Meeting Spain's last anarchist

(BBC) - Hours after flying on a rickety 19-seater propeller plane and landing on a dirt strip, you get to the village of San Buenaventura in the heart of the Bolivian Amazon. Here, in a simple one-storey brick house next to a row of wooden shacks, is the home of Antonio Garcia Baron.
He is the only survivor still alive of the anarchist Durruti column which held Francoist forces at bay in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and the founder of an anarchist community in the heart of the jungle. Continued

Baltimore County Council mulls historical sites

(Examiner) - ... Also on Monday evening, lawmakers heard testimony on proposed additions to the county’s roster of historical landmarks, including an 83-year-old Catonsville home built by chemist and developer Victor Bloede.
... Residents also testified in support of adding Loch Raven Elementary School, which was built at the center of Loch Raven Village, one of Maryland’s first planned communities. Lutherville resident Jill Hettinger urged lawmakers to add the Weisbrod-Carroll [house] on Forest Avenue, a rare example of the “Downing-Vaux cottage” of the Victoria era.

Photo by Daniel Case: Downing-Vaux style house in New York

Anne of Green Gables at 100

(Meghan O'Rourke) - One hundred years ago, L.M. Montgomery did for women's imaginative lives what Susan B. Anthony did for women's political lives by publishing Anne of Green Gables, the story of an outspoken red-haired orphan growing up on Canada's Prince Edward Island.
The book immediately broke through commercially and artistically, selling some 19,000 copies in five months, leading even the cranky dean of American letters, Mark Twain, to pronounce Anne "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice." Continued

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Braddock expedition

(Wikipedia) - The Braddock expedition (also called "Braddock's campaign") was a failed British attempt to capture the French Fort Duquesne in the summer of 1755 during the French and Indian War. The expedition takes its name from General Edward Braddock, who led the British forces and died in the effort. Braddock's defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela was a major setback for the British in the early stages of the war with France.
... Setting out from Fort Cumberland in Maryland on May 29, 1755, the expedition faced an enormous logistical challenge: moving a large body of men with equipment, provisions, and (most importantly for the task ahead) heavy cannon, across the densely wooded Allegheny Mountains and into western Pennsylvania, a journey of about 110 miles. Braddock had received important assistance from Benjamin Franklin, who helped procure wagons and supplies for the expedition. Among the wagoners, incidentally, were two young men who would later become legends of American history: Daniel Boone, and Daniel Morgan. Other members of the expedition were Ensign William Crawford (soldier) and Charles Scott (governor of Kentucky). Among the British were Thomas Gage; Charles Lee and Horatio Gates. Continued

See also: WikiTravel Itinerary tracing the route of the expedition

The 500,000 Artifacts of George Washington

(SLATE) - Archaeologists announced on Wednesday that they had unearthed George Washington's boyhood home at a site not far from Fredericksburg, Va.
Over the course of a seven-year excavation, the researchers found more than 500,000 artifacts. How can there be half a million artifacts at one site? Continued

Photo: Library of Congress

Seitz Cemetery

Seitz Cemetery is located on the grounds of Susquehannock High School, near Glen Rock, Pennsylvania.

Canon EOS 30D & EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 IS lens

Mary Surratt

(Wikipedia) - Mary Elizabeth Eugenia Jenkins Surratt (May/June 1823 in Waterloo, Maryland, USA – July 7, 1865 in Washington, D.C) was convicted of taking part in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
She was the first woman executed by the United States federal government, after being tried and found guilty, and was executed by hanging. She was the mother of John Surratt, also alleged to have been involved in the conspiracy. Continued

Conrad Beissel

(Christian Neff) - Johann Konrad Beissel, b. April 1690, at Eberbach in Baden, Germany, d. 6 July 1768, As a baker's journeyman he devoted himself to an exhaustive study of the Bible and the works of Jakob Böhme. He was converted in 1717.
In the late summer of 1720 he emigrated to America (first to Boston) with a group of fellow believers to escape persecution by church and temporal authorities. He was a "man of lively imagination, great energy, and inspiring eloquence, especially when the Spirit came upon him."
He went to Germantown, where he learned the weaver's trade for a year under Peter Becker, organizer of the Church of the Brethren, who also baptized him in 1722. He now assumed the name Friedsam Gottrecht.
After some time as a hermit at Mill Creek in Lebanon County and as the head of the "newly founded Dunker Church" of Conestoga in Lancaster County, he withdrew to solitude on the Cocalico Creek near Ephrata, and there established the Ephrata Cloister of the Seventh Day Baptists. Beissel was an outstanding though amateur musician, the composer of over 1,000 hymns, of which 441 were printed. Continued

