Lower Macungie Township Historical Society

09/14/2026

Gardens and Gardening Among the Pennsylvania Germans
By Shawn Young

The care of the garden and all decisions concerning it belonged to the woman of the house. The men did very little work in the garden. On some farms the men dug the garden or at least helped to dig, but in the majority of cases the men did nothing more than keep the fence in repair, haul the manure to the garden on the manure sled and throw it over the fence.
Vegetable crops grown in early settlement gardens were those brought as seeds, roots or slips from Europe – cabbage, onions, beans, lettuce, endive, and peas. The native American crops such as potatoes, corn, beans, pumpkins, and melons were soon adopted, but their cultivation necessitated the introduction of another garden location, the patch or schtick. These plants were never truly accepted into the traditional garden. By the 19th century, a richer diversity of vegetables was grown – newer varieties of potatoes, celery, lettuce, spinach, lettuce, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes were developed and sought after. Tomatoes were considered poisonous when they were first introduced and they were not widely grown in Pennsylvania German gardens until the mid to late 1800s. Even into the 20th century there were a number of people who thought tomatoes were unfit to eat. “Why even the pigs won’t eat them.”
Pennsylvania German settlers early on acquired a reputation for hard work and careful stewardship of the land and their gardens reflected these beliefs.

09/14/2026

From Ridge and Root's post

That was not a brush pile and it was not a fire that got away from somebody. 🔥 It was a machine. Thirty feet across, built out of cordwood and sealed under leaves and packed dirt, and the man who tended it slept beside it for two weeks because if he slept wrong it was all lost.
Before coke, the iron furnaces of these mountains ran on charcoal, and charcoal does not come out of the ground. It has to be made, and making it was the work of men called colliers, who lived out in the woods for the whole burning season.
Here is what they were actually doing. Wood will not burn hot enough to smelt iron, because it is full of water and volatile material that burns off cool and dirty. But if you heat wood with almost no air getting to it, all of that cooks out, and what is left behind is nearly pure carbon, which burns far hotter. So the collier stacked thirty or forty cords of wood on end around a central chimney, packed it into a dome, covered the whole thing in leaves and then in earth, and lit it down the middle. What he had then was not a bonfire. It was a sealed oven cooking itself, and his entire job for the next ten to fourteen days was controlling exactly how much air got in.
Too much air and the mound burned instead of charred, and weeks of work went up in an afternoon. Too little and it choked out and the wood was wasted. So he walked that mound day and night opening and closing vent holes with a rake, watching the color of the smoke, listening to it, feeling the crust with his bare feet for the soft spots where the pile was settling, and shoveling dirt onto anywhere it threatened to break through. He did not leave it. He ate and slept within a few steps of it.
Colliers are close to invisible now. They were often young men, often poor, and in Virginia and Tennessee frequently Black men who had been doing this exact work since before emancipation, and hardly any of them left a name behind. 🌲
If there is a flat circle of ground in your woods where the soil runs black and nothing much grows on it, that is not a coincidence. That is a hearth, and somebody stood on it. See less

09/10/2026

09/10/2026

Good Press today!

09/06/2026

Did you know that Market Square was once home to one of Downtown Pittsburgh’s busiest public markets?

From 1915 until 1960, Diamond Market bustled with more than 40 independent businesses selling meat, fish, baked goods, coffee, produce, and more. Beyond groceries, the massive market hosted poultry shows, boxing matches, and even had a roller-skating rink on the second floor.

By the 1950s, the aging building stood in stark contrast to the modern skyscrapers rising around it. Diamond Market closed for good on Dec. 31, 1960, and was demolished the following year.

Read more about the rise and fall of Diamond Market on our blog: https://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/blog/western-pennsylvania-history-the-rise-and-fall-of-pittsburghs-diamond-market/