“Not one in 50 of our citizens, we venture to say, has ever stood on the highest elevation of the city, or even know where it is,’’ the reporter suggested.

“The College Heights are always spoken of as the highest within the city bounds, but a far larger view of the city is obtained from Union Street, near Locust.’’

Locust doesn’t intersect with Union, but Laurel does. The reporter misreported the location.

He did not misreport the view: Just before you get to the Laurel intersection, at the top of Union Street hill, the view remains one of the best of downtown Lancaster.

But the reporter seems to imply that the Cabbage Hill location might be higher than the hill on which Old Main stands in the heart of Franklin & Marshall College’s campus.

Is it?

Nope, says Maggie Weidinger, manager of Lancaster County’s Geographic Information Services.

Buchanan Park (directly behind Old Main) is the city’s high point at 438 feet. That’s why the city tried to construct its original water reservoir there.

A spot near the intersection of Walnut and West End avenues stands second highest at 420 feet.

Third, at 366 feet, is the Cabbage Hill height at Union and Laurel.

“If somebody would have said to me, just cold, ‘What’s the highest point in Lancaster City?’ I would have said ‘Cabbage Hill,’’’ Weidinger notes. “I thought it was way up there, but I guess it isn’t high enough.’’

High enough to provide a considerably better view than anything seen from F&M, from which the high land slopes more gradually toward the center of town.

The view was more impressive in 1853.

In that year, F&M began building the tall Gothic building that would become Old Main. Wide-open fields at that time separated the college from the core of Lancaster. From the high point, the original Fummers looked down on the city.

College Hill, however, was not F&M’s original choice for a campus.

The college previously had considered and rejected building on the high point where Lancaster County Prison, completed in 1851, now stands. That’s why, before the college changed direction, the streets on either side of the prison were named Franklin and Marshall.

And that’s why Henry Harbaugh, F&M’s president, exclaimed at the laying of Old Main’s cornerstone: “Thank God! The College stands higher than the jail. Education must be lifted up and let crime sink to the lowest depths.’’

College over crime: a commendable elevation.

Stone rose on Low Grade bridge

A hundred years ago this summer, as a New Era reporter stood on Union Street hill, other men worked hard to create bridges and tunnels for the Atglen & Susquehanna Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Low Grade Freight Line running through southern Lancaster County.

One of those workers, an Italian immigrant, carved less than a full-blown rose in the stone foundation of a bridge carrying Orchard Buck Road over the rail line at Christiana.

The worker told 4-year-old Havard Martin, a daily observer of the bridge’s progress, that the closed rose was for him.

The earth moved during intervening decades, obscuring the rose.

Recent work at the site has uncovered the rose again, reports Lancastrian Nancy Haubert, Martin’s daughter. The rose and the stem, carved horizontally in stone, are clear, though faint.

“It’s not as big as I imagined the rose would be,’’ she says.

Nor as big, no doubt, as it appeared to a wide-eyed 4-year-old boy a hundred summers ago.

Horror writer visits Long’s Park

Stephen King, who wrote the book about the killer car and other creepy thrillers that have entertained millions of readers and moviegoers, visited Lancaster last weekend.

Numerous Lancastrians spotted the author at the Long’s Park Art & Craft Festival.

Perhaps the master of horror was absorbing atmosphere for a new novel that might be called “Festival Fiend.’’

The Scribbler column is published in the New Era on Tuesdays and Fridays.

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