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Category Archives: History
Cobb County blacksmith shops: Due West Road (9Co246)
In October 1986 I spent a couple of days documenting a 20th century blacksmith shop that had been slated for removal in advance of a proposed shopping center development and highway widening. Located at the intersection of Due West Road and Dallas Highway (SR 120), the shop was the first of two Cobb County blacksmith shops I documented in 1986 and 1987. This is the second in a series of posts on the shops. Continue reading
The tanner’s home: Canadensis, Pa.
Gilbert E. Palen.
In 1856, Gilbert E. Palen (1832-1901) was a newly minted MD who decided to forego a career in medicine. Instead, he and a cousin (who also happened to be his brother-in-law), George W. Northrop (1812-1875), and brother Edward (1836-1924) opened a tannery along the banks of Brodhead Creek in rural Monroe County in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. The Palens and Northrop named their new tannery town Canadensis (from the Latin species name for the hemlock trees, Tsuga canadensis) and they built large Gothic Revival homes across the street from their industrial complex.
Gilbert, Edward, and Northrop tanned leather in Canadensis between 1856 and 1873, the year the family’s firms failed in the national depression. The Canadensis tannery was a stepping stone for Gilbert Palen. He was perhaps a fourth generation tanner who learned the trade in his family’s plants throughout Ulster and Greene counties in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Between 1802 and 1873, the Palens had built and bought at least seventeen tanneries in New York and Pennsylvania . They were, as one nineteenth century trade journal remarked, “par excellence , a family of tanners.” Continue reading
Cobb County blacksmith shops: a return
Blacksmith shops were features on all of the larger plantations in the state, and also occurred as separate industries in many of Georgia’s small towns. As an archaeological site type, few “smithies” have been examined in the state. However, one site, 9CO246, has been recorded by David Rotenstein and Rotenstein’s (1986) report provides both an overview of elements of a blacksmith shop as well as example of the types of materials which can be recovered from such sites archaeologically. — Historical Archaeology in Georgia.
Lost Mountain blacksmith shop, 1987.
In the fall of 1986 I was working as an archaeologist with the Georgia Department of Transportation when I got a chance to do some traditional archaeology inside a 20th century blacksmith shop. Located at the intersection of Due West Road and Dallas Highway (Ga. 120) about six miles west of Marietta, the Georgia state archaeologist’s office assigned it a site number after my work was completed: 9Co246. I wrote a report that was filed with the state historic preservation office and an article that was published in The Florida Anthropologist. Continue reading
Protected: Nuts and bolts of Oakhurst’s third place: The path to hipness (updated)
Protected: The path to hipness (Part I)
Hudson on the Savannah
Savannah’s architectural charm is evident throughout the expansive National Historic Landmark district that comprises its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban core. Buildings, structures, and cultural landscapes are what most visitors notice. Archaeologists (current and former) who spend a lot of time looking down — a professional hazard — appreciate the history underfoot. Specifically, brick pavers from brickyards throughout the Southeast and the Hudson River Valley. Continue reading
Virtual zeitgeist, physical places, and real people
Architecture writer Nichole Reber has written a post for Hong Kong’s Perspective magazine blog that explores the intersection of history, preservation, and memory documented in past posts in this blog. Continue reading
Views of the Communipaw Abattoir
Before the arrival of the railroads in the mid-19th century, Communipaw, New Jersey, was a small port town in the Hudson River’s west bank. Before 1866, the Pennsylvania Railroad had no dedicated livestock terminal in the New York market. Animals the railroad carried from the west were offloaded in Elizabethport, New Jersey, and were ferried across the Hudson River to Manhattan where they were driven through the streets to the Allerton stockyards at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue. While New York City’s new health laws (which became effective in 1866) contributed greatly to the construction of the Communipaw abattoir and stockyards, the reduction and elimination of the costs of driving livestock across the Hudson River and through city streets also were significant factors along with increased competition for livestock by the three major railroads serving New York City: the Pennsylvania; the Erie; and, the New York Central. Continue reading
The power of place: research roles and the Web
Folks in my trade, history and architectural history, find buildings and landscapes interesting. Yet, it is the people who designed, built, lived, and worked in them who are the real stars in architectural history. Sometimes I meet a building’s earlier occupants through the property’s current stewards; the former homeowner or resident knocking on the door of a current resident is an almost universal motif in architectural history narratives. Those connections yield invaluable information sources for people who study old houses.
Over the past decade a different kind of connection has been becoming more frequent. The Internet has democratized the past in ways not anticipated by traditional historians accustomed to archival and field research; reporting in academic journals and conference papers; and, to dialogues with colleagues and students. In 2011 I wrote a blog post on the history of Parkwood, a suburban Atlanta, Georgia, subdivision. Parkwood was among one of the last subdivisions developed in Druid Hills, the large suburb historically linked with some of Atlanta’s leading Gilded Age entrepreneurs and noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and his successors. Continue reading