Marker Dedication: Haines Shoe House

There has been so much going on around here lately that I feel a little head-spinny. But before I tell you about my latest adventure out in the world, I do have a fun announcement to make. I was recently contacted by John, the lovely gentleman who runs Mainly Museums, which is a crowdsourced blog dedicated to showcasing museums around the world. He likes my work (yay!) and invited me to do a series of articles about the Pennsylvania museums I encounter in the course of my research. Since blathering about Pennsylvania history seems to be what I do best, I of course said yes and my first article went live yesterday. My regular readers will know that I wrote about Eckley Miners' Village Museum here on the blog last year, and because I enjoyed it so much, I kicked off my MM series with the same subject. I'll be contributing two articles per month to the MM collective, so watch for future links and meanwhile check out the rest of the site; they're still pretty new but they've got a lot of talent in the pool.

Meanwhile, last week I mentioned that my bff Andrea and I were off to attend another marker dedication. I'll tell you about the actual Haines Shoe House in next week's post, but for today, here's everything that went down while we were in York. We met so many cool people!

Marker Dedication: Marshalls Creek Explosion

This past Monday I finally got to attend a marker dedication ceremony for the first time all year. These ceremonies will unfortunately be few and far between for a while - although the PHMC did approve a number of new markers for 2023, they are actually suspending the marker program for the time being, due to supply issues and other difficulties. So several of the newly approved markers have their dedication ceremonies "TBA" for the time being. This page will always show the most up-to-date information on when and where markers are being dedicated. But this Monroe County marker was ready in time for a particular anniversary, which meant a lot to many of the people there for the ceremony.

I'll be talking about the actual Marshalls Creek explosion in next week's post, so I'm not going to get into much of it today, but it claimed six lives and greatly impacted the entire Marshalls Creek area - and eventually, the country as a whole. But I can tell you that I had actually never heard of it until the marker was approved, so Monday was quite a learning experience for me.

Marker Dedication: Liberty Bell Hiding Place

Husband Kevin's birthday is this week, so we're getting ready to head out on our little road trip. The plan is to leave first thing in the morning tomorrow - if I can get my to-do list cleared! That includes updating this blog, of course, so here we are. As part of the lead-up to his birthday celebration, we attended the marker dedication in his home city of Allentown this past Saturday, where the beautiful Zion's Reformed United Church of Christ celebrated their very unique place in history.

Lots of churches have bells. Not too many have had bells underneath their floorboards.

Richard Moore marker dedication, Quakertown, Bucks County

So if you're paying attention to my usual update schedule, you might be thinking, "Hey, aren't you supposed to be posting next week instead of this week?" And you would be correct, because this is one of the in-between weeks in which I don't tell you about the history behind a marker.

Instead, I thought I'd do a sort of 'special edition' for the blog, and share my experiences from this past weekend when a marker was dedicated. I don't know how often I'll be able to attend a marker dedication ceremony, but I'm going to get to them when I can because I'm interested to see how the different communities handle the events. This was the first one I ever attended, and I had a wonderful time. The actual history behind the Richard Moore marker will be covered in next week's regularly scheduled blog post; but here's how it went seeing it unveiled.