, named by Oliver for the uncle who had made his own success possible. Wilmington Trust Company, as trustee, announced it would award several full four-year college scholarships every year from the trust's income — with the first scholarships offered beginning in January 1990.

Beyond individual scholarships, the trust also pays 20% of its annual net income — about $100,000 at the program's 1989 launch — directly to Mount Union Area School District each year "for the benefit of the moral, physical and intellectual development of the pupils."

The direct gift to the district itself has grown from about $100,000 at the program's 1989 launch to $342,000 in the most recent filing year — still flowing "for the benefit of the moral, physical and intellectual development of the pupils," just as Oliver Etnier intended.

Source: MUASD Morrison Scholarship records, 1990–2025. Have a correction or a winner to add? Send it to the district office.