This is the story of how a small-town blacksmith shop grew into the largest freight car manufacturer in the Eastern United States, and how its founders literally reshaped the town to keep the gears turning.
In the early years of his lengthy educational career, Charles Lose occasionally had to spend the night in a hotel when he visited rural Lycoming County Schools. In one of those stays, he was pranked by several schoolboys, who made his hotel bed disappear.
A young French explorer never provided a written record of his exploration of the Susquehanna River or its valley. Historian can only piece together his trip through the records of Samuel de Champlain.
Camp meetings were part of the great wave of evangelical Christianity that swept across America during the early nineteenth century. Methodists, United Brethren, Evangelicals and other denominations discovered that an outdoor gathering could bring together farm families scattered across miles of countryside such as rural Perry County.
Daniel Ott was born near Selinsgrove on May 27, 1820. He lived nearly a century in the Susquehanna Valley. The veteran wildlife hunter experienced two very different versions of Pennsylvania.
Sometimes history isn't found in a grand monument. Sometimes it's an old trolley car that everybody forgot to throw away. And we're rather fortunate that they did.
A century ago, travelers looked out from their coach windows and found themselves high above the Catawissa Creek in Mainville, on one of the most remarkable bridges in Columbia County.
Stone walls stretching into the river. Wooden eel baskets waiting in the current. And fishermen watching for a creature that had traveled all the way from the Atlantic Ocean. It was part of everyday life at one time in the Middle Susquehanna Valley.
In 1891, the Columbia County Courthouse received a major facelift. It included the removal of the old, reliable town clock, which was going to get a loftier view of the town.
Today, hikers entering Masten, Laquin, or the country around Ricketts and Grays Run in northern Pennsylvania may believe they are walking through wilderness. In reality, they are walking through old neighborhoods of lumber towns long since forgotten.
