An Impressive Legacy: A Half-Century of Historic Preservation in Pennsylvania, 1955-2005

Posted by on Nov 25, 2013 in | Comments Off on An Impressive Legacy: A Half-Century of Historic Preservation in Pennsylvania, 1955-2005 A quarter-century ago, James Biddle (1929-2005), president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, from 1968 to 1980, was named chairman of Pennsylvania’s first State Historic Preservation Board. Jimmy, as the scion of one of the Commonwealth’s most notable families was known – especially to fellow preservationists, many of them working at the grassroots level –...
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Civilian Conservation Corps

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Civilian Conservation Corps Between 1933 and 1942, nearly 3.5 million young men nationwide, and 195,000 in Pennsylvania, enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as part of his New Deal relief programs to put the unemployed back to work during the Great Depression. The CCC — nicknamed Roosevelt’s Tree Army — was to reclaim land and forests that had been ravaged...
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Rediscovering the People’s Art: New Deal Murals in Pennsylvania’s Post Offices

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Rediscovering the People’s Art: New Deal Murals in Pennsylvania’s Post Offices On a February morning in 1937, artist George Warren Rickey (1907-2002) and a group of four men met at the post office in Selinsgrove, Snyder County. Armed with cloth-covered rolling pins, the men attached Rickey’s mural entitled Susquehanna Trail to one of the lobby’s end walls. After six hours, they transformed the entire blank white wall, from marble wainscoting to ceiling, into a...
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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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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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New York Central Railroad Station, Philipsburg, Pa.

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on New York Central Railroad Station, Philipsburg, Pa. Until railroads reached Philipsburg in the mid-nineteenth century, the small Centre County community was primarily a hub of local commerce. Founded in 1797 on the east side of Moshannon Creek by a thirty-year-old entrepreneur, Henry Phillips (1767–1800), the community owed its economic boom of the second half of the nineteenth century to the proverbial coming of the railroad. Philipsburg was...
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Pennsylvania’s War Governor

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Pennsylvania’s War Governor On September 14, 1862, Pennsylvania’s Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin invited the governors of the northern and border states to a meeting to be held at Altoona, Blair County, in ten days. The purpose of the meeting that became known as the Loyal War Governors’ Conference — or, simply, the Altoona Conference – was to “take measures for a more active support of the government’s prosecution of...
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Lock Haven Hospital, Lock Haven, Pa.

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Lock Haven Hospital, Lock Haven, Pa. This burned since you were here [and] suppose you read of it,” wrote a Mrs. A. McClintock to Mrs. E. H. MacKee, of Buffalo, New York, on a postcard depicting the Lock Haven Hospital in Lock Haven, Clinton County. The postcard was postmarked September 2, 1908, at Lock Haven. Built in 1903 at a cost of $42,000, the Lock Haven Hospital was destroyed by fire five years later, on July 28, 1908....
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African Americans and Civil Rights in Pennsylvania

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on African Americans and Civil Rights in Pennsylvania Summer and swimming go hand in hand – or so thought the Creative Steps Day Care Camp. The camp’s leaders had signed a contract to use the pool at a private swim club, but when the children – 46 African Americans and ten Hispanics ranging from kindergarten through seventh grade – arrived for their summer swim, they were subjected to harsh criticism by some club members....
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From the Editor

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on From the Editor After a long winter of brutal back-to-back snowstorms, and a cool spring, summer is finally here! And what better time to discover all that Pennsylvania has to offer travelers of all ages! This edition of Pennsylvania Heritage is your “go to” guide for exploring the Keystone State’s culture and heritage-especially our African American history. The Pennsylvania Historical and...
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