Loleta Recreation Area

Posted by on Dec 1, 2019 in | Comments Off on Loleta Recreation Area Upon his inauguration on March 4, 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt set about combating the economic crisis of the Great Depression with his New Deal program of economic reforms and public work projects. One of the most popular programs established that year was “Roosevelt’s Tree Army,” the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which was part of the Emergency Conservation Work (ECW) Act....
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McKean County: Where the Gold is Green

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on McKean County: Where the Gold is Green The great gold and silver rushes of the late nineteenth century to places such as the Black Hills, Colorado, Arizona, California and Alaska have long been hailed in story and song for their excite­ment, riches and heartbreak. But, the rush for “green gold” to McKean County during the same century was equally or more exciting. First, there were the forests – immense forests of...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf The Philadelphia and Erie Railroad: Its Place in American Economic History by Homer T. Rosenberger has just been published by The Fox Hills Press. The illustrated book is 748 pages and is available for $18.00 from The Fox Hills Press, 8409 Fox Run, Potomac, Maryland 20854. Copies are also available at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Dr. Rosenberger, a noted historian, is a...
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Historical Sketch of Elk County

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on Historical Sketch of Elk County Elk County is named for that noble animal that once abounded in the region in great numbers. The last native elk, however, was shot in 1867 in Elk County by an Indian, Jim Jacobs. Today, Pennsylvania’s only Elk herd roams freely over the area bounded by Elk and Cam­eron Counties. It is descended from the Elk herd imported into Pennsylvania in 1913 from Montana and Wyoming. The history of...
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Jefferson County: Of Wilderness Tamed

Posted by on Nov 27, 2013 in | Comments Off on Jefferson County: Of Wilderness Tamed Jefferson County. Its hallmarks are as disparate as Thomas Jef­ferson and Punxsutawney Phil. Village names as dissimilar as Panic and Desire. Inhabitants as distinctive as Indian chief Cornplanter and Moravian missionary John Heckewelder. And a tranquil­ity which masks the turbu­lence of the nineteenth century’s lumber boom that spawned settlement and nu­merous ancillary industries....
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Ridgway Historic District

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on Ridgway Historic District In 1833, Ridgway was platted as an unincorporated village and named for wealthy Philadelphia Quaker Jacob Ridgway (1768-1843), who owned more than one hundred thousand acres in north­central Pennsylvania. The village, originally located in Jefferson County, became the Elk County seat upon the county’s creation in 1843. Ridgway, incor­porated as a borough in 1881, emerged as an important...
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Letters

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Letters Saintly Connections The feature story on Saint Katharine Drexel was brilliantly written by William C. Kashatus [“Philadelphia’s Sainted Katharine Drexel,” Summer 2007]. This article is of great interest to our Keating family and others here in northeastern Pennsylvania. My aunt, Esther Keating, of Pittston, Luzerne County, was educated in nursing at the University of...
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Bucktail Monument, Driftwood, PA.

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bucktail Monument, Driftwood, PA. This sounds as if the Bucktails were coming don’t it?” asked an unknown writer to Miss Bessie McPhee of Pittsburgh in a postcard mailed on April 6, 1908, at Driftwood, the second — and last — incorporated borough in Cameron County. Today a community of one hundred residents, Driftwood was incorporated as a borough in 1872; the county seat, Emporium, was incorporated in 1864. The postcard bears a...
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The Bucktails

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Bucktails Three days after the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor on April 15, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued an emergency call for troops to help defend the nation’s capital. Thomas Leiper Kane (1822–1883), scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, helped raise a mounted rifle regiment in Pennsylvania’s Northern Tier counties of Cameron, Elk, McKean, and...
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The Piney Dam and Spillway on Clarion River

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Piney Dam and Spillway on Clarion River A tributary of the Allegheny River, the Clarion River snakes through northwestern Pennsylvania for 110 miles, draining the mountainous region of the Allegheny Plateau of the Ohio River watershed. For much of the nineteenth century, loggers used the river to raft lumber to market. Historians believe that James V. Cassatt piloted the last lumber raft on the river from Clarington, Forest County, to...
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