Branch Line Empires by Michael Bezilla with Luther Gette

Posted by on Dec 11, 2019 in | Comments Off on Branch Line Empires by Michael Bezilla with Luther Gette Branch Line Empires The Pennsylvania and the New York Central Railroads by Michael Bezilla, with Luther Gette Indiana University Press, 370 pp., cloth $55, e-book $54.99 During my time as a student at Penn State, I saw plenty of railroad tracks in Centre and Clearfield counties. Many of them were weed-grown and disused. I thought, “Somebody built these, but why? And what happened?” Now author...
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The Pennsylvania Turnpike, From Tollbooths to Tunnels: Rediscovering America’s First Superhighway at 75

Posted by on Apr 12, 2016 in | Comments Off on The Pennsylvania Turnpike, From Tollbooths to Tunnels: Rediscovering America’s First Superhighway at 75 Few Pennsylvania-born celebrities have made the kind of splash that the Pennsylvania Turnpike did when it first arrived on the scene in October 1940. Its 160 miles of limited-access, four-lane paved highway across the Alleghenies were hailed as America’s answer to the Autobahn, Germany’s highly regarded network of high-speed “super roads.” After the war, as the United States’ population expanded...
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Clearfield County: Land of Natural Resources

Posted by on Nov 30, 2013 in | Comments Off on Clearfield County: Land of Natural Resources Clearfield County, believed named for the cleared fields found by early settlers in the area, belies its name; 83 percent of the county’s 1,143.5 square miles is still forested today. Its present timber, however, is second and third growth. Although its forest lands support some lumbering, the county’s economic life depends mostly upon coal and clay in­dustries and the manufacture of...
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Erie County: Where Geography Has Shaped History

Posted by on Nov 28, 2013 in | Comments Off on Erie County: Where Geography Has Shaped History Erie County forms the northwest corner of the state, bounded by Lake Erie on the northwest, the states of Ohio and New York on the west and east respectively and parts of Warren and Crawford counties on the east and south. Historically the county was divided into two sections. The sou them region of 259 ,000 acres fell within the original land grant to William Penn. The northern portion of...
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Currents

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Currents To Be Modern In 1921, Philadelphia’s venerable Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts mounted the first comprehensive display of American modernist works in an American museum with the ground­breaking “Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings Showing the Later Tendencies in Art.” The exhibition’s selection com­mittee, composed of such “moderns” as Thomas Hart...
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Soft Coal’s Soft-Spoken Diplomat

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Soft Coal’s Soft-Spoken Diplomat Wearing a straw boater, he rode in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, and forlornly surveyed the pick­eting miners who blocked the lane leading into the village of St. Benedict in Cambria County. He sig­naled his manservant – serving now as bodyguard and chauffeur as well – to proceed through the human blockade. Angry strikers taunted them, shouting obscenities, as they drove up the...
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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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Letters

Posted by on Nov 20, 2013 in | Comments Off on Letters Energized! Your most recent issue [Spring 2009] has left me “energized”! The articles and the interviews are all top notch – stunningly written and beautifully laid out. This one is a keeper. Thank you for making history so relevant to what we are experiencing today. We need to understand history in order to make critical decisions that will affect not only us but our...
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