"On April 17, 1865, eighteen year old John Rakestraw left the family farm in Bart Township, Lancaster County, to attend Unionville Academy, a small Quaker boarding school in Chester County. During the time he was away his two older sisters wrote to him regularly. Ten of those letters have survived and they provide a candid and often painfully honest glimpse of life on a Lancaster County farm in the 1860's. Diaries and ledgers kept by John's father, William I. Rakestraw , provide additional insight into that that time and place." [excerpt from the text]
In: Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, v. 30.
Summary
The article focuses on a letter from Edward Shippen lll to his son, Edward Shippen lV (who would later become the Chief Justice of Pennsylvania). The letter contains advice on how to live a good and productive life both in business and family life.
Committee: Jacob P. Ackerman, Harry L. Coho, William E. Nauman.
Cover title.
Laid in between front cover and flyleaf: The ministerium at work: News of the Evangelical Lutheran Ministerium of Pennsylvania and adjacent states, vol 21, no. 1, Philadelphia, Pa, January 20, 1946.
Includes Accountability matrix, Acknowledgments, and Citations.
Summary
"This plan is a blue print and a series of first steps to build that kind of community and those kinds of systems. It is open-ended enough to allow residents who are struggling with these issues to sit at the leadership table and guide not just the details of the implementation of this document, but also its inevitable and expected evolution. What works on Duke Street may not work on Queen Street. What works in the Southeast may not work in the Southwest. This plan must remain flexible. This plan is also firm in its insistence that residents who understand poverty best must be at the table shoulder to shoulder with clergy, employers, policymakers, academics and the nonprofits that have initially agreed to be accountable for the process. Every sector of our community must be engaged. This plan is a call to action: to bring your wisdom and energy to bear on this crucial starting point,and work with us to make this imperfect plan more perfect through your effort. There will be much to do now that this document has been bound and released: specialized action teams to fill with people who can get things done across a broad spectrum of goals. We hope you’'re one of those people." [from the forward]
James Buchanan; paper read before the Kittochtinny Historical Society of Franklin County, Friday evening, March 30, 1900, at the residence of Dr. Chas. F. Palmer, Chambersburg, Pa
"By following the story of my great-grandmother Isabella Ford's life, and adding to it with information from available sources, I have been able to get a better understanding of the circumstances of Lancaster's free blacks. Her story provides a sense of life in mid-nineteenth century Lancaster County and shows how free black families held their own, despite an environment that was often unfriendly and that restricted their opportunities by both law and custom."
"May God have mercy on the deeply affected congregation" : the divisive 1825 language dispute at Lancaster's Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Holy Trinity
