Lehigh County: The Land and Its People

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lehigh County: The Land and Its People Lehigh County encompasses the western half of the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania. Bounded on the east by the Lehigh River, the main geographical feature of the larger valley, and on the north by the Blue Mountain range, the land is a mosaic of lime­stone plain, sinks and rolling hills. While the southern region of the county lies astride the so-called South Moun­tain and the hills of the...
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Rural Bust and Boom: Snyder County, 1880-1920

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Rural Bust and Boom: Snyder County, 1880-1920 Between 1880 and 1920 a dialectic of sorts operated in Snyder County. These were years of decline. This decline was both absolute, in population and the generation of wealth, and relative, when compared to the growth in numbers, wealth and cultural richness occuring elsewhere. The area did not have easily tilled fertile soil; its minerals were neither accessible nor rich; its population was...
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Reading’s Past Will Be a Part of Its Future

Posted by on Nov 28, 2013 in | Comments Off on Reading’s Past Will Be a Part of Its Future Travellers, visitors, or out-of-towners have associated Reading, Pennsylvania, at various times in its history with its most sa­lient industry or activity. In the eighteenth century, had our ancestors been as ready as we to identify a per­son or place solely by one feature, Reading could have been known as “Felt Hat City.” In the nineteenth century, when railroading became one of...
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Lackawanna County: The Last Shall Not Be Least

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lackawanna County: The Last Shall Not Be Least The history of the Key­stone State’s sixty­-seven counties is often quite similar to family histories. Its portrait is a rich composite of Native American legend and lore, early trans­portation, marine and mari­time heritage, industry and industrialists, pioneers, capitalists and the working classes, religious communes, inventors and the Industrial Revolution …. And the county, whose...
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Girard College: A Story of Change and Continuity

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Girard College: A Story of Change and Continuity Girard College, a boarding school for orphans and other­wise under­privileged children, is located in a largely unattractive, grimy industrial district of Philadel­phia. Its location in the city’s north section does not conjure images of wealth or the Social Register, but its endowment marks it is as one of the richest boarding schools in the country. The story of Girard Col­lege and its...
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Mailbox

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Mailbox The Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Phila­delphia, has recently acquired the political archives of Robert N. C. Nix, Jr., the first African American to serve on the Pennsylva­nia Supreme Court. To further expand its collections documenting and interpreting the lives and careers of leading African American political leaders and government officials, the museum is seeking documents,...
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Letters to the Editor

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Letters to the Editor Filled the Bill I appreciated the article entitled “Against All Odds: Chevalier Jackson, Physician and Painter” in the summer 1992 edition. Following a double mastoid ear operation at the age of seven, I moved with my family to Philadelphia in 1924, and my mother and I commuted at least weekly for ear treatments from Dr. Arthur J. Wagers, a friend and colleague of Dr. Jackson. It was...
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Lost and Found

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lost and Found Lost Strained by the weight of nearly a half-million pounds of snow during what has become known as the Winter of 1994, the century-old Mount Gretna Playhouse collapsed in February. The historic open-air theater was built in the Lebanon County summer resort in 1892 by carpenter John Cilley, a self­-taught engineer. Measuring one hundred feet in diameter and shaped like an umbrella, the...
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The Anthracite Aristocracy Takes to the Mountains

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Anthracite Aristocracy Takes to the Mountains Hidden high in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania­ – about a dozen miles north of Hazleton and less than half that distance south of Wilkes­-Barre – lies a small late nineteenth century retreat known to very few. Developed by coal barons and the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company in 1882, the hamlet’s fifty distinctive “summer cottages,” with equally distinctive...
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Shorts

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Shorts A cartoonist and illustrator for The New Yorker from 1927 to 1966, Mary Petty (1899-1976) was well loved for her humorous and witty depictions of twentieth century life. An exhibit of fifty works in watercolor and ink, “The Life and Art of Mary Petty” will be on view at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford through Sunday, November 20 [1994]. For more infor­mation, write:...
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