A boa constrictor spending the cold Bradford County winter in woolen blankets, wagons to paint, acts to rehearse, and horses to train. One performer in the entourage was a cartwheeling youngster who later rose to national acclaim. All of them were part of Charles Lee's Great London Shows, which wintered in Canton. During the traveling season, the wagon train of performers wheeled into such places as Troy, Towanda, LeRaysville and Montrose before continuing into New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
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Sometimes, the smallest stories tell us the most about the people who came before us. One of them was Samuel Maclay, a surveyor, Revolutionary War officer, and United States Senator who made his home in the beautiful Buffalo Valley, in what is now Union County. (Cenotaph pictured at Dreisbach Church Cemetery. )
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Without people like John Franklin Meginness, much of what we know about life along the Susquehanna River might have been lost to the passage of generations. The histories he painstakingly assembled remain an invaluable record of Pennsylvania's past.
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During much of the nineteenth century, water came from a backyard well, a spring, a cistern, or a community pump. It was carried into the house one bucket at a time. Bathing usually meant a basin or a portable tub placed near the kitchen stove. And when nature called, there was the familiar path to the privy, sometimes through rain, snow, and bitter winter cold. Change came gradually to the valley’s growing industrial towns.
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