“If alum is something to be proud of why conceal it on the label in type as small as the law permits?” – Alum in Baking Powder, 1927, Royal Baking Powder Company “Today, the Royal Company is manufacturing and selling a phosphate type of powder such as they condemned and classed as a mineral…
I found this rare little church cookbook at the Kelmscott Bookshop a few months ago. It’s got a bunch of old photographs and a brief history of a town in Maryland right on the Pennsylvania border, Bentley Springs. “On October 4, 1837, the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad obtained a right-of-way from William Dorsey and leveled…
“Every year in the 50s, my mother, my grandmother and I went downtown to do our Christmas shopping,” A. Zoland Leishear fondly recalled in the Baltimore Sun in 1989. The store had been closed all of two months and the nostalgia was stirred. Leishear recalled a picturesque scene of streetcar wire sparks lighting up the…
“An old almanac in the Goschenhoppen Folklife Library contains a woodcut showing a farm boy with a baseball-bat size club whacking away at a walnut tree. The late Thomas R. Brendle records the practice of waking-up young fruit and nut trees that are reluctant to start bearing by beating them with club. The folk practice…
In 1971, a woman in Fruitland, MD, recovering from an illness, took out an ad in the Salisbury Daily Times to express gratitude towards the “many friends who contributed in any way” towards her recovery. She thanked friends, neighbors, ambulance drivers, doctors, her Pastor, and she praised the Lord. She also thanked “Bill Phillips and…