Cambria County: Coming Full Circle

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Cambria County: Coming Full Circle Located in the highlands of west­-central Pennsylvania and amidst forbidding mountains – the Allegheny escarpment and the Laurel Ridge standing sentinel on its eastern and western borders­ – the territory that would become Cambria County was not easily accessible to early Pennsylvanians. Migrants bound westward during the second half of the eighteenth century avoided its...
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Violence and Vigilantes: The KKK in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Violence and Vigilantes: The KKK in Pennsylvania It was a warm, muggy day in early August 1921 in Philadelphia when F. W. Atkins of Jacksonville, Florida, and W. J. Bellamy of Cincinnati, Ohio, rented an office in the Bellevue Court Building to quietly recruit members for “a great and patriotic crusade to save the nation.” Their goal was to organize a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Posing as a prospective KKK initiate, a...
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