Good Guys, Bad Guys and Spies, All Wrapped in ‘Edutainment’

(NYTimes) WASHINGTON, D.C. - “If I told you what secret documents I had in my briefcase,” I said in response to a jocular inquiry from a fellow visitor at the International Spy Museum here this week, “I’d have to kill you.” And if I did that, I added silently, I might end up in a homicide exhibit at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment, which opened in May a few blocks away. Continued

Old House #25: "Model Farm"

Established in 1846, the property was originaly called Pearson's Outlet, then Bond's Gift, and finally Model Farm. It is located near Upper Cross Roads, Maryland.

Canon EOS 40D

Will Loch Raven school building gain historic status?

(Towson Times) - The Baltimore County Council will hear testimony on whether to grant historic status to the old Loch Raven Elementary School on Monday, July 7.
... The school on Glen Keith Boulevard was the center of Loch Raven Village, which was built to meet postwar housing demand.
Designed by Gaudreau Inc., the school was built by John K. Ruff, the same Baltimore company that built Towson High School -- which is now on the landmarks list -- and the Dulaney Valley Apartments, which is being demolished for The Quarter apartment and condominium complex. Continued

Also: Landmarks list hearing is planned (Baltimore Sun)

Independence Day in the 1870's

In an American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940 interview, Miss Nettie Spencer remembered the Fourth as the "big event of the year. Everyone in the countryside got together on that day for the only time in the year." She continued,

There would be floats in the morning and the one that got the [girls?] eye was the Goddess of Liberty. She was supposed to be the most wholesome and prettiest girl in the countryside — if she wasn't she had friends who thought she was. But the rest of us weren't always in agreement on that…Following the float would be the Oregon Agricultural College cadets, and some kind of a band. Sometimes there would be political effigies.

Just before lunch - and we'd always hold lunch up for an hour - some Senator or lawyer would speak. These speeches always had one pattern. First the speaker would challenge England to a fight and berate the King and say that he was a skunk. This was known as twisting the lion's tail. Then the next theme was that any one could find freedom and liberty on our shores. The speaker would invite those who were heavy laden in other lands to come to us and find peace. The speeches were pretty fiery and by that time the men who drank got into fights and called each other Englishmen. In the afternoon we had what we called the 'plug uglies' — funny floats and clowns who took off on the political subjects of the day…The Fourth was the day of the year that really counted then. Christmas wasn't much; a Church tree or something, but no one twisted the lion's tail. - Library of Congress

Photo: Russell Lee, 1941, FSA/OWI

Lazarus Stewart: Colonial Custer

(Wikipedia) - Captain Lazarus Stewart (July 4, 1734 – July 3, 1778) was an 18th century Pennsylvanian frontiersman and leader of the Paxton Boys. He achieved notoriety by leading the massacre of the Susquehannocks in 1763, and was a prominent military commander — on the Yankee side — in the Pennamite Wars. He met his death in battle with the Loyalists and Iroquois at the Wyoming Massacre, in an attack precipitated by his own rashness. Continued

Top image: "Massacre of the Indians at Lancaster by the Paxton Boys in 1763," lithograph published in Events in Indian History (John Wimer, 1841).

Bottom image: "Massacre of Wyoming"

Thurgood Marshall

Thurgood Marshall was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education.
Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 2, 1908. Continued

Gettysburg 1913

(LoC) - This photo shows the fifty-year reunion of the soldiers who fought at the Battle of Gettysburg.

William Munroe Graves recalls the stories his fellow veterans told at the seventy-five-year reunion of the Battle of Gettysburg:

Maj.- Gen. O.R. Gillette who was in Davis Brigade, Heaths Division, the Army of Northern Virginia… told of how… the Army of Northern Virginia rolled northward… to strike at Harrisburg and Philadelphia to find shoes for the rebel soldiers bare feet, and food to fill the knapsacks which were almost empty of parched corn rations. He remembered how Lee's war-tired men came out of the valley of the Shenandoah to meet Meade's army of the Potomac as it reached out along the roads that centered like the spokes of a wheel at Gettysburg, and how they met and fought and forgot they ever needed shoes…