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A statewide hunt for the tales buildings tell

Plus, are rare whiskey lotteries worth it?

Welcome to PA Local, a free weekly newsletter about the great people, amazing places, and delicious food of Pennsylvania.
Your Postmaster: Colin Deppen

September 7, 2024
 
Inside this edition: Faire play, Maxo murals, now serving, rare drinks, get your goose, and history hunters. Thanks for checking in.
A Pennsylvania-centric trivia question.
Pennsylvania's wild elk were imported from which national park in 1913?

A. Yellowstone National Park
B. Acadia National Park
C. Yosemite National Park
D. Grand Canyon National Park
(Keep scrolling for the answer, but don't miss all the good stuff in between. Like what you read? Forward this email to a friend.)
Our five favorite Pennsylvania stories of the week.
» One faire worth thy time: Hear ye, hear ye. Fall means the return of Pennsylvania's Renaissance Faire in Lancaster County. Pro-tip, via Lebanon Daily News: Tickets are discounted after 4 p.m. (Pregame by watching HBO's wild, Texas-set doc Ren Faire if you haven't already.) 

» One restoration worth seeing: An all-woman conservation crew is hand-restoring the famed and towering Maxo Vanka murals in a church near Pittsburgh. The work could be completed by next month. Vanka, a Croatian immigrant, called the murals a “Gift to America.”

» One foodtruck worth finding: Former Roc-a-Fella rapper Beanie Sigel is behind the grill of his own food truck in Philadelphia, his hometown. Find it at 24th and Passyunk Ave., "across from the Bingo Hall." Sigel performed live at The Met in March, just a few miles away. 

» One lottery worth winning: Are Pennsylvania's rare whiskey lotteries worth it? A bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon that goes for $150 to a PLCB lottery winner can retail for over $1,000. The stuff is so sought-after it featured in a Kentucky heist recounted in this Netflix show.

» One goose worth getting: Goose is on the menu in Juniata River Valley this month. The prosperity-minded tradition has even spawned its own festival, which happens Sept. 29 in Lewistown with drones.


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The top stories published by Spotlight PA this week.
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» Who’s running to be PA’s next attorney general?
» 1000s of ballots at stake as PA courts weigh cases
» The biggest cases awaiting PA high court decisions
» Caregiving in Pennsylvania, by the numbers
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A pink and green map of Shippensburg's street grid.
An 1872 map of Shippensburg. 
THE TALES BUILDINGS TELL

An army of contractors has spent the past several years quietly fanning out across Pennsylvania to find the history state records have missed. 

The deployment, the first of its kind here since the 1980s, quickly produced leads. 

In year one, more than 7,500 properties in 17 rural counties were added to Pennsylvania's Historic Places Inventory, which is exactly what it sounds like. By the time the multiyear, 55-county architectural survey ended this June, more than 20,000 properties had been logged, along with 727 potential archaeological sites. 

The findings include Black churches and Croatian clubs in coal country; Chinese laundries; vintage ice cream stands; a stone altar on a Snyder County mountain; Northern Tier drive-ins; American Legion outposts galore; pyramids in Bucks County; the Liberty Theater in Nanty Glo, Cambria County; and mid-20th century homes in Upper Chichester, Delaware County. 

If you browse the series of blog posts detailing the discoveries, you might find yourself thinking, “A lot of these historic places don’t look very old.” The stone altar in Snyder County was only built in 1974, for instance. 

But that falls right around the 50-year threshold for what experts will generally consider historic, explains Andrea MacDonald, director of the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). “So that's bringing us up to 1974,” MacDonald told PA Local.

In short, history is relative, and state officials wanted a proper accounting of these newly “old” places sooner rather than later. 

Properties identified through this “baseline survey” won’t all be deemed worthy of a National Register of Historic Places listing, a federal distinction. Most won’t, probably. But the data gleaned from the hunt can inform future land surveys and open up preservation tax credits and grants for rehab projects whether a site lands the national honor or not.

Overshooting is part of the process, MacDonald said. “We don't know what we’re promoting the preservation of until we know what those places are.” 

Finding that history involves a lot of shoe-leather work. 

