Before we get into some modern commentary on the Sugar Run Mounds discovery and its significance, I think it will be helpful to define just who these people were. We know them as “Hopewell” but, as was mentioned last week, that’s a term modern scientists have applied to ...
It’s really to get in the trap of writing about written history. That means when I sit down to write these stories each week, I’m somewhat limited to the last 250 years or so of this area’s story. I was reminded recently though that there’s a lot more to it. I was reading the ...
About a million acres have burned in the Canadian wildfire that has impacted our air quality here in recent weeks. Fires of that size pale in comparison to anything we see in the eastern United States, like a fire in Glade Township in 2021 that burned 259 acres. But don’t tell that to ...
When the forefathers of the Allegheny National Forest were planning for the future, they were looking primarily at what the forest COULD be. Decades of excessive timber harvesting gave them, in some sense, a blank slate to work with. So what did those early planners think they were going to ...
The main driver behind the creation of the Allegheny National Forest was to protect the headwaters of the Allegheny River. The economic benefits - timber - were a secondary consideration. Recreation might have not been at the top of the list but the ANF’s first superintendent, Loren ...
Loren Bishop, the Allegheny National Forest’s first supervisor, made a compelling case for the vision and purpose of the ANF. He needed to make that argument because when he wrote in 1925 there were still a couple hundred thousand acres that hadn’t yet been purchased. So while the ...