Scribbler

Ron Hontz has spent part of his summer conducting walking tours at Mount Gretna, the wooded Lebanon County community that contains the idyllic cottage clusters known as the Pennsylvania Chautauqua, Campmeeting and the Heights. The Scribblers recently attended Hontz’s tour of Campmeeting.

Franklin & Marshall College last month protested an Atlantic magazine article that claimed it is considering changing its name because of its associations with slavery. The magazine later reported that the college has had no “official” conversations on that subject.

Mennonites have long opposed slavery. Mennonites in early America disowned slave-owning members of the church. Quakers with Mennonite associations were among those who signed the 1688 Germantown petition against slavery, America’s first anti-slavery document.

Dear Dr. Scribblerlily:

“Everyone else is wearing masks. Why shouldn’t ducks?”

Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan relied on Ruth Freitag to find many of the materials they used to interpret the galaxy. As a reference librarian at the Library of Congress for nearly half a century, she helped numerous other scientists locate obscure but valuable sources.

Dear Dr. Scribblercal:

Memorial Day typically is described as a day to honor American soldiers and sailors who died in service. But there is more to it than that. Memorial Day traditions are complex and have evolved over time.

The Paxton Boys, an expanded group of the Paxton Rangers who massacred the last of the Conestoga Indians here in 1763, originally were known as the Hickory Boys — a label that hits closer to home.

The first mistake was in not locating Lancaster directly along the Conestoga River.

A few weeks ago, Mr. and Mrs. Scribbler wandered around the Sunnyside peninsula. The peninsula is formed by a large horseshoe bend of the Conestoga River at Lancaster City’s southern end. We were searching for any sign of a trail along the water.

Hong Neok Woo, one of at least 10 Chinese men who served in the Union or Confederate armies during the American Civil War, worked as a pressman for a Lancaster newspaper before returning to Shanghai in 1864 and becoming a priest and medical assistant.