Discover . . .
• William Penn's legacy of religious tolerance and the people who found their way here to enjoy it.
• The story of Jewish immigrant and land developer Aaron Levy, who's ecumenical gift of a communion set to the local Protestant churches led to an international celebration over 150 years later that attracted 30,000 visitors to Aaronsburg.
• Why chemist/minister Joseph Priestley escaped to Pennsylvania ahead of an English mob.
• Why a lop of the guillotine kept Marie Antoinette from becoming a Pennsylvanian.
• The legacy of "steel farms".
• Potters and squatters, poets and thieves.
• A contemporary local who dowses for graves.
• Young urban emigrants seeking a gentler place to live and raise a family.
It often takes an outsider to see the value of a place. Just as early settlers knew a good thing when they saw it, Joan Morse Gordon recognizes the innate beauty of the area and the strength of its history and people. She invites the reader on a journey worth taking for anyone interested in history, Pennsylvania, or just a good tale, covering a time span from the region's geological formation to today.
In addition to conveying a marvelous sense of place, there are historical illustrations and contemporary photos gathered from public and private archives to give the reader a visual link between past and present along Route 45, also known as PA's Purple Heart Highway.
From the book:
• This road of mine, I was pleased to note, was no thruway. This was a byway, a road less traveled, less transient, with a greater sense of permanence, of roots.
• Direction signs at crossroads indicated springs, forges, mills and caves nearby, all echoes of the past. More important was what wasn't there: billboards, graffiti, used car lots, and even worse, auto graveyards and adult movie shacks, typical despoilers of the landscape of so many highways today.
• Nailed to the siding on the northwest corner of Stover's Village Store, in Aaronsburg, PA, is a small corroded bronzecolored plaque with the words "Geographic Center of Pennsylvania," half hidden by a large PEPSI cooler standing alongside its COCA COLA cousin. No one quite remembers when the sign was put there, but it was quite some time ago.
• The surnames one comes across most frequently are Beachy, Peachy, Zook, Beiler, Hostetler, Stolzfus and Yoder. Geographer Peirce Lewis describes the newly arrived Amish as "hermit crabs," converting an old farm or a California ranch house to their own needs.
• It is the Palatine Germans and Swiss who have had the biggest impact on Route 45 and whose descendants have prevailed....Unlike second or third generation offspring of immigrants who cluster in heavily ethnic neighborhoods in cities, with churches onion-domed or medieval, who celebrate in a stopped time ritual with food and dance and song the traditions of their forebears, the citizens along Route 45 tend to think of themselves as village or township or county residents; Pennsylvanians or American first.
• In 1737, long after his father's departure, William Penn's son, Thomas, used the same walking measure contorted by deceit to trick the Lenape out of their rightful land. In what was called the "Walking Purchase," the Lenape lost 1,200 square miles. Lenape Lappawinsoe protested, "The walkers should have walkt for a few miles and then sat down and smoakt a Pipe . . . and not kept upon the Run, Run,
