Bookshelf

Our Priceless Heritage: Pennsylvania State Parks, 1893-1993 by Dan Cupper Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1993 (70 pages, paper, $12.95) “Priceless” is a word that best defines the Keystone State’s natural history, and Our Priceless Heritage: Pennsylvania State Parks, 1893-1993, is a copiously...
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Reviving – and Revising – the Reputation of Ralph Elwood Brock

On May 31, 1966, D. S. Nace of the state Department of Forests and Waters, now the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR), scrawled a note to Joe Hill of the Mont Alto Nursery, in Franklin County, and attached it to a stack of documents. “Might find something of interest in these. Don’t Destroy,” he cautioned. Those nine words ultimately proved to be an invaluable...
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“With a Woman’s Instinct”: Mira Lloyd Dock, The Mother of Forestry in Pennsylvania

On a frosty December night in 1900, Mira Lloyd Dock (1853–1945) presented an illustrated lecture to the Harrisburg Board of Trade entitled “The City Beautiful.” Using vivid descriptions and dramatic images, Dock contrasted the “roughness, slime and filth” of the state capital and the Susquehanna River with the well-kept cities and rivers of other American states and European nations. She...
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Wood on Glass: The Lumber Industry Photographs of William T. Clarke

William Townsend Clarke (1859–1930) photographed the forests of northcentral Pennsylvania during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, producing stunning images that tell the story of the logging industry in the vast stands of old-growth white pine and hemlock trees which Henry W. Shoemaker (1880–1958) called the “Black Forest” of Pennsylvania. Shoemaker was a prolific writer,...
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