The underground Pentagon
Three hours after terrorists crashed a passenger plane into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, five helicopters landed on Raven Rock Mountain just north of the Pennsylvania state line in Adams County. SUVs quickly carried the passengers from the helipad, down a mountain road, and through a large portal that led underneath the mountain. The passengers were not seen, but it is believed that Vice President Dick Cheney directed his office from that location for the next few days. The incident brought Site R back into the spotlight. The Underground Pentagon or Harry’s Hole, as it was called during its construction, had nearly fallen into disuse or so most people believed. It turns out that the Alternate Joint Communications Center (yet another name for Site R) still had a purpose in keeping the country running in case of an attack. Read more…
Looking Back 1980: First tornado in a century hits Chambersburg, Pa.
Monday, May 12, 1980, was winding down. Families were sitting down to dinner. Some people were just returning home from work. It has been a warm day so many people had opened their windows to allow the fresh air in. Then just after 6 p.m., a large black cloud moved in over Chambersburg, the wind began gusting to incredible speeds and rain fell, sometimes very heavily. “It was like fire rolling over the top of the building. The power lines started snapping like candy,” said a motorist who pulled into The Lumber Yard when the rain became too intense to see through, according to the Public Opinion. Another Chambersburg resident, Ida Beard, said, “I was driving home (via) Radio Hill around 6 and saw a round ball in the sky to my left. It kept getting smaller. I looked like Read more…
The circus comes to York, Pa.
Early Wednesday morning, July 19, 1933, a long train arrived in York and stopped near the fairground. The Sam B. Dill Circus had arrived. “Young America, having caught the infectious circus spirit is likely to be in ahead of both morning orb and circus and be on the lot along with enthusiastic adults to greet the show train on its arrival there,” The York Dispatch reported the day before the train’s arrival. The unloading and setting up of the circus tents and shows worked smoothly. All of the performers knew their jobs. They had been doing it multiple times each week since the circus had opened its season in Dallas, Tex., on April 9. Wagons containing the menagerie were rolled down ramps. Trunks were carried off to other areas. Elephants and roustabouts worked to raise the big top as the Read more…
Edward Woodward: Poet, Gunsmith, Souvenir Maker
Edward Woodward was a creative man who came to America from England in the mid-1850s seeking an opportunity to display his creativity. What he found when he and his father arrived in Baltimore was a land of simmering tensions that soon erupted into the Civil War. On April 19, 1861, a regiment of Massachusetts soldiers was transferring between railroad stations in Baltimore. To do this they had to disembark one train and march through a city filled with Confederate sympathizers to another station where they could board a train to Washington. The sympathizers attacked the soldiers, blocking the route and throwing bricks and cobblestones at the Union men. The soldiers panicked and fired into the mob, which led to a wild fight involving the soldiers, mob, and Baltimore police. When all was said and done, four soldiers and 12 civilians Read more…
Callithumpian band causes worry in York
The metallic reverberating sound of gongs repeatedly sounded throughout downtown York, Pa., in August 1925. It was a sound people recognized as the alert on a fire truck. Somewhere in York, a fire was burning. “During the disturbance patrons of theaters, hurriedly snatched their wraps and fled from the amusement places to ‘go to the fire.’ Others telephoned or went to their homes,” The York Dispatch reported. People attending a municipal band concert at Farquhar Park heard the gongs over the music and streamed out of the park, seeking the fire or their homes to make sure it wasn’t burning. The problem was that there was no fire. “A callithumpian band mounted on a truck which also carried, despite their objections the bride and bridegroom, coursed about downtown streets for about an hour last evening,” The York Dispatch reported. According Read more…
Where Fairytales Came to Life on a Civil War Battlefield (Part 2)
Fantasyland, the amusement park on a portion of the Gettysburg Battlefield, was an immediate hit. The Gettysburg Times noted in 1959, “’Fantasyland,’ which is Gettysburg’s newest major tourist attraction, outgrew its facilities for handling crowds on the second day of its operation.” During the opening weekend, 4,500 people entered the park and that number quickly grew to 4,800 by the third weekend. Weekdays saw 500 to 700 people a day visiting the park. “We never turned anybody away,” Jacqueline White, daughter of park owners Kenneth and Thelma Dick, said. A second entrance even had to be built to handle the weekend crowds. White started working at the park when she was only eight years old. She played Little Red Riding Hood walking through the park and talking to the visitors. As she got older, she worked other jobs in the Read more…
The first residents of Johnstown (part 1)
Chiefs of the Iroquois Indians and members of Pennsylvania’s government met on November 5, 1768. They sat down together and negotiated what is now called the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The agreement opened up the Conemaugh Valley and Stonycreek Valley by encouraging their settlement. When the treaty became effective the following April, a warrant was taken out for 249 acres between Conemaugh and Stonycreek rivers. What was initially an Indian town called Conemaugh eventually grew into Johnstown. It also opened up the shortest land route between Philadelphia and the Great Lakes, which was of interest to merchants. The treaty was a turning point in relations between whites and Indians in the region. By that time, the two cultures had been trading for about 40 years. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix marked a formal agreement to settle some land disputes between Read more…
Small-town high school students prepare for the journey of a lifetime in the middle of the Great Depression (Part 3)
Few of the boys of Arendtsville Vocational High School had traveled beyond the borders of Adams County, but in a short time during the summer of 1937, they had visited two countries, traveled through 19 states and territories, swam in two oceans, and were getting ready to sail on an ocean. They boys had traveled a southern route across the country with their teacher, Edwin Rice, but now they were in Vancouver, British Columbia. There, they boarded the steamship, Prince Rupert. Since the group was traveling on a shoestring budget, they had booked passage on the freight deck. It was cramped quarters. The boys slept in bunk beds and the rooms had no windows, “but we could see out when the doors opened,” Wayne Criswell said in “The Journey of a Lifetime Summer 1937” an unpublished article Criswell told to Read more…
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