Browse Items (63 total)

During the Civil War, Harrisburg served as an important railway hub, critical for the transportation of material for the Union army. To protect the city from invasion, several forts were constructed across the Susquehanna River, just southwest of…

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…

This bucolic view of Bethlehem captures the still relatively small town just after the Lehigh Canal was constructed, though the canal is virtually impossible to detect from this vantage point. In the foreground, the group of three people converse on…

George Lehman, a talented landscape painter who was also trained in printmaking, came to this country from his native Switzerland in 1824. He produced lithographs and engravings as early as 1827 for the Philadelphia publisher Cephas G. Childs, and by…

Located along the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, West Pittston (not surprisingly, due west of Pittston, just across the Susquehanna) lies at the heart of Wyoming Valley, a broad, crescent shaped lowland in…

Henry Wellge was another artist who, like Herman Brosius, worked a great deal in the Midwest and Canada, and often in association with the publisher Joseph Stoner. Starting in 1880, he drew about forty views for Stoner through 1884, when Stoner…

Born in the small town of Darlington, Wisconsin, about fifty miles southwest of Madison, Herman Brosius worked mostly with lithographers throughout the Midwest and in parts of Ontario, Canada. He did travel east to produce some views in 1873;…

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…

This picturesque town on the Susquehanna River, located about halfway between Harrisburg and the Pennsylvania state line, was almost the nation's capital.

In 1730, John Wright, an evangelical Quaker who had settled in the area to preach to the…

The Alfred Thomas, a ninety-foot steamer, was constructed in Easton in 1859 to navigate the Delaware River between Easton and Port Jervis, New York, transporting produce and passengers. On March 6, 1860, the ship steamed up river with about forty…