Religious Freedom: Key to Diversity

“There can be no reason to persecute any man in this world about anything that belongs to the next.” – William Penn   To describe Pennsylvania’s re­ligious diversity is to present the history of its religious develop­ment. Although many other states be­came religiously heterogeneous during the nineteenth century, Pennsylvania was pluralistic even as a colony within...
read more

McKean County: Where the Gold is Green

The great gold and silver rushes of the late nineteenth century to places such as the Black Hills, Colorado, Arizona, California and Alaska have long been hailed in story and song for their excite­ment, riches and heartbreak. But, the rush for “green gold” to McKean County during the same century was equally or more exciting. First, there were the forests – immense forests of...
read more

Religion on a Moving Frontier: The Berks County Area, 1700-1748

Because of the tolerant policy of the Penns, thousands of people of various ethnic backgrounds and religious faiths poured into the colony of Pennsylvania, many of them moving directly to the frontier. Within fifteen years after the founding of Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania frontier had moved more than fifty miles north and west of the city. By 1700 the area comprising the southeastern part of...
read more