Setting the Standard for Others

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Setting the Standard for Others With a rich heritage rooted in colonial military formations – such as the forces furnished in 1740 for a disastrous English expe­dition against Cartagena, Spain’s principal seaport in South America, and Benjamin Franklin’s ten thousand mem­ber military Association, estab­lished in 1747 – the 28th Infantry (Keystone) Division, Pennsylvania Army National Guard, is the oldest regularly...
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The Romance of Pennsylvania Agriculture

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Romance of Pennsylvania Agriculture When a small group of men met at Lancaster’s Leopard Hotel in August 1916 to organize the first Pennsylvania Farm Show, they did not have in mind mammoth displays of fifty thousand dollar tractors, mountains of steaming baked potatoes or presentations of grand champion livestock ribbons. They didn’t envision a state fair of the type that had become so popular in places like Iowa,...
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The Valley That Changed the World: Visiting the Drake Well Museum

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Valley That Changed the World: Visiting the Drake Well Museum “They’ve struck oil!” They were only three words, but they thundered triumphantly throughout the valley along northwestern Pennsylvania’s Oil Creek during the days following the long-anticipated breakthrough – one that would change the world forever – on an otherwise quiet Saturday in August 1859. To many it was a miracle, one on which great fortunes would be...
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John A. Mather’s Lens: The Unerring Eye of History

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on John A. Mather’s Lens: The Unerring Eye of History When the dapper Englishman John Aked Mather (1829–1915) stepped from the stage coach in Titusville, Crawford County, that October day in 1860, he had no idea that he was about to become the pre-eminent chronicler of a Pennsylvania phenomenon, petroleum. But for five and a half decades Mather recorded the birth and development of the new industry, one which would forever change the way the nation...
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Disaster – Or Murder? – In the Mines

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Disaster – Or Murder? – In the Mines In Winter 1959, after two days of drenching rain and unseasonably high temperatures, the frozen Susquehanna River began surging wildly. A recording station in Wilkes­-Barre, Luzerne County, measured the rise of the water level from 2.1 feet on Tuesday, January 20, to just below the 22-foot flood stage by Friday night. Wary Wilkes-Barre area residents kept a close watch, knowing that the river...
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My Memories of Harrisburg and the Flood of ’36

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on My Memories of Harrisburg and the Flood of ’36 In 1923, I was four years old when my family moved from Philadelphia to Harrisburg. My father, Einar Barfod, had been appointed chief investigator in the securities department of Pennsylvania’s ban.king department by Governor Gifford Pinchot. My earliest memory of Harrisburg was a summer when my mother hired a farmer to plow the field next to our house, then having all the neighborhood...
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