Even the most casual observer has heard of Doctor Joseph Priestley, who is known as the discoverer of oxygen. Dr. Priestley was a controversial figure in his native England and in America, where he spent the last ten years of his life in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. His contemporaries and friends included Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson along with chemist and inventor James Watt.
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The New York Daily News, on June 16, 1936, mentioned Daniel McFarlan Moore, a native of Northumberland, Pennsylvania, as one of the electric industry's top three wizards, alongside Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. The brilliant inventor and electrical engineer's life was cut short by a gunman on the lawn of his New Jersey Home.
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One of the leading social reformers in north central Pennsylvania during the struggle to secure a woman’s right to vote was Henrietta Baldy Lyon. Born in 1864 in Danville, her parents were Henry H. and Henrietta Cooper Montgomery Baldy. She was a descendant of one of the notable families in colonial Pennsylvania.
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A Pennsylvania native born in Bradford County is credited with helping make music a regular part of school curriculums across the country and is known throughout the world of education both in the United States and Europe. Hollis Dann was born in Canton, Pennsylvania in 1861 to a musical family. During Canton’s 150th Anniversary celebration in 1950, the Canton Independent-Sentinel carried a detailed story on Dann’s life, and the life he remembered growing up.
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Some see the arraignment of a man in Carbon County on January 18th, 1876, as the beginning of the end for the group known as the Mollie Maguires. Among the victims was Alexander Rea, a member of a prominent family from Montour County.
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The Susquehanna and North Branch and West Branch Telegraph Company was created by an Act of Assembly by the State of Pennsylvania on April 9, 1840, five years after the first telegraphic message had been flashed over a crude wire line between Baltimore and Washington by Samuel Morse, containing the now historic words: "What hath God wrought!"
Read MoreP.T. Barnum who founded the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was known as the “Greatest Showman.” But a Tioga County man, founded and managed the John J. Jones Exposition, one of the first to use steel railroad cars and one of the largest of its kind, exceeded in size only by Barnum and Bailey. Jones entered the carnival business in 1895 and opened his first small traveling fair in 1899
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Numerous Pennsylvania Germans were known for their Frakturs, colorful artwork. The word itself describes a German style of black lettering. One Fraktur artist, Charles Francis Portzline, came from Westphalia, Germany, in 1777. After spending several years in southeastern Pennsylvania, he eventually settled in Union County. He is buried in the family cemetery there.
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Dr.James Strawbridge of Montour County was one of several local physicians who saw extended duty in the Civil War. His workload during the war, imprisonment in a Confederate jail, and director of the hospital ship Nashville, all took a heavy toll. Strawbridge described the aftermath of the Battle of Milliken's Bend, and wrote to a friend that Black soldiers, " fight with a degree of intelligence and determination unequaled by the whites."
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Hiram Cranmer of Hammersley Forks, Clinton County, was born in 1891 and worked in the lumber camps of northern Pennsylvania from an early age. In 1947, he began discussing his experiences and memories, providing a unique insight into the heyday of lumbering, in which towns sprung up overnight and company owners became millionaires. We again share some of those insights, continuing the story we first shared in October of 2024.
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