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Artifact: PRR freight bills
I have a thick ledgerbook from S.E. Pannebaker’s lumber mill in East Waterford, Pennsylvania. Stuffed into the pages of the book are all sorts of interesting papers, including these bills for shipping two carloads of lumber from East Waterford, through Juniata County on the narrow-gauge Tuscarora Valley Railroad to Port Royal, and then along the Pennsylvania Railroad to transfer to the Erie Railroad for final delivery to the Standard Hardwood Lumber Co. of Buffalo, New York. None of these companies exist today–not even Standard Hardwood, whose address now seems to be the trackside location of a Laub warehouse.
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Samuel Pannebaker’s car
Many of the papers in my grandfather’s collection came from John and Beulah Patterson, aunt and uncle to my great grandfather, both of whom died childless. Beginning in the early 1950s, my great grandparents lived in the same East Waterford house as the Pattersons, after moving from Harrisburg back to the old hometown. Following John’s and Beulah’s deaths, these papers, I surmise, stayed behind in the old home. When my great grandmother moved to spend the final decade of her life in the single-level house my grandfather built in Honey Grove for just that purpose, the papers moved with her. She died in 1994; my grandfather moved in for the final…
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Adams Express Company
The pile of old papers handed down from generation to generation and now finding itself in my hands has quite a few folded scraps of yellowed paper–letters, clippings, recipes, and so forth–whose context and relevance I don’t know. They’re interesting in the own right, as artifacts from two centuries ago, and their endurance is fascinating. How have these old letters and receipts managed to survive for so long? And, more importantly, why have they survived for so long? I toss my own papers every day. If I should stuff a few of them into a vault for 150 years, will future generations be fascinated by them? Will they be imbued with importance…