Pennsylvania's mining laws were strengthened following the September 6, 1986 mining disaster in Avondale, Luzerne County. But deadly accidents still occurred, including several in the anthracite mines of lower Northumberland County. Together, five disasters between 1873 and 1894 claimed thirty-eight lives.
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Nineteenth-century businessman J. Warner Erwin traveled across Pennsylvania as a conveyancer, a term for a writer of deeds, leases, property transfers, and other legal matters. He kept a detailed diary of his travels, including a descriptive account of a November 1851 trip through several towns in the Susquehanna Valley.
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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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The old circuit riders are gone now. So are many of the trails they followed through the forests and across the mountains of the Susquehanna Valley. But scattered across the valley are churches and congregations whose beginnings reach back to those men who came on horseback. For the circuit rider, the earthly course was often long and difficult. But he rode it believing that the journey did not end at the next preaching appointment.
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For the Middle Susquehanna Valley, 1778 was especially frightening. Raids threatened isolated farms and settlements. Settlers fled down the West Branch in what became known as the Great Runaway. Colonel Thomas Hartley demonstrated that a relatively small Continental force could reverse that movement during the Battle of Indian Hill on September 29, 1778.
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In the 21st century, we can sit down at any time of the day to read the latest edition of a morning or evening newspaper. Newspaper history in the Susquehanna Valley dates back to the late 1700s.
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A Danville, Pennsylvania, man found a plug of hair inside an old apple tree in 1920. What was its purpose? Plugging illness into trees was part of older Pennsylvania folk-healing traditions. Similar remedies were used for ailments such as croup, whooping cough, asthma, seizures, paralysis, and other lingering illnesses.
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Fire that began in a stable in the city of Williamsport on the night of August 20, 1871, destroyed 45 buildings, near East Third and Mulberry streets, then one of Williamsport’s principal residential and business districts. Among the buildings destroyed was the Russell Inn, a log cabin building as seen in the photo.
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For perhaps sixty to eighty years, singing schools trained congregations to read and sing music, provided rural communities with winter entertainment, and created one of the most important courtship settings available to young people in the Susquehanna Valley.
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In the 1880s, the Bloomsburg Car Manufacturing Company in Columbia County produced an estimated four thousand railroad cars. It was a leader in the manufacture of standard railroad freight cars, small mine and colliery cars, rotary dump cars, and other materials for the railroad and mining industries.
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