After the Civil War ended, the battle often still wasn’t over for the soldiers or their survivors. It wasn’t easy to get the pensions they were due, and they usually had to rely on the assistance of attorneys who could keep up with the changing pension laws. One of the
I was doing some research today at the York County Heritage Trust Library/Archives on York County ferries and came across the article below in the Shenk’s Ferry file. It is from the February 26, 1925 York Dispatch. Mrs. Love sounds like a formidable woman. FISHERWOMAN AT 82 Mrs. Catherine A.
No wonder York County can’t claim any covered bridges anymore. Hurricane Agnes destroyed the last one, at Bentzel’s Mill, in 1972. Previous storms and floods took their toll of many others over the years. Lila Fourhman-Shaull, Director of Library and Archives at York County Heritage Trust just shared an August
As I related in a recent post, I was puzzled by an account in the July 7, 1863 York Gazette, first reported in the York Pennsylvanian. It said that “last Sunday” there was quite a scare at the Brogue when a company of Union soldiers were mistaken for Confederate invaders.
Settlement patterns can be determined by what those who went before us left behind. Cemeteries offer many clues. The surnames on the headstones and the denomination of the churches with which the graveyards were affiliated point to the ethnic background of the people who lived nearby. The dates on the
Tomatoes and Shakespeare and York County? I recently wrote my York Sunday News column on the canning houses of York County, going back to the 1920s through the 1950s when the canneries dotted the county. Local farmers could easily haul their fresh vegetables just down the road to be canned
York Furnace Bridge, c.1856. I only knew of one photo that showed any remnants of the 1855-1857 bridge at York Furnace. That photo, perhaps taken in the 1890s, showed the remaining piers on the island. Click here for the previous post and column on the bridge. After reading my column
Probable photo of the York Furnace bridge Residents of “the lower end” of York and Lancaster counties thought they could beat winter weather in the 1850s by building a bridge across the Susquehanna River at York Furnace. The Lancaster Examiner of November 20, 1855 celebrated the opening of the bridge.
Doing a Google search on forest fires is eye opening. As I write this, fires are raging in the mountains of New Mexico; tigers and elephants are threatened by the fires in two national parks in India; and 45 forest fires have started in Irkutsk, Russia the past few days.
York County is part of what is known as a “cultural hearth,” an area from which ideas and culture spread throughout much of the country as settlers moved on. In a recent post, I showed how the Great Wagon road, shown on the 1751 Fry-Jefferson map, carried pioneers to the