Charter Day All Over the State

So Sunday is Charter Day, and we'll be celebrating Pennsylvania's birthday all along PHMC's Trails of History. A couple of sites will celebrate other birthdays as well - Dr. Joseph Priestley and Ephrata founder Conrad Beissel. Landis Valley Village & Farm Museum will debut their 2016 exhibit on weathervanes. The State Museum will have the original Charter of 1681 on display. Conrad Weiser Homestead will hold their largest living history event and kickoff their season. And those are just a few of the activities planned - be sure to check out the list of open sites and the March program listings for details. Be sure all your clocks are set ahead one hour early Sunday morning for Daylight Saving Time or you might miss some of the fun!

UPDATE: If you tweet about your Charter Day visit please include #PaCharter2016 and tweet to @PHMC.

Landis Valley's 2016 exhibit will be open through December

In recent weeks I've been sharing links to media mentions of our sites and museums, and this week is no different...

Jim Cheney, who has written about a number of Trails of History sites on his blog, UncoveringPA.com, recently described his visit to Ephrata Cloister. Appropriately for Charter Day, Cheney concludes his post (after noting that he quite enjoyed his visit) with: "It offers a peek into one of colonial America’s most unusual religious societies and gives a great perspective on how the religious freedom instilled into Pennsylvania by William Penn shaped the colony in the 18th century and beyond."

A Los Angeles Times article about the west coast debut of Julia Wolfe's Pulitzer-Prize-winning choral work, Anthracite Fields, noted that her research included folks at the PA Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton (read more about it in a previous Trailheads post).

Last week, VacationIdea.com had a post listing the "25 Best Things to See & Do in Erie, PA." Near the top was our very own Erie Maritime Museum - the article noted the museum's exhibits of historical artifacts, its interactives, the Lawrence ship-section exhibit (which shows the effects of cannon-fire on a wooden sailing ship), and the GE steam-powered generator. Visitors also know that the museum is the homeport of the US Brig Niagara.

Earlier this winter, DC-based blogger Erin Gifford (kidventurous.com) and her four kids had some unexpected school vacation time due to snow. They headed north to PA to avoid cabin fever. Their visit to Lancaster County (recounted in a post called "Exploring with Kids: 36 Hours in Lancaster, PA") included stops at the Railroad Museum of PA and Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum.

And okay, this last one isn't specific to the PHMC or the Trails of History, but I'm sharing it anyway because. On the blog for the Association of Living History, Farm and Agricultural Museums (ALHFAM), Derrick Birdsall recently wrote a post called "The Walking Dead and ALHFAM?" that explores an interesting point. (I don't follow the show so I don't know if this constitutes a spoiler or not - if that matters to you then stop reading now.) Birdsall notes that a location called the Hilltop that serves as a refuge from the zombie apocalypse was chosen because it had been a living history site, preserving the knowledge of how to survive without the modern amenities. He wonders if any living history sites might be able to take advantage of that fact in their marketing. Thoughts?

Finally, since we're talking about marketing and promotion and all that, the PA Tourism Office this week unveiled a new brand for Pennsylvania. They produced a video to launch the idea and I thought you might like to see it, if you haven't already.

6 Things on the Trails of History to Take Your Mind off Impending Doom

Pond at Graeme Park after ice storm via Facebook

Are there 6 things listed below? Maybe. How can I be expected to count when the biggest storm of the winter is bearing down on us? Either that, or the most overhyped storm of the winter so far. I hope it’s the latter, because, as you know if you’ve read Trailheads lately, I’ve had it with winter. Had. It. (In case you missed them, you can catch up on my rants and whining with posts from last week, the week before, or the week before that, and so on.)

The February program listing was posted two weeks ago and I have made a couple of updates since then. Please check ahead on all programs (by website, Facebook, or phone) to be sure they’re going on as scheduled.

So anyway. Happy Valentine’s Day to those celebrating. In honor of the holiday, Pennsbury Manor’s blog takes a look at marriage among 17th-century Quakers in Pennsylvania.

And speaking of holidays, most sites are closed on Feb. 17 for Presidents Day, but you can visit Fort Pitt Museum or the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.

And speaking of Presidents Day (sorry for the stream of consciousness), the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History blog, “O Say Can You See?” recently included a post talking about the connections between President Thomas Jefferson and Dr. Joseph Priestley, whose home in Northumberland is part of the PA Trails of History. How cool is that? (Thanks to the PA Trails of History FB page for the link!)

