The Great Escape: Camping in the 19th Century

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Great Escape: Camping in the 19th Century During the turbulent nineteenth century, Americans were as mobile as wheels, waterways and ambition could make them. The population was preoccupied with carving out a new nation, emigrating, pioneering, surveying, sod busting, prospecting for gold and, fundamentally, attempt­ing to preserve body and soul. With the surge westward and the consuming desire to push on to the frontiers, there was a...
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Mifflin County: The Crossroads of the Commonwealth

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Mifflin County: The Crossroads of the Commonwealth Mifflin County will celebrate its two hundredth birth­day on September 19, during a customarily beau­tiful month when glowing foliage sweeps over four hun­dred and thirty-one square miles of farms, small towns and wooded mountains. Ex­tending from Bear Gap to Kistler Borough through rug­ged and scenic valleys to the banks of the Juniata River, it’s just fifteen miles from the Seven...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Canoeing on the Juniata, 1888 by Henry K. Landis Pennsylvania Histori­cal and Museum Commission and Landis Valley Associates, 1993 (68 pages, cloth, $15.95) Elizabeth F. Johnson, who wrote the introduction to Canoeing on the Juniata, 1888, describes Henry K. Landis (1865-1955) as “a collector, recorder, keeper, and lover of history.” Throughout his long life, he sustained a keen...
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This Is a Beautiful, Bountiful Earth: Joseph Trimble Rothrock and the Preservation of Penn’s Woods

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on This Is a Beautiful, Bountiful Earth: Joseph Trimble Rothrock and the Preservation of Penn’s Woods The lush, verdant woodlands characteristic of Pennsylvania’s landscape are almost entirely second-growth forests, in existence roughly for less than a century. Had it not been for the groundbreaking work of many conservationists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Keystone State’s present terrain would be dramatically different. One of the most important of those...
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