John O'Hara, Pottsville, Schuylkill County

Before I get started with the latest post, I wanted to offer a small shout-out to the women of the Herstory Club! This internet collective is made up entirely of women of all ages who focus on the study of history, and I was recently welcomed into the ranks. I'm very excited to be in the club and appreciate the kind greetings I've received, so thank you!

November is here and I hope you are all well! At this time last year I was battling what turned out to be pneumonia, but so far I've been much luckier this autumn. The weather hasn't been the most conducive to going out to collect markers, but I've still got some stockpiled from before the lockdown, so we're going to take a trip back to Schuylkill County today to look at one of Pennsylvania's native authors.

Pottsville Maroons, Pottsville, Schuylkill County

Today we're going to be looking at a subject that doesn't usually interest me: football. After all, this is Super Bowl weekend coming up! Sure, I cheered as much as anybody else when the Eagles won the 2016 Super Bowl - I live in Eagles Country, after all. And I did spend my final two years of high school as a member of the varsity football team. (No, really, I did. I was the equipment manager.) But in general, I'm not super enthused about the sport. 

However, today's story is one that I find pretty intriguing despite my usual apathy for the topic, because the controversy has endured for nearly a century. Who really won the NFL championship of 1925?

Molly Maguire Executions, Carbon and Schuylkill Counties

This is a new one for the blog - the first cross-county post. Throughout Pennsylvania there are a number of markers which are related - either they contain the same information in two different locations (which is the case today), or they're a series of markers which, when put together, more or less tell a story. It's not going to be easy for me to do some of these; for example, there are several markers related to the various canals that will take me a long time to collect. But this one, which has just two, I can do.

Odd as it probably sounds, given the subject matter, I've been looking forward to writing this post. It contains one of the most interesting and obscure pieces of local apocrypha that we have in the Lehigh Valley region. I only waited as long as I did to do this one because I needed a couple of photos from the other location in the story. Now that I have those, here's how we'll finish out the summer - with the deaths of ten men.

Burd Patterson, Pottsville, Schuylkill County

Today we make the blog's first foray into Schuylkill County (that's "SKOO-kill," for those of you who aren't from around here). My youngest sister Liza took me on a drive around the city of Pottsville, which is not far from where she works; we collected a handful of the markers. There's nothing quite like driving around Pennsylvania in an open-air Jeep, so thank you, baby sis!

Among the findings of that afternoon was a beautiful Federal-style mansion on Mahantongo Street, which more than one sign identified as being the former home of Burd Patterson. He turned out to be a trickier subject than I expected.