Browse Items (19 total)

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…

Today a community with widely diversified industries, Williamsport was, from the time of its founding in 1795, and still in 1854 when John Bachelder created his drawing, a thriving lumber city. This view of Williamsport was sketched from the slopes…

The plan for Reading was laid out in 1743 by Richard and Thomas Penn, the sons of William Penn and proprietors of the colony of Pennsylvania since the elder Penn's death in 1718. The town, soon to be the county seat of Berks County (chartered in…

Like many of the municipal views of the period, this depiction of Huntingdon is surrounded by a number of vignettes featuring some of the town’s more significant structures, mostly churches, businesses, and private residences. The idea not only…

After partnering with Thaddeus Fowler in Milwaukee during the early 1870s, Oakley Bailey moved in 1875 to Cambridge, Massachusetts, his wife's hometown, and set up his own lithography firm in Boston. Although Connecticut and Massachusetts towns…

From volume II of Picturesque America

In June 1872, the publishing firm D. Appleton and Company sent its agents out across the country to solicit subscriptions for its ambitious Picturesque America. Already under production for several years, the…

This representation of Catasauqua, in 1873 already a fairly substantial town located on the Lehigh River just east of Allentown, provides the perfect model for demonstrating the often complicated history behind the production of bird's-eye views. For…

Homestead, located about seven miles south of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River, was home to the Homestead Steel Works, the smoking conglomeration of buildings located here in the upper left, along the banks of the river. In the summer of 1892, the…

Clearfield was named after the numerous open fields, thought to have been cleared by bison that once roamed western Pennsylvania, that were discovered where what today is known as Clearfield Creek flows into the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.…