The Paoli Local and the Birth of Pennsylvania’s Main Line

Posted by on Mar 11, 2022 in | Comments Off on The Paoli Local and the Birth of Pennsylvania’s Main Line “In the year 1857, when the Columbia Railroad passed into the possession of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company . . . the local travel was very light, very few of the business men of the city having residences out of town,” wrote William Hasell Wilson (1811–1902) in his memoir of life as a railroad engineer. During the rest of the 19th and 20th centuries, Wilson, his family and the Pennsylvania...
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Those Beautiful Bodies of Yesteryear

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Those Beautiful Bodies of Yesteryear On a balmy spring day in 1880, a seventeen-year-old youth from Ire­land’s County Galway arrived at Boston. An orphan with scant formal education, he had spent his meager savings for the transatlantic ship passage. He had neither friends nor close relatives in the United States. He did not even have the promise of a job. But Joseph J. Derham knew he would succeed. America was the golden...
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