Blog of the Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office

Month: May 2014

Remembering Indian Hannah

by Karen Galle and Cory Kegerise

Hannah Freeman is not a name that you’ll find in most history books, though her story and her legend live on in southern Chester County. Known more popularly as “Indian Hannah”, Freeman is remembered in local lore as the last Lenni Lenape living in Chester County at the time of her death in 1802. She was born c.1730 on the Webb farm in Kennett Township not far from the Delaware border. Today the Webb farm is part of Longwood Gardens and her life and story are commemorated by a large stone monument erected in 1925 and rededicated in May 2014.

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Spotlight Series: The Allegheny Observatory

The Spotlight Series is an occasional series that highlights interesting people, places, programs, and partner organizations working on historic preservation issues.

This spring I had the pleasure of working with a group of six students from the University of Pittsburgh’s History of Art and Architecture Department as they participated in a unique opportunity to intensively study the historic Allegheny Observatory and to interact directly with a project funded by a PHMC Keystone Historic Preservation Grant.

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Something About That Place…

Given I routinely speak to agencies, applicants, and the public about historic architecture, I was a bit surprised by the presence of sweaty palms and butterflies as I prepared to talk to a new audience, a group I assumed would exhibit short attention spans, emotional reactivity, and call-it-like-you-see-it attitudes while I struggled to make even the most basic architectural principles interesting. As is the case with much of life, reality provided distant from expectations, and I was reminded of a very basic but important principle I believe worthy of sharing in a blog posting: the connection between memory and place and identity. Continue reading

A Museum for the 21st Century: The Online Presence of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Editor’s Note:  Each year PHMC hosts students from Pennsylvania state colleges and universities through The Harrisburg Internship Semester (T.H.I.S.) program.  The interns come from a wide variety of backgrounds and majors and are encouraged to gain writing experience by authoring a blog post on a topic that interests them. 

by Kara Adams, T.H.I.S. intern

A lot can be said about where I grew up and where I went to college, but their one feature in common is their rural natures. While rural communities are excellent places to grow up and live, it’s hard to ignore the disconnectedness they experience from cultural centers, such as museums in big cities. Many museums, however, are taking a new approach to providing access to their collections, with a rise in the usage of social media and the creation of collections databases hosted on the museums’ websites. One Pennsylvania museum taking full advantage of the interconnectivity the internet provides is the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose online collections database and social media pages give a museum experience to anyone with an interest in history and an internet connection. Continue reading

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