The Roundup Continues!

U.S. and PA flags at May 2013 Celebration of Service
at Pennsylvania Military Museum

The State College Elks Club and local veterans organizations will present a Flag Day and U.S. Flag Retirement Ceremony on the grounds of the 28th Division Shrine at the Pennsylvania Military Museum today at 6 pm. U.S. flags that are no longer serviceable may be brought to the program for proper disposal.

The June program preview lists info on events happening this weekend, which include Patch Town Days at Eckley Miners’ Village, free Father’s Day admission for dads at Ephrata Cloister, and Evening on the Green at Daniel Boone Homestead. In addition, Brandywine Battlefield will host the first of their summer lecture programs on Father’s Day (details here).

Drake Well Museum showed up in my various news feeds several times this past week. The visitor center at Historic Pithole, the remains of an oil boomtown, will be open 10 am-4 pm on weekends through the summer, thanks to volunteers and staff from the museum. You can read more about that in the Titusville Herald here. A newspaper in Bakersfield, California, reported this week (here) that local students would be stopping at Drake Well on their way to the National History Day contest in Maryland to visit the site that was the focus of their entry (the museum documented the visit on their Facebook page.) THIS JUST IN: these students finished in fifth place nationally in the Junior Group Exhibit category; first place went to students from Kutztown, PA (I'll have a list of PA results in next week's post). And, Drake Well is participating in the “Titusville Treasure Hunt,” a cooperative effort to get families out and about to explore local history—treasure hunters can download the questions on Drake Well’s website (here) or pick up a copy at the museum; there will also be a family picnic on the museum grounds in September for people who participated in the project.

In a cooperative effort with Ephrata High School, Ephrata Cloister has produced a series of short videos focused on aspects of the site’s history, collections, and architecture. You can check them out here on YouTube. (You can also follow the adventures of Ephrata’s summer interns on the site’s blog here.)

In other video news, you can learn more about the current restoration project at Cornwall Iron Furnace by watching this interview on the Lebanon Daily News website.

I ran across a British blog post (thank you, soon-to-be-defunct Google Alerts) about a visit to Bowood House (in Wiltshire, England), the site of Dr. Joseph Priestley’s discovery of oxygen. A photo in the post shows a plaque presented jointly by the American Chemical Society and Royal Society of Chemistry that mentions Priestley’s American home and laboratory (which you can visit here).

I’ll leave you for this weekend with some images from last weekend. The Arts on Fire Festival, held at the Scranton Iron Furnaces, has quickly become a very popular event in Scranton. You might say it’s red hot (but I’d never do that). Anyway, you can enjoy photos of the event on Facebook here.