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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The Wissahickon Valley: To a Wilderness Returned

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Wissahickon Valley: To a Wilderness Returned The rural Wissahickon Valley, near center-city Philadelphia, typifies the rugged landscape which greeted the first white settlers. Today, its huge hem­locks and towering sycamores contrast markedly with the busy factories and row houses only a mile away. But this valley of contrasts has always been different from the sur­rounding region. A century ago, when most of America was rural or wild, the...
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