Castanea … From Blight to Backcross Breeding

Posted by on Aug 22, 2017 in | 0 comments Not far from my home at the base of the South Mountain in Cumberland County, there is a wide spot in the road where you can park a couple cars at the edge of a block of public land. From that place, the visible but overgrown bed of a Colonial-era haul road ascends the mountain. Scattered along the road are the small, flat and circular remains of 18th- and 19th-century charcoal kilns that...
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“Restless Progress in America”: Drawing the Mason-Dixon Line

Posted by on Aug 22, 2017 in | 0 comments “When I found I had crossed that line,” recalled Harriet Tubman, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything . . . I felt like I was in Heaven.” Such was the power of the Mason-Dixon Line. Within 75 years of its completion to resolve an eight-decade-long dispute between two colonial proprietors, a boundary line drawn in the 1760s by two English...
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The Beauty and Bounty of Penn’s Wood

Posted by on Nov 29, 2013 in | Comments Off on The Beauty and Bounty of Penn’s Wood Pennsylvania’s beauty – the gently sweeping valleys, the broad rivers, the rugged mountains and the rolling hillsides – is the bounty which lured waves of settlers to the New World more than three centuries ago. Founder William Penn, entrepreneur and seventeenth century land promoter, heavily advertised his province as “the land good, the air clean and sweet, the springs...
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Bookshelf

Posted by on Nov 26, 2013 in | Comments Off on Bookshelf Organizing Archival Records by David W. Carmicheal Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1993 (53 pages, paper, $9.95) Subtitled A Practical Method of Arrangement and Description for Small Archives, this compact book is an easy-to-use “how-to” guide for community associa­tions, fraternal organizations, church groups, and local and county historical societies. This invaluable...
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