Harriet Lane Johnston: The Legacy of a White House Hostess

On the cool, overcast day of May 9, 2017, a dozen nurses from the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center arrived by bus at Green Mount Cemetery, a leafy 19th-century oasis in center city Baltimore. They carried a generous bouquet of flowers to decorate the grave of Harriet Lane Johnston, niece of James Buchanan (1791–1868), Pennsylvania’s only U.S. president. “Without Harriet Lane, we don’t know what...
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Pennsylvania Heritage Foundation Newsletter

Topics in the Spring 2017 Newsletter: PHF Board Meets at Pennsbury Manor The Giving Circle PHF Welcomes Three New Board Members Historical Marker Scavenger Hunt at Pennsylvania Farm Show Join the Pennsylvania Heritage Foundation  ...
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Shorts

The distinctively decorated furniture of Soap Hollow in Somerset County (see “Makers’ Marks and a Master’s Touch” by Edna V. Brendlinger and Robert B. Myers in the winter 1986 edition) is on view at the Southern Alleghenies Mu­seum of Art, Loretto, from Saturday, March 27, through Monday, May 31, 1993. Soap Hollow furniture, made during the second half of the nine­teenth...
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Currents

Beaux’s Art Pennsylvania native Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) was one of the most important and successful portrait painters of her time (see “Artistic Ambitions: Cecilia Beaux in Philadelphia” by Tara Leigh Tappert in the winter 1996 edition). Among the significant commissions she completed in the early twentieth century was a portrait of President Theodore Roosevelt’s...
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Lost and Found

Lost The Crestmont Inn, for many years the grandest hotel in the summer colony of Eagles Mere, Sullivan County, was a self-contained resort that offered its affluent guests a wide variety of activities, including tennis, swimming, bowling, croquet, badminton, and golf, in addition to concerts, dances, and bridge tournaments. Perched on a mountain top overlooking the spring-fed Eagles Mere Lake,...
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Shorts

“Abstraction to Figuration: Selections of Contemporary Art from the Pincus Collection” is an exhibition of works of art drawn from the collection of David and Gerry Pincus currently on view at the Palmer Museum of Art on the University Park campus of the Pennsylvania State University. An exhi­bition of post-1945 American painting, sculpture, and photography, “Abstraction to...
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Bookshelf

Stoneware of Southwestern Pennsylvania by Phil Schaltenbrand University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996 (216 pages, paper, $22.95) A greatly expanded version of the author’s Old Pots (1978), Stoneware of Southwestern Pennsylvania describes the salt-glazed stoneware industry that once flourished in the Monongahela and Youghiogheny Valleys and contains much new information about the remarkable...
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Shorts

To observe the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of its opening in 1848, Girard College will unveil an exhibition entitled “Monument to Philanthropy: The Design and Building of Girard College, 1832-1848,” on Sunday, May 3 [1998]. Financier Stephen Girard (1750-1831) established the school for orphans with a bequest of seven million dollars (see “Girard College: A Story of...
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“To Do Good and Love Mercy”: A Conversation with C. Delores Tucker

C. Delores Tucker was only a young girl when, because of her color, she was refused seating at a lunch counter in Detroit. The incident marked the beginning of a life devoted to advancing the cause of minority groups in this country. Born in Philadel­phia in 1927, the daughter of the Reverend Whitfield and Captilda (Gardiner) Nottage, she had lived her childhood in a multi­cultural environment...
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Maurice K. Goddard: The Commonwealth’s Conservation Czar

There is a point in crossing the top of the Allegheny Mountains between Pittsburgh and Harris­burg at which a traveler sees, at every turn, only trees. It is one of the most spectacular views on the North American Continent. The scene lacks the frenetic energy of Niagara Falls, or the awe-filling majesty of the Grand Canyon, but this several­-hundred-square-mile panorama of second-growth forest...
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