Harvey Blaine Kauffman was a self made man. He got his middle name after James G. Blaine, who was then secretary of State and who later was an unsucessful Republican presidential candidate in 1884.

With little formal education, Harvey became a student of the Bible and of politics, in addition to being a crack PRR engineer. One of twelve children, he was born in Marietta, PA, a son of the late Issac Brenner and Mary (Gottschall) Kauffman. Harvey was an ambitious young man, spending his boyhood at Marietta helping his father farm 23 acres and doing other manual jobs in the area, with the help of his father's mules, plowing garden lots in the spring, wresting sand from the Susquehanna River for use in construction, and in the local foundaries, ice in the winter for refrigeration purposes, and working for the Borough and Township doing various hauling jobs. Consequently, he knew practically everyone in the area and throughout his life, kept diaries and scrapbooks of obituaries and marriage notices of his friends, acquaintances and railroad co-workers.

As soon as he reached the age of twenty-one, he began working for the Pennsylvania Railroad as a fireman out of Enola-Harrisburg. He worked his way up from fireman to becoming a highly regarded passenger train engineer. The most famous trains he piloted were the "Broadway Limited"
and “The Spirit of Saint Louis” from Harrisburg to New York City. He retired in 1951 after forty-eight years of service, and then lived for thirty-two more years on his two acre farmette in Kinderhook, about a mile from Columbia, where he lived for sixty-five years and raised a variety of vegetables and tended his apple orchard and grape arbors.

Harvey was married to Mary Catherine McCracken 5 Aug 1907 in Columbia, PA. She was born 15 Aug,1880 and died at home 18 Nov 1969. They had four daughters: Ruth Gottschall, Sara Virginia, Carolyn Irene and Mary Philomene.