Muriel Matzkin Shapp, World War II Relocation Camp Educator

Posted by on Apr 19, 2016 in | Comments Off on Muriel Matzkin Shapp, World War II Relocation Camp Educator Muriel Matzkin Shapp (1919–99), wife of Governor Milton J. Shapp (1912-94), received her undergraduate degree in biology from Brooklyn College in 1940. During the first years of American involvement in World War II, she served as a federal civil servant working in a government clerical pool in Washington, D.C. While there, she answered an advertisement seeking teachers for the relocation centers...
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Back to the Land! Pennsylvania’s New Deal Era Communities

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Back to the Land! Pennsylvania’s New Deal Era Communities The economic collapse of 1929 ushered in a decade fraught with deep, often tremu­lous, questioning of the na­tion’s development and future. Many were the cries to re­turn to the land. As a result, two all-new rural communities founded in Pennsylvania in the mid-1930s – Norvelt, in Westmoreland County, and Penn-Craft, in adjacent Fayette County – remain today as testimony to...
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September 2001 Meeting of Historic Preservation Board

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on September 2001 Meeting of Historic Preservation Board In the dizzying aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans realized that their lives would be forever changed. Terrorism even impacted the routine – and frequently mundane – ways in which business had been conducted. For its September 2001 meeting-held, incidentally, on Tuesday, September 11 – the Commonwealth’s Historic...
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“He, on the Whole, Stood First”: Gifford Pinchot

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on “He, on the Whole, Stood First”: Gifford Pinchot President Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946) was a talented and gifted public servant. Of his friend and adviser, Roosevelt wrote, “I believe it is but just to say that among the many, many public officials who, under my administra­tion, rendered literally invaluable service to the people of the United States he, on the whole, stood first.” Among Pennsylvania’s...
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Eyedazzlers: The Two-Century Romance of Navajo Weavers and Germantown Yarn

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Eyedazzlers: The Two-Century Romance of Navajo Weavers and Germantown Yarn The cavernous nineteenth-­century factory buildings of Philadelphia’s John Wilde & Brother, the oldest independent rug yarn mill in the United States, seem out of place against the trendy restaurants and galleries of Manayunk, a showplace of modern urban renewal in the city’s greater Germantown neighborhood. A mural on the wall of the smallest mill building depicts images...
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Current and Coming

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Current and Coming Photography of Design Margaret Bourke­-White (1904-1971) is best remembered as the first staff photographer of Fortune magazine, the first female war correspondent, and the woman whose photographs made the covers of Life magazine famous. Before she began traveling throughout the world to record history in the making, Bourke-White was creating evocative abstract photographs of American industry...
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Longue Vue Club and Golf Course

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Longue Vue Club and Golf Course The incorporating members of the Lougue Vue Club and Golf Course founded in 1920, hired Benno Janssen (1874-1964), of Janssen and Cocken Archi­tects, landscape architect Albert Taylor (1883-1951), and golf course architect Robert White (1874-1959) to design their clubhouse, grounds, and golf course on three hundred and fifty acres they had purchased in East Penn Hills Town­ship, east of...
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1876 Centennial Craze Sweeps into Philadelphia!

Posted by on Nov 24, 2013 in | Comments Off on 1876 Centennial Craze Sweeps into Philadelphia! This spring marks the one hundred and thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the International Exhibition of Art, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine, better known as the Centennial International Exhibition, staged to mark the one hundredth anniversary of American independence. Opening Day, Wednesday, May 10, 1876, welcome more than one hundred thousand visitors, and by closing day,...
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An Address for the Afterlife at Laurel Hill Cemetery

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on An Address for the Afterlife at Laurel Hill Cemetery It all began in 1836, when architect John Notman (1810–1865) laid out a series of meandering walkways and terraces on the east bank of the Schuylkill River above Fairmount Park. With his design for Laurel Hill Cemetery, the twenty-six-year-old native of Scotland created the first architecturally designed cemetery in the country. He also established the nation’s second garden-type cemetery,...
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Hummelstown Brownstone: A Victorian Era Treasure

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Hummelstown Brownstone: A Victorian Era Treasure Builders and contractors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prized brownstone as one of the best and most versatile masonry materials in the United States. Whether used for curbing, windowsills,steps, lintels, stoops, foundations, and tombstones, or to grace the finest mansions as intricately carved statues or coping, brownstone filled the bill. Eminent American architects...
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