Today, while researching the area around a survey benchmark Rich and I found this morning, I came across another bird’s-eye view map. This one features Elmhurst, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately this one is not available from the digital collections of the Library of Congress or the Leventhal Map Center. I will post the image here for now.
Recently I have been enjoying watching Jason, from the YouTube channel JPVideos, who explores (among other things) abandoned railways and other areas relevant to eastern Pennsylvania history. In order to provide a bit of protection for some of these areas, he often leaves out any direct mention of the locations but gives just enough clues for someone familiar with the area, or someone who is observant and does some extra research, to figure it out. (I really enjoy this aspect of the videos, too!)
As one of the first widely-adopted static site generators, Jekyll may feel a bit old-fashioned these days. Newer solutions like Astro provide more flexibility and much faster build speeds, but also come with greater complexity that often (for my small projects, anyway) isn’t needed. To me, Jekyll is extremely simple and straightforward to use, and it’s still a solution I turn to when I want a site that’s easy to build out and maintain. I can appreciate the fact that it’s a relatively mature system that, once you understand its quirks, basically just works.
I was recently assigned a “micro-site” of four pages that would be accessible by QR code. This was a very simple project to complete using just basic HTML/CSS, but I thought it would also be an interesting way to get my feet wet with Astro, a relatively new JavaScript-based static site generator.
Like the other bird’s-eye view maps I’ve posted recently, these maps depict some towns in Northeastern Pennsylvania—these specifically show three towns/cities in the Wyoming Valley region. They also show some of the geological features, structures, and roads & railroads of this industrial region.
Similar to the maps I posted a few days ago (see: Bird’s-Eye View Maps of the Lackawanna Valley), these maps show some towns of the more northerly regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania. They also date to the late 1800s and show the geological features, structures, and roads & railroads of this more isolated region.
The bird’s-eye view maps typically published in the late 19th century are sometimes useful in my explorations of hidden and abandoned features, and in getting a sense of the layout of the land and the towns at a given point in time. Even when they’re not so useful, it’s great fun to get lost in them!
Ming Thing is a very unusual monstrose cactus that has won our hearts!
In an 1877 Scranton city atlas, I spotted a reference to a tunnel that I never knew existed!
This workaround can buy you some time if you’re working with an old WordPress site that relies on mysql_query.
