Editor’s Letter

“Persons and places conceive each other.” While preparing this edition of Pennsylvania Heritage, I was reminded of this quote from the preface of an American studies textbook I read as a graduate student, American Ground: Vistas, Visions and Revisions, edited by Robert H. Fossum and John K. Roth. It continues: “No people would have become American without a place of their own. Nor would any...
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Castanea … From Blight to Backcross Breeding

Not far from my home at the base of the South Mountain in Cumberland County, there is a wide spot in the road where you can park a couple cars at the edge of a block of public land. From that place, the visible but overgrown bed of a Colonial-era haul road ascends the mountain. Scattered along the road are the small, flat and circular remains of 18th- and 19th-century charcoal kilns that...
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Chestnut Tree Blight Disease Commission

Not all of the records relating to forestry in Pennsylvania were created by large permanent state agencies such as the Department of Forests and Waters (see “Reviving — and Revising — the Reputation of Ralph Elwood Brock” by Rachel L. Jones Williams in the fall 2007 issue). A 1912 diagram accompanying a field inspection report for the Mahoning Valley in Carbon County, for example, is among the...
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