Fielding Lucas, Jr., was primarily a cartographer who not only drew but also surveyed a number of the towns he was responsible for mapping. Early in his career he worked with publishers in Philadelphia;…
This charming view of Lancaster was drawn on stone by James Benade, about whom we know relatively little not because he lacked talent, but because he died so young, at the age of 30. The son of a bishop of the Moravian Church in Bethlehem, Benade…
On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam on the Little Conemaugh River in southwest Pennsylvania, which held back the Lake Conemaugh reservoir, about fourteen miles upstream from Johnstown, failed after an unusually torrential rainfall. A little after…
The great elm tree depicted here by George Lehman supposedly marked the location where William Penn negotiated a treaty in the early 1680s with Tamanend, chief of the Lenape clan that inhabited the area where Philadelphia was established. The tree…
Founded in 1846, the University at Lewisburg remained under its original title only for a few decades. In 1886, the board of trustees voted to change the name to Bucknell University, in honor of William Bucknell, one of the founders of the school…
This broadside announces the Tuscarora Academy, founded in Academia, Pennsylvania (about eight miles southwest of Mifflintown), in 1836 by the Reverend McKnight Williamson, pastor of the nearby Lower Tuscarora Presbyterian Church. The Academy was the…
Fielding Lucas, Jr., was primarily a cartographer who not only drew but also surveyed a number of the towns he was responsible for mapping. Early in his career he worked with publishers in Philadelphia;…
Known today almost exclusively as the location where the Continental Army camped in the winter of 1777-78 during the American Revolutionary War, Valley Forge, as this lithograph demonstrates, was a small but thriving town throughout much of the later…
To anyone interested in bird’s-eye views of Pennsylvania towns during the late nineteenth century, the name of Thaddeus Fowler appears on a seemingly endless number of panoramic images. He was the most prolific of all the view makers, drawing and…
This view of Harrisburg, together with the depiction of waterfalls on the Lackawanna River (86.613) are three of the twenty-eight locations in Pennsylvania,…