December 2005 Archives

Lenny Moore, famed Penn State and Baltimore Colts running back, is coming back home when he appears at York Sports Night.

The annual event is set for Jan. 25, 2006, at the old Central York High School, 300 E. Seventh Ave., North York. The autograph session will be at 6:15 p.m., and the show starts at 7:15 p.m.

Moore has strong family ties to York, as attested to by the following excerpt from “Almost Forgotten," my book on black history in York County:

June Lloyd, retired archivist at the York County Heritage Trust, is off to a great start as a columnist for The York Daily Record/Sunday News.

On Christmas Day, her column connected a product of York County with a popular part of New Orleans. You'll have to read below to find out more.

Previously, she wrote on Christian Gobrecht, a York County native who became a well-known engraver at the United States mint. She also told about Hanover native John Luther Long's story that Puccini adapted for his famed opera "Madame Butterfly." (That column is posted in the York Town Square archives.)

June brings the skills honed in years of unsung, painstaking research as the popular archives at York County's premier historical research facility. In her retirement, she'd doing historical consulting. I'll occasionally post her work here, but all her newspaper material will be available at www.newslibrary.com.

Motorists driving across the Wright’s Ferry Bridge spanning the Susquehanna River might wonder about the long lonely row of bridge supports seen downstream beside the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge.

Some may know that these piers supported the mile-long bridge burned by Union militia to keep the Confederates from crossing the river in the days before the Battle of Gettysburg in late June 1863. But that’s the extent of their knowledge... .

A fight between a developer and preservationists over the Camp Security site in Springettsbury Township has made many York County residents aware of the history of that Revolutionary War location.

Fewer are aware that York County played host to a second prisoner of war camp — Camp Stewartstown in World War II.

More than 2,000 German prisoners camped there in the summers of 1944 and 1945. These detainees came down from Fort Indiantown Gap to work in the orchards and canneries through southern York County. They stayed in tents, within a barbed-wire-enclosed compound at the Stewartstown Fairgrounds, next to the Presbyterian Church.

“There’s no homes built on it yet," Betty Baldwin commented in presenting information about the camp to a gathering at Zion United Church of Christ earlier this month... .

In covering the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, the Gazette and Daily in York made its first extensive use of photographs delivered via a phone line.

The daily newspaper played with its news technology by running a July 1 photograph of Santa Barbara, damaged by an earthquake two days earlier.

So when the Tennessee trial began a week later, the morning daily was ready to harvest photos from the phone wire, called "wire photos."

The Gazette and Daily ran about 10 single photos or photo packages of the trial.

When state's attorney William Jennings Bryan died shortly after the trial, the newspaper ran a photo of his funeral and a photo package consisting of at least four wire photos including a remarkable photo of the house where Bryan died. Some editor had placed crosses on the picture at the place where Bryan was "lying when the end came‿ and the porch where his wife was sitting when informed of her husband's death.

Eighty years later, technology played a major role in news coverage of the federal judge's decision in the Dover ID case... .

Where do you start if you want to read more about York County history?

An e-mailer from Seven Valleys posed that question recently.

The correspondent said he's read Scott Butcher's "Postcard History of York" and Georg Sheets' "To the Setting Sun" and "Made in York," among other books.

I wrote back saying those picks make a great start... .

A gratifying part of doing journalism and history is pulling past research from the file and putting it into play today.

I had researched the York charrette, a major community forum in 1970, for a paper as an American studies graduate student at Penn State.

The paper compared the York Gazette and Daily’s and The York Dispatch’s coverage of the charrette.

The Gazette was coming at it from the left and the Dispatch from the right. Interestingly, both newspapers, in coverage and in opinions, treated it as a major event which wasn't perfect but brought forth good things.

I suppose it wasn’t surprising that the newspaper found merit in the eight-day assembly. York was riddled with racial woes and faced a third summer of unrest, unless someone put forth a solution.

My conclusion was that the Dispatch liked the charrette, and the Gazette and Daily liked it a little better.

My York Sunday News piece on the charrette follows:

Jim Rudisill is seen with fellow history enthusiast Luther B. Sowers.

At least a half dozen times a year, I spend time with Jim Rudisill, dean of York County history.

His knowledge is so vast that every get together is a whole course in local history.

Jim has an interesting perspective for understanding history. History is really "His Story," the story of people, and ends in a "y." He means that "why" is the most important question historians can ask.

He makes another point along these lines... .

Our editorial board believes that recent state tourism efforts to highlight York County black history on the Web were sparse, so we provided some additional possibilities in the editorial in the York Sunday News on Dec. 4.

In researching the editorial, I spent a delightful hour confirming some of the material I would write about.

I visited North York’s Lebanon Cemetery, the largest black cemetery in the county. I wanted to confirm that prominent physician Dr. George Bowles was laid to rest there, and a car tour was more interesting than calling the Heritage Trust for the information. I’ve been to the cemetery several times before and thought I remembered his marker.

A trip through Lebanon provides a lesson in black history. One sees markers for prominent families — the Kearses, Montouths, Chapmans and Sweeneys. Gladys Rawlins, the founder of Green Circle, was laid to rest there.

I then drove to Crispus Attucks Community Center to view the beautiful artwork posted there. It had been six months since I was last there, so I wanted to make sure the photographs, drawings and paintings were still on display.

During my visit, I ran into CA President Bobby Simpson, and he told me about big plans for a celebration of the organization’s 75th anniversary in March.

I frequently take little tours of noteworthy sites in Central Pennsylvania. There’s nothing like viewing these sites first hand. The tour last week was an hour well spent and added to the following editorial: