How Was Your Charter Day?

Last week's post features Trails of History events through March 21, and the March program page gets you the rest of the way.

Philly Pretzel Factory in Langhorne made this pretzel version of the Manor House for Pennsbury's Charter Day celebration (via Facebook)

On Sunday, March 10, we celebrated the 338th anniversary of King Charles II of England granting William Penn the land that became Pennsylvania. As is the tradition, the original Charter went on display at The State Museum of Pennsylvania (still there through noon today, March 15). This year it was accompanied by documents related to passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in honor of the centennial of women's suffrage. The Charter will now return to the vault of the Pennsylvania State Archives and the other documents to their appropriate housing. The State Museum displays a photographic reproduction of the Charter throughout the year.

Most sites on the Pennsylvania Trails of History were open free of charge in honor of Charter Day. Pennsbury Manor honored founder William Penn and his family with living history demonstrations and a unique pretzel from Philly Pretzel Factory in Langhorne (see photo above). Conrad Weiser Homestead is closed to the public during the winter, and hosts its largest living history event of the year on Charter Day to mark the start of their season (see news coverage of their day). Eckley Miners' Village featured local artists reading poetry and displaying paintings as part of their Charter Day event (more info).

Ephrata Cloister chose Charter Day to debut their new iPads, which allow guides to share historic photographs of the site with visitors and show upper floors of the 18th-century buildings not generally open to the public and not accessible at all to people with mobility issues. They also allow for closer examination of Ephrata's well-known fraktur alphabet, as in the photo below. You can read more in this article from The Ephrata Review.

Ephrata Cloister now has iPads for use on tours and in programs to provide visitors with additional visual info (via Facebook)

Charter Day was also the official opening of Landis Valley Village & Farm Museum's new visitor center exhibit, "Thrown, Fired, and Glazed: The Redware Tradition from Pennsylvania and Beyond." This exhibit will run through December of 2020, with a change of objects happening over the winter 2019-20. Hundreds of objects will be on display over the course of the exhibit's run, many that come from private collections and have not been exhibited in public. The exhibit also includes information on individual potters and various techniques of forming and decorating redware and other ceramics. I had a chance to attend the exhibit preview and can highly recommend a visit. I'll need to go back to spend some time really soaking it in. Kathy Daminger from LancasterOnline visited, and you can read her article to learn more.

The exhibit opening featured gingerbread cookies decorated to look like redware, and they were delicious! (photo AKF)