Daniel Hale Williams

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Daniel Hale Williams Daniel Hale Williams was born January 18, 1856, the son of Daniel and Sarah Ann Price Williams, in Hollidaysburg, Blair County. When his father died in 1867, his mother, who moved to Annapolis, Maryland, arranged an apprenticeship as a shoemaker for her son. Dissatisfied with shoemaking, Williams later settled in Janesville, Wisconsin, along with his sister Sally. He found work at Harry...
read more

A Trio of Philadelphia Maritime Painters

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on A Trio of Philadelphia Maritime Painters Oceans and seas have long challenged civilization’s adventurous spirit. Sailors and their ships have struggled against billowing winds and sweeping tides, as well as fires, piracy, collisions, and warfare. All of this has been celebrated in story and song — and in works of art. Artists of the day captured both the beauty and the rigors of those wonderful ships in their coveted canvases. Three of...
read more

Lloyd Mifflin: Artist of the Susquehanna

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lloyd Mifflin: Artist of the Susquehanna While many artists have painted the majestic Susquehanna River, none were as devoted to studying, rhapsodizing about its beauty and, ultimately, painting it in its many moods as was Pennsylvania native Lloyd Mifflin (1846–1921). In many ways, Mifflin typified the romantic, if often improbable, late nineteenth-century image of the artist as an attractive, highly sensitive, elitist dandy who...
read more

The Rise and Fall of “Young Napoleon”

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Rise and Fall of “Young Napoleon” On Wednesday evening, November 13, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln paid a visit to the residence of George Brinton McClellan (1826–1885), who he had recently appointed general in chief of the Union Army. Located on Lafayette Square, near the White House, McClellan’s luxurious dwelling also served as his Washington, D.C., headquarters. Accompanied by Secretary of State William H. Seward...
read more

State Street, Harrisburg

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on State Street, Harrisburg One hundred years ago, on May 20, 1911, a self- proclaimed “business man in the Capitol City,” identified only as C. O. S., wrote to Lial Phillips of Leechburg, Armstrong County, on a postcard bearing an image of Harrisburg’s State Street, looking west from the State Capitol toward the Susquehanna River. Although the sender’s remarks are brief and desultory, the postcard’s image is not. It...
read more

Peter Kalm in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Peter Kalm in Pennsylvania The territory now recognized as Pennsylvania was once part of a Swedish colony stretching from Delaware to New York. Swedish farmers settled in small villages along the Delaware River, in southern New Jersey, and in the Hudson Valley. Established by the New Sweden Company in March 1638, it was administered from Fort Christina (Wilmington) in what is now Delaware. In 1655, a band of Dutch...
read more

Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Paint, Pattern and People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725–1850 by Wendy A. Cooper and Lisa Minardi published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011; 277 pages, cloth, $55.00 A sumptuous celebration of workmanship and artistry, Wendy A. Cooper and Lisa Minardi’s Paint, Pattern and People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725–1850, is a landmark book exploring the...
read more

Jimmy Stewart’s Wonderful Life Began in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Jimmy Stewart’s Wonderful Life Began in Pennsylvania It’s Christmas Eve 1945 in the small town of Bedford Falls. George Bailey, president of the Bailey Building and Loan Association, stands in despair at the edge of a bridge wishing he had never been born. An unscrupulous competitor, Henry F. Potter, has threatened to shut down the financial institution and see Bailey thrown into prison on the pretense of stealing the townspeople’s money. In fact,...
read more

Cremation’s Fiery Beginnings

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Cremation’s Fiery Beginnings Franz Lee Rickaby (1889–1925), a bone-thin man of thirty-five, was a much-loved professor of English and drama at Pomona College in Claremont, California, when he died of rheumatic fever. An adventurous wanderer, he left a respected historical legacy with folklorists when Harvard University posthumously published his collection of songs of the Midwest lumberjack, Ballads and Songs of the...
read more

Hotel Fauchere

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Hotel Fauchere Born in Vevey, Switzerland, Louis Fauchére (1823-1893) began his apprenticeship as a cook at the age of fifteen, after which he was employed by prestigious hotels in his native country. In 1846 he married Rosalie Perrochet, with whom he had one daughter, Marie, born two years later. The family immigrated to the United States in 1851 and Fauchére found employment as a master chef at New...
read more