Workers pause during construction of Pennsylvania Station, NYC, early 1900s
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-286

Here’s an item that links several PHMC areas of responsibility: On Tuesday, Feb. 18, on PBS’s The American Experience, you can watch a documentary about New York’s Pennsylvania Station that includes 23 photos from the PA State Archives Penn Central Railroad collection (MG-286). The original Penn Station was completed in 1910 as a terminal for the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) (many PRR locomotives, other rolling stock, and associated artifacts are preserved and displayed at the Railroad Museum of PA). Today’s Penn Station is sort of an underground remnant of the grand Beaux-Arts building demolished in 1963 to make way for Madison Square Garden, an event that is generally credited with spurring the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 that, among other things, established state historic preservation offices (PHMC is the SHPO for Pennsylvania).

At the Tall Ships America Conference earlier this month, US Brig Niagara’s Senior Captain, Walter Rybka, was recognized for his role in making the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Lake Erie such a success. Congratulations to Walter and to all who worked on the bicentennial events throughout the Great Lakes.

Last week I had the opportunity to visit Ephrata Cloister and sit in on week 2 of the Winter History Class, where Dr. Jeff Bach, who has done extensive research and writing on the history of the religious community at Ephrata, updated the group on his work with some newly discovered letters that shed light on a division in the community in the 1740s. I also stuck around for the afternoon meeting of the site’s Student Historians and took part in a hands-on session about pottery decoration (sgraffito, to be exact) led by redware artists Ned Foltz and Sam Shoemaker. After tracing designs prepared by Ned, we scratched the decoration into the clay; the final product will be delivered after the pieces are glazed and fired. My effort is below (I will not be quitting my day job). Thanks to Michael Showalter and Rebecca Lawrence for letting me hang out and exercise a little creativity.

Not too terrible for my first attempt

Media Watch (Print and TV)

I’ve been keeping a list of items the last couple of weeks and now those items have coalesced into a post, as they will do. The first two on the agenda are publications projects that have received awards from national organizations.

The Civil War in Pennsylvania: A Photographic History, which features many images not previously published, has received an Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History’s (AASLH) 2013 Leadership in History program. The book, by Michael G. Kraus, David M. Neville, and Kenneth C. Turner, was published by the Senator John Heinz History Center as part of Pennsylvania Civil War 150 (whose other partner organizations include PHMC, the Pennsylvania Heritage Foundation, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania). It was one of only two entries from Pennsylvania to receive AASLH awards this year. As luck would have it you can purchase it at shopPAheritage.com.

Entered alongside other Scholarly Journals from organizations with budgets less than $750,000, Drake Well Museum’s Oilfield Journal has received an honorable mention from the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Publications Design Competition for 2013. Drake Well was one of only two Pennsylvania awardees in that budget range and (based on a quick scan of the list) one of only a handful of history museums/historic sites among all prize winners (and I'm not the only person who noticed this). This is not Oilfield Journal’s first recognition from AAM—in fact, it’s a three-peat (previous wins were in 2008 and 2010). Hearty congratulations to everyone involved with this excellent publication.

From print, we move on to several very different television projects that have ventured along the Trails of History in recent weeks…

BBC Film Crew at Washington Crossing from PhillyBurbs.com

During the last week of June, a crew from the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) was on site at Washington Crossing Historic Park filming for a two-part documentary by British broadcaster and writer Melvyn Bragg. The documentary, Melvyn Bragg’s Radical Lives, will explore the revolutionary thinking of Thomas Paine and John Ball. You can read more about the Washington Crossing filming, which was focused on Mr. Paine, here. No airdate for BBC2 has been announced, and it is unclear whether it will make its way to BBC America, but we’ll keep you posted.

MTV personality Lenay Dunn (she hosts 10 on Top, a celebrity/pop culture countdown--and yes, I had to Google it) recently visited Pennsbury Manor to film a segment called “Summer Jobs” where volunteer coordinator Hannah Howard outfitted her in period clothing and taught her various 17th-century chores, and curator Todd Galle demonstrated beer brewing. If you had told me four years ago, when Trailheads started, that I would EVER write a sentence that combined “MTV” and “Pennsbury,” I would have said you were seriously wacko. But here we are. We’ll try to share info on when it airs so you can catch it (or DVR it or look for it online—whatevs).

Fourth of July Visitors at Erie Maritime Museum (photo by John Baker)

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” Heard it? When meteorologist Ray Petelin of Pittsburgh’s WTAE-4 explored the weather science and history behind this well-known saying, he featured the Erie Maritime Museum and Flagship Niagara. It’s really a fun piece and includes Capt. Wes Heerssen talking about modern shipboard weather forecasting and his take on the old saying (spoiler alert: it’s true). Watch it here.