SHPO spent $700,000 to send nine consulting firms and dozens of surveyors out into the field. At the top of its detailed list of priorities were Black churches and cemeteries, and “underrepresented communities.”

Of the 20,000 resources logged in total by the project, 2,000 were “historically associated with African American or other ethnic communities,” MacDonald told PA Local by email. That’s significant at a time when physical emblems of Black history are disappearing in Pennsylvania and nationwide. MacDonald added in a follow-up phone call that sites associated with the Underground Railroad were particularly prized by surveyors.

Every state has a Historic Preservation Office, as authorized under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Pennsylvania’s didn’t get off the ground until the 1970s. And while the commonwealth’s inventorying began soon after, MacDonald said for many states the earliest listings centered on the usual suspects — courthouses, battlefields, and architectural standouts.

In Pennsylvania, digging for the less-obvious gems of historical significance, the deeper cuts, would slow considerably — and stay that way for decades — as SHPO focused its resources elsewhere.

“We're a federal-state partnership and we had a number of other programs we started to be responsible for, programs administered on behalf of the National Park Service, for example,” MacDonald said. “We are a very small but mighty staff, but we didn't have the resources to do a lot of proactive work.” That changed with this baseline survey, which coincided with the launch of PA-SHARE, or Pennsylvania's State Historic and Archaeological Resource Exchange.

Counties with a relatively high level of preservation activity already — Philadelphia, Allegheny, Lancaster, and Chester, to name a few — were excluded.

“We really wanted to focus on places we knew nothing or very little about,” MacDonald said. “We identified specific municipalities in each county [of focus] where it looked like no real inventory effort had ever taken place, so that’s where we started.”

Thousands of new resources were added to the Historic Places Inventory annually during the three-year effort. “Before that, it was a fraction of those numbers … for many, many years, it was nowhere near that volume,” MacDonald added. The agency plans to present all of the findings for public consumption in the coming months, via PA-SHARE. 

Hundreds of historic sites have been recommended for further study. This partly involves evaluating them for potential National Register listings. Officials will also consider consolidating clusters of resources in one area — groupings of AME churches, ethnic clubs, etc. — into historic districts that can be evaluated collectively. There is still a lot of work left to do. 

“Because we can't do it all, obviously we will rely on our local partners — perhaps county and local historical societies, planning commissions, you know, other organizations who may have an interest in advancing some of these recommendations and doing additional research,” MacDonald said. “That will be our call to action to help advance this work.”

Colin Deppen, newsletter editor

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A quote from a Pennsylvanian that we found interesting this week.
“What am I looking for in a whoopie pie?”

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz — a Nebraskan-turned-Minnesotan — during a campaign stop at Cherry Hill Orchards Outlet in Lancaster
Our favorite reader-submitted photo of the week.
A Pennsylvania Dutch tradition, this hex sign for good luck was given out at a Phillies game in 1970, via @ShenkLarry. Send us photos by email, use #PAGems on Instagram, or tag @spotlightpennsylvania.
A hex sign showing two birds and reading "good luck Phillies."
The answer to this week's Pennsylvania-centric trivia question.
The answer to this week's trivia question — "Pennsylvania's wild elk were imported from which national park in 1913?" — is "A. Yellowstone."

Pennsylvania's original wild elk were hunted to extirpation by the late 19th century. The Game Commission explains what happened next

In 1912, the Game Commissioners and agency Executive Secretary Joseph Kalbfus began talking about re-introducing elk in Pennsylvania. The idea stemmed from a federal government effort to reduce the mushrooming elk herds at Yellowstone National Park and the Jackson Hole Refuge Area.

The following year:

Pennsylvania's first shipment of Yellowstone elk arrived by train. The 50 elk cost about $30 each. Half of the Wyoming wapiti shipment went to Clinton County, the other half to Clearfield County. An additional 22 elk were bought from a Monroe County preserve that year. Twelve were released on state lands in Monroe County and the remainder on a Centre County preserve.

Pennsylvania's elk cam livestream — set up in the heart of the herd's stronghold in Elk County — is back, just in time for this year's rut.
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