The Daniel Boone Homestead

I have been pet sitting in Macungie, Pa for the past few days, and so today I decided to take advantage of my time in Southeastern Pennsylvania and meet up with my former co-worker Ryan and visit our old place of employment, the Daniel Boone Homestead. Boone has always been a healing sort of place for me, it's extremely quiet, secluded, and the landscape and architecture is beautiful. I found that aspect of the site intact for me, but much else had changed. Boone has been essentially closed by the PHMC because of funding issues. To give the Commission some credit, it is still funding the maintenance of the site, it just won't pay people to operate it anymore.

You may remember hearing about the PHMC's closures of other sites last summer. These included the Conrad Wiser Homestead, Joseph Priestly House, and Brandywine Battlefield. I thought that the closures would end there, but this fall Daniel Boone was also closed, all of its staff laid off, and it's site administrator (my former boss Jim Lewars) transferred to Landis Valley State Historic Site.

When I visited Boone today I found one former staff member behind the counter at the visitor's center. She explained to me that the Friends of the Daniel Boone Homestead, an auxiliary organization that partially funded the site, was paying her to keep Boone open on Sundays in December. She was not sure how long this would go on or what the schedule would be like as the busy summer season approached. She complained that without anyone being in the office, it was impossible to schedule school group visits, which is a major part of the visitation revenue each spring.

If that wasn't enough I found that two of my favorite animals at the site had been euthanized due to old age and chronic illness. Reds, the 27 year old, ornery, former race horse, had to be put down last summer and our old calico barn cat, Kitten, suffered the same fate.

Happily they found another horse to replace Reds, named Axle, because they didn't want to leave 30 year old Dancer (who nearly broke my jaw today I might add. Don't ask.) all alone with nobody but three extremely lazy sheep and a few grumpy geese for company.

Anyway, here are some pictures I took of the place, as if you haven't seen enough on this blog already.

Axle


Dancer

A few shots of the buildings, graves, and the landscape.

Gary B. Nash

He's my new hero. Half way through this semester I decided that I should have written my historiography paper on him and not on Charles Beard. I am writing a paper currently on interracial mob activity during the American Revolution, and Nash's name appears in my footnotes an obscene amount of times. The man got his PhD from Princeton in 1964 so he's had a long career and published a ton of stuff. Read Urban Crucible and it will change the way you think about the American Revolution. His article "social change and the growth of prerevolutionary urban radicalism," is also a good one, because he sheds light on a great deal of the social tensions and increasing urban poverty that other historians tended to gloss over when they characterized social and economic life in the 18th century.

Sadness

Well, I forgot to factor in one thing when I posted last about being able to leave Vermont on the 17th. I am a teaching assistant and my students are taking their final exam on Tuesday. I was hoping to have the finals graded by Thursday, which, depending on how my paper for my seminar on slavery goes, may or may not be feasible. But I neglected to factor in one thing: the professor I work with has a schedule of her own. She cannot meet to go over final grades and submit everything until Friday the 18th. So it looks like I will be here another day, possibly two, depending on how late we have to meet on Friday.

I am off to work on my intellectual biography of Charles Beard, which is due on Monday.

New, Fun Posts Coming Soon

I know that I have not been blogging much lately. If you had 75 pages of writing and three books to read per week hanging over your head you wouldn't have much time to blog either. But I have exciting news! On December 17 I will be done with my first semester in graduate school!! This means that I will have an ENTIRE MONTH to do absolutely nothing but visit historic sites and blog about it. And believe me, after this semester, I will be in no condition to do anything else for a good long while. I won't spoil the surprise, but I may be visiting a few places in Vermont and New York. Think Ethan Allen, if you want a hint.