Most of the colorful tales about Davey Lewis appeared seventy years after his death. By then, seventy years had passed, giving memory and imagination plenty of time to transform an outlaw into a champion of the poor, as Pennsylvania's own Robin Hood.
For generations, an old stone structure in Snyder County has been associated with one of Pennsylvania's frontier defenses of the French and Indian War. The problem is that Fort Pomfret may never actually have been built.
Innovation doesn't always arrive with smoke pouring from a factory chimney or a locomotive roaring down the tracks. Sometimes it begins quietly. Such is the case of several women inventors in the Susquehanna Valley.
Walk along Millionaires’ Row in Williamsport, look at Trinity Church, remember the great lumber boom—or encounter that curious old word, herdic—and you can still find the footprints left behind by Peter Herdic
Sometimes history begins with politics. Sometimes it begins with industry. Sometimes history begins simply because two rivers meet.
Someone once said, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." There's a mixture of both in the folklore of "Little Red Riding Hood of the West Branch."
During the nineteenth century, gristmills dotted the streams of the Susquehanna Valley. They transformed the harvest into food—but also helped transform scattered farms into communities.
For a few remarkable days during the summer of 1919, the towns of the Middle Susquehanna Valley stopped everything else. They gathered beneath the flags, listened for the approaching bands, and welcomed their sons and daughters home from World War I.
Early settlers in northern Pennsylvania used clumsy axes and hoes to clear land and prepare the soil for farming. Thrashing was done with a flail or trampled by oxen or horses. Men usually worked at lumbering, clearing land, building fences, and raising field crops, while women and children tended livestock, made dairy products, and preserved food.
“Dry-goods stores” were broad mercantile houses—part fabric shop, grocery, hardware store, shoe store and household-supply business. They also provided a social setting to catch up on the latest community news.
