From Ithaca I headed south to the Pennsylvania border. My plan was to follow the valley of the Susquehanna River until I reached Chesapeake Bay. It would take me across Pennsylvania from north to south, without passing through any of the largest cities in the state. It felt like an interesting way of seeing Pennsylvania.
I didn't plan to follow the river exactly (as I did the Ohio River last fall), but rather loosely skipping down its watershed at my leisure. First I passed Elmira, New York, where I took a picture of the Ernie Davis statue. I figured it was mandatory, given last fall's release of the The Express. I tried to find Mark Twain's house there, but the highways were all torn up, and I wound up circling through downtown Elmira so many times in the heat of the day that I began to joke to myself that I was never going to get out of town.
But I did, and within a few minutes I was across the border in the Keystone State. I continued southward until I got to Williamsport on the West Branch of the Susquehanna. I never know what a city is going to be like until I arrive, and Williamsport turns out to be one of the those faded river communities that seems like a ghost of its former self, at least in the downtown area. The most interesting thing was the large masonic hall. I'm fascinated by the architeture of masonic halls and have built a rather large photographic collection of them from my travels across the country.
In the afternoon I traveled up the valley of the West Branch along the Interstate, exiting to set up camp at Black Moshannon State Park, named after a little tributary of the West Branch. It was nice and forested there. In New England, I'd gotten used to state parks having mechanical gates, guards, and access codes to enter, and even to showing my ID to check in (bah!). At Black Moshannon, there was only an unmanned info center with honor envelopes to register. I felt like I was on the edge of the west once again. It felt good. There was a wonderful little camp store for groceries.
In the morning I drove the short distance into State College, where I parked in a downtown parking garage and spent the entire morning on a self-guided walking tour of the Penn State campus. It was quite fun, especially the football stadium (of course) and the nearby "Dairy of Distinction." It turns out that Penn State makes it own ice cream and milk products and sells them at a creamery on campus. My kind of university!
There was a independent theater across from campus showing The Brothers Bloom, one of the movies I missed seeing while I was in Europe. But it wasn't showing until the evening, and I was unwilling to stay an entire day in State College, so I passed on it again.
From State College, I zizsagged back eastward through a region called the Penn Valley, which is marked as a scenic route in my atlas, and turns out to be a gentle region of pleasant farms and Amish country in between ridges of the Appalachians.
By mid afternoon, I made it to Lewisport on the West Branch, which is a nice little river town with boutiques, no doubt from the presence of Bucknell University, which I drove through while I was there. I also walked across the Susquehanna on the bridge there. I figure if you're going to tour a river valley, you need to cros the river as a pedestrian at least once.
The route south of Lewisport turned out to be one of the most scenic parts of my trip, rivalling the Upper Delaware, although in a different way. I took the smaller road on the eastern shore and a few miles south of Lewisport reached the forks of the Susquehanna at Northumberland. There is a state park where you can see the forks, and where a famous Iroquois sachem is buried. I lingered there in the park drawing in the majesty of the confluence of the branches of the river in the sparkling summer sun.
Southward, the road tracks the river closely, rising on bluffs and then passing through small towns on the river bank that were once ports back a hundred years ago (like the little town of Dalmatia, Pennsylvania, which was my favorite).
A few miles further south, one finds the last remaining ferry across the Susquehanna. It turns out to be rustic sterwheel paddleboat (!). Normally I would seize the opportunity to take it, but it cost five bucks each way, and I wanted to continue southward on the east side of the river. I resolved that if I ever cross Pennyslvania on another trip, I will detour to take the ferry in order to cross the river.
That evening I camped right on the river bank, at a boater's campground in the town of Duncannon, just south of the mouth of the Juniata River. It was only twelve bucks, and it was very rustic, the kind of place I would recommend only to seasoned tent travelers like me. But the view was unbeatable. I had a iolsated sight with a view downriver where the river enters the canyon-like narrows of the Appalachians. During the evening, a snowy egret waded in the shallows near my tent site to keep me company.
In the morning, my route took me south through the narrows, where the road and the river emerge from the front ridge of the mountains onto the rolling plains of southeastern Pennsylvania. Here one finds Harrisburg, the state capital, and the largest city on my swing through the state.
For such a large state, Pennsylvania has an amazingly sleepy capital. It was very easy to find a parking spot near the capitol on a weekday morning.
But the capitol itself is magnificent. You can't tell from the outside, but the inside, constructed in the first decade of the Twentieth Century and modeled after Michelangelo's design of St. Peter's, is one of the most ornate and beautiful statehouses I have yet visited. I spent an hour there, since that is how much money I put in the parking meter, but I wished I could have stayed longer.
From Harrisburg I could have continued downriver, but at this point, I had a special visit to make that was off the river route, and even out of the watershed of the river. First I detoured slightly back upstream thorugh the narrows, then cut along Swatara Creek eastward behind the front ridge of the mountains, emerging onto the plains again in the "Swatara Gap" near Tower City.
My objective was special and personal, namely a historic site that is the homestead and resting place of Conrad Weiser, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather (give or take a great), He was German immigrant in colonial America. My grandmother was Lorene Weiser.
Weiser was an amazing man. Not only was a leader and founder of the German community in that area of Pennsylvania (called the Tulpehocken, after a creek there), but he negotiated nearly every treaty with the Indians during the mid Eighteenth Century. He learned and spoke the native languages, and made close and lasting contacts with the Iroquois chieftains of that day, who trusted him and gave him an Iroquois name. Born in 1690, he died in 1760, after which relations between the English colonists and the Iroquois went downhill fast. It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if he had lived longer than 66 years.
For some reason, I had never made the pilgrimmage to his homestead near the small town of Womelsdorf just west of Reading (a city which he founded and platted). It never seemed like the convenient thing to do. But I knew that coming down the Susquehanna valley, it was absolutely time to do so. As I came through the Swatara Gap, there were numerous historical markers indicating the route that Weiser had taken while visiting the Iroquois homeland in western New York on various missions.
It turns out that nearly everything around Womelsdorf is named after Weiser, including the main highway, and even the Tru-Value hardware store. The state historic site was very easy to find.
Unfortunately, as I discovered upon arriving on a Wednesday afternoon, it was open only on the weekends. The visitor center was locked up tight. Nevertheless I was able to stroll the grounds of the ample park, which was designed by Frederick Olmstead, who also designed Central Park in New York City.
Thus I was able to visit his gravesite and the monuments erected to him. I took plenty of snapshots and even used his headstone to balance my camera to take a picture of myself there. I figured old Conrad wouldn't mind, especially since I actually once took the time to learn some Iroquois language and used it five years ago while traveling through the reservation west of Buffalo (I made a girl at a gas station there grin very wide by saying "thank you" in Iroquois).
I made a Facebook photo essay of my visit to the Weiser homestead. Here is a link to it.
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