Whitefield House, Nazareth, Northampton County

It's an unexpectedly balmy day in April, which is sort of amusing. The temperatures lately have been quite up and down, but today they're up for the warmest day all year thus far. 

So, weird confession. Despite it being an entire twelve miles from where I currently live, until very recently I never visited downtown Nazareth. I've been in or through its outskirts, but never in the community proper. A few weeks ago, finding myself with an unexpected afternoon completely free, I made a spontaneous decision to correct this oversight and collect the markers that Nazareth has to offer. There was still snow on the ground, which looks funny to me now as I write this post.

Funny thing about Nazareth - although Bethlehem is the place around here that's always touted as being a big part of Moravian history (and rightfully so), Nazareth also has Moravian origins. Not only that, but Nazareth's Moravian origins are what led to Bethlehem's.

Captain C. V. Gridley, Erie, Erie County

Before I get into today's quest, I just wanted to extend my thanks to St. John's Episcopal Church of York. That's the place where the York Liberty Bell is housed, and they shared the link to my post in their latest e-newsletter. I really appreciate that and I hope the congregation enjoyed reading the article!

As some of my longtime readers might recall, I'm an occasional volunteer with FindAGrave.com. In recent weeks, through our mutual work on that site, I unexpectedly made contact with my distant cousin Ron Bauerle. Ron, according to his researches, is my mother's eighth cousin through her father's line; like us, he's descended from Philip Kratzer, one of the earliest settlers of Emmaus. Much to my surprise and delight, he checked out this blog and offered to send me pictures of markers from his home county, which I gladly accepted since who the heck knows when I'll be able to go there myself. So thanks to his contributions, today we're going to learn about a sailor in the Spanish-American War, and the origin of a certain well-known military catchphrase of the time.

The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, Dauphin County

For reasons that probably don't need to be explained, I haven't been able to travel to today's subject and take pictures. But last fall, my parents were in the city of Harrisburg, as I mentioned in my post about the Underground Railroad, and they got a few pictures of markers for me while they were in the vicinity. Today my stepdad joins the ranks of the blog's guest photographers, and hopefully, he and I will both get to make a proper visit to the subject in the relatively near future. Whenever I'm finally able to go, I'll come back and edit this post to add more pictures - I promise I'll let you know when that happens.

"Pennsylvania," says one of my sources for today's post, "is a history-minded state." That, of course, is why I'm here and why you're here with me.

York Liberty Bell, York, York County

Welcome to April, and the grass has turned green in my yard! In my last email, I made an allusion to an announcement coming this month, and indeed I'm making one. I'm looking at the project I have created for myself with this blog, and realizing that even though I double up some of the markers when appropriate, there are a lot more of them than I had ever imagined (over 2,000 and counting), and I've barely made a dent in the last three years.

Wow, it's been three years? Already? Huh.

Anyway, the big news is that... I'm increasing the frequency of posts. Instead of every other Wednesday, I'm going to see how it goes with posting every Wednesday, so I can fit more markers into each calendar year. It's an experiment - if I feel too overwhelmed I'll drop it back to the every other week plan - but I have hopes that it will succeed. I've already sketched out my schedule of planned posts leading into the first week of June, because I have that much material handy, so we'll see what comes of it.

For today, I'm sharing the first fruits of my labor from last month's road trip. My best friend Andrea and I, as I wrote a few weeks ago, spent her birthday visiting York County and collected several markers in its county seat. It had been a long time since I crossed the Susquehanna River - I forgot how wide it is! Today's quest is a trek back to colonial times to learn about a liberty bell which, until that day, I never knew existed.