Montour County

Before I get started, I just want to wish my parents a very happy wedding anniversary! Thank you both for all your generosity and support over the years.

I had mentioned it a while back, but when I gave presentations at Zenkaikon back in March, some of them were recorded, and the tech crew is still hard at work getting them uploaded to the convention's YouTube channel. For those of you who didn't see it on Facebook, my presentation about Celtic mythology and its impact on modern media is now available, so if you'd like to watch me babble my way through almost a full hour of the topic, you have the option. You can find it here. 

Meanwhile, today I'll be making a return to Montour County for the first time this year, to take a look at the county's general history. Once again, hi and thanks to Shane and the rest of the staff at the Columbia-Montour Visitors Bureau for their kind interest in my work!

Columbia County

I leave for my annual sojourn to Lancaster two weeks from tomorrow, and for some reason it just doesn't seem like my to-do list gets any smaller. (Maybe it's because I keep thinking of things to add to it...) I'm both excited and nervous, since my presentation on "The Red Rose City: A History of Lancaster" will be the first time I'm doing an actual public engagement as the face of this blog. Adding to both the excitement and the nervousness, they have me scheduled to give my presentation in one of the two biggest rooms in the whole convention. Either they expect a lot of people to be interested in the subject or they ran out of broom closets. I kid, of course, and I'm honored to be regarded as one of this year's featured panelists.

But first, a blog post. Once the weather gets more palatable, unlike the wind that's howling outside my window right now, I'll be heading back up to Columbia County to collect some more markers and pay a visit to the kindly folks at the Columbia-Montour Visitors Center. In the meantime, let's take a look at the history of the county itself.

Monroe County

As my Facebook followers may have seen, last week my husband and I celebrated his birthday by traveling down to Lancaster, one of our favorite cities, and touring President Buchanan's beautiful home at Wheatland. Kevin drove, and because he's an indulgent sort, he kept pulling over every time he spotted a marker, so I was able to catch a couple that I still needed. I also got plenty of pictures for the post I'm going to be doing next month about Wheatland itself.

Moving on to today's quest, I decided to revisit my trip to Stroudsburg from this past spring and learn more about Monroe County itself.

Lancaster County

I think my best friend Andrea is feeling a little wistful about our annual trip to Lancaster. Normally we're there every spring for Zenkaikon, but - like the vast majority of fan conventions - it was canceled because of COVID-19. We're planning to take a run down there sometime in the coming weeks to collect some more of my markers, but for this week's post she asked me to write about "something from Lancaster." So I thought, why not write about Lancaster itself?

Lehigh County

I hope that all of my readers are safe and well during this unprecedented situation with COVID-19. My heart goes out to everyone who has been affected. 

Before we get into today's quest, I wanted to share the announcement of the 2020 historical marker selections. Of course, circumstances being what they are right now, it's hard to say when the dedication ceremonies for any of these will be taking place, but I'm looking forward to a time when that becomes possible again. I'm especially excited that the Liberty Bell Museum in Allentown will be receiving a marker, since I had been surprised to find that they didn't already have one, and I will definitely be attending that ceremony whenever it gets scheduled. And my thanks to Karen Galle for promoting this blog in the article!

Moving on to the main event here, I was looking through my remaining saved markers - I have enough material to take us through June, at least, thankfully. For today's post, I thought we might wander around the county of my own birth.

Carbon County

I'm not sure how commonly this is known, but did you realize that every one of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, in addition to being home to many other markers, has a PHMC marker of its very own? I've been trying to figure out the best way to talk about these, but as is so often the case, I'm probably overthinking the matter and I'm just going to treat them like the other markers.

The marker for each county is found in the vicinity of the county courthouse, and the community where the county courthouse is located is known as the county seat. (The lone exception to this rule is Philadelphia County, which consists entirely of the city of Philadelphia - it is its own county seat.) So if you haven't had occasion to wander past the courthouse of a given county, odds are you've never seen one of these markers.

(Edit: Karen Galle, of the PHMC, tells me in a comment below that Montgomery County actually does not have its own marker.)