Pithole City

Posted by on Apr 12, 2016 in | Comments Off on Pithole City At first sight, there is not much to Pithole City 150 years after it was established. There are cellar holes, a grass-covered but visible street grid, a 1972 visitor center and interpretive guideposts. The property today looks much the same as when it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on March 20, 1973, for its significance to industrial history. It is amazing to think that...
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Midcentury Modern Trails

Posted by on May 11, 2015 in | Comments Off on Midcentury Modern Trails From the 1950s into the 1970s, when Midcentury Modern architecture was at its height, a flurry of new construction took place on the Trails of History. Many of the visitor centers and museums from this period echoed historic forms appropriate to the sites where they were built. The visitor center at Ephrata Cloister, constructed in the late 1950s to mid-1960s, is complementary to the surviving...
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The Deerslayer by N.C. Wyeth

Posted by on May 8, 2015 in | Comments Off on The Deerslayer by N.C. Wyeth   In December 1967 PHMC chairman James B. Stevenson accepted an original painting by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) for the collection of The State Museum of Pennsylvania from Mrs. George R. Bailey of the George R. Bailey Foundation of Harrisburg, Dauphin County, in a ceremony held in the museum’s Memorial Hall. The painting had been created as the cover design for the 1925 Scribner Illustrated...
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Pithole City: Boom Town Turned Ghost Town, An Interview with James B. Stevenson

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pithole City: Boom Town Turned Ghost Town, An Interview with James B. Stevenson One hundred and twenty-five years ago this summer, the placid calm of northwestern Pennsylvania’s sparsely populated but panoramic vista was ruptured when “Colonel” Edwin L. Drake’s well coughed up rich, black crude oil on August 28, 1859. The following boom years of the oil industry gave rise to numerous towns and cities, some of which were short-lived ghost towns. The...
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The Gentleman from Pennsylvania: An Interview with William W. Scranton

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Gentleman from Pennsylvania: An Interview with William W. Scranton Bill Scranton is precisely what one expects of a diplomat and statesman. He is courtly, not supercilious. He is a good conversationalist, but not loquacious or self-aggrandizing. He is as graceful as he is gracious. His recall of the people and the places and the events in his life is phenomenal. In the best of northeastern Pennsylvania’s vernacular, he is a Class Act – and in a...
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Genealogical Research of Pithole

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Genealogical Research of Pithole Genealogical research can best be described as a search for matching up the crosshairs of “time and place” to find what records a specific era and particular location can yield. The phenomenon of the “boom town” can be one of the most frustrating situations for family historians. While many might think of boom-to-bust ghost towns in terms of the American West,...
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Pithole

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pithole Pennsylvania’s oil boom began in Venango County, one-half mile south of Titusville, late in the afternoon ­of Saturday, August 27, 1859, when Edwin L. Drake (1819-1880) perfected a way to drill for oil and extract it horn the ground. Initially, production was centered in the valleys of Oil Creek and the Allegheny River. In 1865, Isaiah N. Frazier and James Faulkner, employees of a nearby...
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