Western Pennsylvania Ghost Towns
Susan Tassin was hiking with her husband one day along a Pennsylvania trail when they came across stacked cut stones in a large rectangle. Tassin recognized what she was seeing as the foundation of a house. The home was long gone, and the stones were all that remained to mark that someone had once called that out-of-the-way place home. “I was excited,” Tassin said. “We saw some other hikers and told them what we had found.” The other hikers didn’t understand the Tassins’ excitement. The hikers pointed out a historical marker that told readers the site had once been more than a place for a single home. An entire home had been located there. It was all gone, though. All that was left was a ghost town. When most people think of ghost towns, they picture dusty streets flanked by Read more…
The "Last to Fall" is now available for pre-order
It can be said that the last deaths at the Battle of Gettysburg were two marines who fell from the sky in an airplane in 1922. Confused? Are you starting to type a comment to tell me that the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in 1863 and there weren’t any marines there? You would be right on both counts. However, during the first week of July 1922, nearly a quarter of the U.S. Marine Corps re-enacted Pickett’s Charge in a historical way and also using modern equipment, such as tanks and airplanes. Think about that for a second. There’s a whole sub-genre of science fiction based on alternative history. One of the standards of the genre is Harry Turtledove’s “Guns of the South.” In it, time travelers give the Confederacy Uzis to use in their Civil War battles. That is Read more…
Will the "Sons of Liberty" be good history?
The “Sons of Liberty” mini-series premieres this Sunday on the History Channel. I have slowly come around to wanting see it. I think it might be a guilty pleasure because I’m not sure how good it will be as a history show. The trailer makes it seem like it will be an action epic. While that could be great television, my take is that there was great reluctance to take action among the Founding Fathers. They didn’t want to start a fight with their mother country. They just wanted to live in peace. Great Britain didn’t make it easy, though. Check out this article on Mental Floss about how much tax some common items would have added to their actual cost. For instance, a hundredweight of foreign coffee had nearly $351 in taxes added to it in order to make Read more…
Don’t let the flu get you!
So it seems like everyone lately has the flu. Schools are sending warnings home to parents. Hospitals are telling patients with the flu not to come in. The Centers for Disease Control has said that is has hit epidemic level. So how bad can it get? The worst to date has been the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. It left about 50 million dead after just a couple months. I wrote about it in my novel October Mourning. I’ve also written about half a dozen articles about it and given a couple talks about it.I continue to be fascinated (scared?) by it. It killed more people than World War I and in a shorter time frame, too, yet the war had the headlines during 1918. It was estimated that 675,000 Americans died from the Spanish Flu or 10 times more Read more…
Inspired: How Washington County (Md.) set Laura Hillenbrand on the track to bestsellerdom
As a young girl, bestselling-author Laura Hillenbrand and her older sister, Susan, rode horses over the Washington County hills and along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath. They rode bareback, sliding back and forth and trying to stay astride the horse while only holding onto bridles they’d made from twine. “We did a lot of riding and a lot of falling off,” Hillenbrand said. When they did fall off, they had to protect their heads since they didn’t wear helmets. It might have been a little dangerous, but it was a lot of fun. Hillenbrand and her family spent much of the summers of her youth at their farm in Sharpsburg. Her father worked as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. and the 600-acre farm served as a getaway and refuge from the stress of the city. The stone farm house Read more…
Why "Unbroken" the book is better than the movie
My wife and I went to see Unbroken last night. I loved the book and was very excited to see the movie, but it didn’t live up to the book. As my wife pointed out, “The book is always better.” But why is that? The movie was well acted and the effects looked good. So I was trying to think about why it left me disappointed. Part of it was definitely because a lot needed to be cut from the book. The movie focuses on Louis Zamperini’s prison-camp experiences. It certainly is the most-exciting part of the book when Zamperini is facing life-or-death consequences. It only gives his running career and change from petty thief to Olympic champion a partial look and pretty much ignores his battle and recovery from post-traumatic stress. By giving those two sections of his life Read more…
Frederick baseball showed some hustle in the Blue Ridge League
On Thursday morning, May 27, 1915, H.A. Albaugh showed his love of baseball in two ways. He drove 42 miles over stone and hard-packed dirt roads from his home in Westminster to Frederick in order to see the Frederick Hustlers make their professional baseball debut. The drive took him about two hours and before leaving home, he made a bet with a friend that Frederick would win its opening day game. If the Hustlers lost, Albaugh promised that he would walk home. It was a daring bet. The Hustlers were playing the Martinsburg Champs who had been the league champs in the defunct Tri-City League the previous year. Albaugh and Frederick City had chosen their champion, though, and the Hustlers didn’t disappoint. Professional Baseball Comes to Frederick Though baseball came to Frederick County near Read more…
Hairy Memories: Hair albums used braided hair to create memories
Charlie Chaplin wrote in his autobiography, “Hair is vitally personal to children. They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.” It is a feeling that adults must never entirely get over, either. How many of us have scrapbooks that contain a lock of our hair from when we were a baby or when we got our first haircuts? When you look at it does it bring back memories of your childhood? Of a time of youthful energy and innocence? Ann Hull, director of the Franklin County (Pa.) Historical Society – Kittochtinny, tells a story of how she was doing genealogy research one time and among some family items, she found an envelope with a lock of Read more…
Hairy Memories: Hair albums used braided hair to create memories
Charlie Chaplin wrote in his autobiography, “Hair is vitally personal to children. They weep vigorously when it is cut for the first time; no matter how it grows, bushy, straight or curly, they feel they are being shorn of a part of their personality.” It is a feeling that adults must never entirely get over, either. How many of us have scrapbooks that contain a lock of our hair from when we were a baby or when we got our first haircuts? When you look at it does it bring back memories of your childhood? Of a time of youthful energy and innocence? Ann Hull, director of the Franklin County (Pa.) Historical Society – Kittochtinny, tells a story of how she was doing genealogy research one time and among some family items, she found an envelope with a lock of Read more…
These vampires were kept dead
Here’s a weird historical story for Halloween. Earlier this month, the UK Telegraph reported at a “vampire grave” had been found in the ruins of ruins of Perperikon, an ancient Thracian city located in southern Bulgaria. The evidence that the grave had been believed to be the resting place of a vampire was a metal stake driven through the man’s chest. Professor Nikolai Ovcharov unearthed the body while doing excavations in the city. Perperikon was discovered 20 years ago and believed to be the site of the Temple of Dionysius, who was the Greek God of wine and fertility. Perperikon is also located near Bulgaria’s border with Greece. “We have no doubts that once again we’re seeing an anti-vampire ritual being carried out,” Professor Ovcharov is quoted in the newspaper. “Often they were applied to people who had died in Read more…
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