Pennsylvania’s Forgotten Roseland: George Cochran Lambdin and Rose Culture in Germantown

Hugh Scott (1900–94), a Pennsylvania lawmaker and Republican who served in the U.S. House of Representatives, 1947–59, and the U.S. Senate, 1959–77, was an avid rosarian who actively worked to have the rose proclaimed as the official flower of the United States — a feat he accomplished when President Ronald Reagan signed appropriate legislation in 1986. A resident of Philadelphia, Scott came...
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After All: Charles Demuth, a Modernist in Lancaster

Charles Demuth was an artist of wide reputation, represented in some of the most eminent art museums in the country. It would take some time, however, for his work to be appreciated in his own hometown of Lancaster, where the majority of his most significant paintings were created. Many of his works featured Lancaster settings and architecture. His acclaimed masterpiece, My Egypt, depicted one...
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The Brandywine by W. Barksdale Maynard

The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait by W. Barksdale Maynard University of Pennsylvania Press, 256 pp, cloth $34.95 My life story is riverine. I was born near the Hudson, summered along the Neversink, went to college in view of the Potomac, attended graduate school at the confluence of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, and live uphill from the Susquehanna. I have a long-standing love affair with...
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Gardens Change with Time

William Penn’s wish that Philadelphia, the capital of his colony, should be a “Greene Country Towne” never was to come to fruition. The town’s settlers really preferred a re-creation of London in miniature. However, gardens and gardening have been an important aspect of the Pennsyl­vania heritage. Gardening has been practiced as a fine art and as a necessity based upon...
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Susquehanna’s Painters

Few Pennsylvanians probably realize that Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Doughty, Frederick Edwin Church and Jasper Francis Cropsey, the leading lights of the Hudson River school, the famous nineteenth century landscape tradition, painted the Susquehanna River or its tributaries. The most important works of Cropsey and Doughty – hailed as the luminar­ies of the Hudson River school...
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The Last of the New Hope Crowd: Faye Swengel and Bernard Badura

While Faye Swengel Badura (1904-1991) is remembered and collected as a fine artist, her husband Bernard “Ben” Badura (1896-1986) is increasingly being recognized as one of the most important makers of frames in the United States. In fact, his frames – works of art in themselves — have far eclipsed the desirability of his accomplished paintings. The couple was a fixture of the art colony at...
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Lloyd Mifflin: Artist of the Susquehanna

While many artists have painted the majestic Susquehanna River, none were as devoted to studying, rhapsodizing about its beauty and, ultimately, painting it in its many moods as was Pennsylvania native Lloyd Mifflin (1846–1921). In many ways, Mifflin typified the romantic, if often improbable, late nineteenth-century image of the artist as an attractive, highly sensitive, elitist dandy who...
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Saving Seeds, Sowing for the Future

The Heirloom Seed Project (HSP) of the Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum in Lancaster, one of two dozen historic sites and museums administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC), literally helps families in the Keystone State (and beyond) bring history to the table – at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The Keystone State has long been a supplier of seeds to the...
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