Old Economy Village: The Centennial of the First Site on the Pennsylvania Trails of History

Posted by on Apr 19, 2016 in | Comments Off on Old Economy Village: The Centennial of the First Site on the Pennsylvania Trails of History One hundred years ago, on February 3, 1916, the Beaver County Court of Common Pleas, in an escheat case, awarded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania 6 acres of land that had been part of the town of Economy. World War I was raging in Europe, and with the United States’ entrance in the war the following year, the state had little time or money to deal with a newly acquired historic site. In 1919 the...
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Midcentury Modern Trails

Posted by on May 11, 2015 in | Comments Off on Midcentury Modern Trails From the 1950s into the 1970s, when Midcentury Modern architecture was at its height, a flurry of new construction took place on the Trails of History. Many of the visitor centers and museums from this period echoed historic forms appropriate to the sites where they were built. The visitor center at Ephrata Cloister, constructed in the late 1950s to mid-1960s, is complementary to the surviving...
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Pennsylvania Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1800-1950

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pennsylvania Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1800-1950 The primary focus of this series of four articles is the architectural heritage of Pennsylvania through the past three centuries. However, in the context of history, architecture is neither an isolated creation nor an assured cultural resource for the future. As buildings ore the products of the interaction of many facets of a society, so. too, the preservation of architecture is the result of...
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Pennsylvania’s Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1950-1981

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pennsylvania’s Architectural Heritage: The Preservation Movement in the Keystone State, 1950-1981 As the last in a four-part series about Pennsylvania s architecture, this conclusion focuses on the develop­ments which have occurred in the field of preservation over the past thirty years. Although this temporal division may seem disproportionate when com­pared with the one hundred fifty years covered in rite preceding article. it has been dictated by both the incentives and challenges to...
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Three Farmhouse Styles of Lawrence County

Posted by on Nov 28, 2013 in | Comments Off on Three Farmhouse Styles of Lawrence County During the spring of 1975, I interviewed fifteen people who had grown up in farmhouses in Lawrence County. The dwellings described by the informants had been built between 1835 and 1900; most were or are located within present-day Hickory Township in the north-central part of the county. Three typical structures will serve as examples of the influence of various architectural styles, tracing the...
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Built by the New Deal

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Built by the New Deal With the nation mired in the grim depths of the Great Depression, industrial Pennsylvania was far from being immune to the financial instability with the closing of 5,000 manufacturing firms and the loss of 270,000 factory jobs by 1933. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal, a series of innovative programs targeted to giving work to the unemployed, stabilizing a downward...
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Extreme Makeover: History Edition

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Extreme Makeover: History Edition Extreme might be a hyperbole but the current restoration of the interior of the Rapp House at Old Economy Village in Ambridge, Beaver County, is a significant undertaking nevertheless. The project will provide a substantive update to the initial restoration work in the 1960s. Old Economy Village presents the remarkable story of the Harmony Society, a Christian communal group with roots in what...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman, with John Shiffman published by Broadway Paperbacks, 2011; 324 pages, paper, $15.00 While employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Philadelphia, Robert King Wittman created and was senior investigator of the bureau’s Art Crime Team. He arrived in 1988 in Philadelphia, “home to two of the...
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