Bibles and Buggies

September 9-10

I drove from Easton to Ronks, in Lancaster County, in a couple of hours.

It could have been a few minutes quicker perhaps, if I had followed the original Google Maps directions. Toward the end of the Google route, you have to leave the highway and make turns on roads that aren’t part of any established route.

You can take that kind of shortcut if you know the area. But then, you wouldn’t need to consult Google Maps. 

It’s what happens when you let a computer make decisions. 

I took Google’s advice for the start. I went north on Third Street to U.S. 22 West, which later merges with I-78 for a while. You travel about 25 miles from Easton and take the exit at Fogelsville for U.S. 222 south. 

This could take me back to Reading, so I used the bypass. U.S. 222 meets one of my favorite highways, U.S. 30, a few miles west of where I was going.

Some of the signs got a little confusing, so I stopped for gas and directions. The lady at Speedway said, yes, I was on the right track to the Lincoln Highway in Ronks.

The highway is almost like Pigeon Forge, Tenn. But here the emphasis is on Amish. There’s Amish this and Old Dutch that, which probably have precious little to do with anybody Amish or Pennsylvania Dutch.

Ah, gang, it was a good morning.

The Sleep Inn is a hundred or so yards east of the Bible History Exhibits, which is the reason I came here.

I had no idea what the museum would be. Maybe it’s one of those places that tries to convince people that the story of the creation of Adam and Eve is sound history and that the world indeed is 6,000 years old. 

The museum is in a small house on the Lincoln Highway. I walked from the hotel and went into the entrance, where I met two small dogs behind a baby gate. They barked aggressively, as small dogs do. Maybe that’s small dog for hello. 

They serve as the entry bell, because a man came up from the backyard to let me into the museum. For eight bucks, he led me on an hour-long tour of the Old and New Testaments and church history.

And it was history, not propaganda. 

There was far too much for me to remember it all. Most of the exhibits are replicas, although there are some originals. 

There is a replica of the copy of Isaiah found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The man showed how the scrolls were stored in jars in the cave where they were found in 1947.

One small scrap from the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is represented by a replica, is believed by some to be a fragment from the Gospel of Mark. That’s controversial, the man said.

There were replicas of cuneiform and hieroglyphic tablets, some actual size and some scaled down. The inscriptions included references to the Habiru, which is generally interpreted as a form of the word “Hebrew.”

Some of the replicas show figures, illustrating how people mentioned in the Bible may have dressed. One had images of three Patriarchs, including Israel, an alternative name for Jacob, with names written in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The New Testament section included a full-size photo reproduction of the Shroud of Turin and replicas of several historical codices. One of the most important from a scholarly point of view is the Codex Sinaiticus, so called because it was retrieved from a monastery on Mount Sinai in the 19th century.

The codex, a hand-written text bound as a book instead of a scroll, contains the Septuagint, a pre-Christian translation of the Old Testament into Greek, and the oldest complete text of the New Testament. It is generally believed to have been made in the 4th century.

It was taken from the monastery by a German scholar named Tischendorf, who presented it to the Tsar of Russia. The codex is now scattered among several places, including Moscow and Berlin. A few pages have been returned to the monastery.

I had read about the codex several years ago in a book lent to me by Pyrrhus Ruches, a newspaper copy editor whose real occupation was the study of the former Roman and Ottoman Empires. He’s the only guy I ever knew whom you could stop on the street to ask, “What’s a Janissary?” And get an answer. 

I really did that one morning on University Place when Pyrrhus and I worked for Fairchild Publications.

Anyhow, to see the codex, even though in facsimile, was quite a treat. 

The church history section contains a complete facsimile of the King James Bible and a few leaves from an original. After the plays of Shakespeare, the King James, or Authorized, translation of the Bible is a crowning work of English literature, so I always approach it with a certain awe.

I’ve seen originals in the British Museum in London, but even so, it was fun to see it again.

The exhibit is illustrated by framed photos of places like Petra and Tel el Amarna, which are identified with locations in the Bible. The man said he had taken most of them himself.

He also mentioned taking his kids to a site in the Near East where they could dig and recover pottery shards. That surprised me.

But maybe it was like the spots in his museum’s backyard where kids can dig for replica treasures that he put there. 

He also has an olive press out back. He explained the different pressings. Extra virgin (as Beatrice once put it, “squeezed only a little bit”) was the first press with only one weight on the lever. Then he pulled a bottle of EVOO out of the press. 

That was used for special occasions, like religious observances and anointing kings. 

Second pressing needed extra weight and was used for every day cooking. The oil in that bottle had a little less color.

Last press would have impurities in it and so was used for burning. No bottle this time, just an oil lamp.

The big thing in the yard, though, is a reconstruction of a tomb. The practice was much the same as in present-day New Orleans. The body is laid out in a shroud for a year inside the tomb. Then the bones are transferred to an ossuary and placed in a niche in the wall.

What you see in the photo of the day would have been the interior of the tomb. The body wasn't left exposed to the elements.

It has been a long while since I was last in Lancaster County. It’s surprising how Amish it still is. I would have expected the big tourist trade to have driven them out.

They are here, though. You see buggies everywhere. They carry small electric lights, probably required by law.

There is also an innovation over the past 10 or 20 years of using scooters and bicycles with no pedals. 

I saw the bicycle in use on the Eastern Shore of Maryland a few years ago.  In Lancaster there were men pushing scooters, equipped with tires that you might find on a child’s bike and handle-bar baskets to carry packages home from the store.

The men wearing long beards, straw hats, and suspenders patiently push them along on the side of the Lincoln Highway, next to the traffic.

My favorite Amish sighting of the day was a young man, beardless and in his teens or twenties, driving a traditional black one-horse buggy up the shoulder of the highway. He was holding the reins in one hand because the other hand was holding what appeared to be a smart phone.

I have no idea what the story behind that is.

This is a tourist trap area, so the food and drink here are adequate, but so far generally undistinguished.

It’s Sunday afternoon right now, so I’m about to go exploring to see what I can find.

Be well, all.

Harry

Local History, Local Brew

September 8

I left early in the afternoon to walk to the county history museum. It’s here because Easton is the seat of Northumberland County. 

This section of town is very colorful. The route brought me to a walking street, a bright alley that is part of Bank Street.

It’s right by the back entrance to the Crayola Experience.

There is a bike rack that looks like the Three Wise Monkeys. Farther down are walls covered with pictures, rough versions of things like a Van Gogh self-portrait and the Mona Lisa, along with mosaics of what may be local sights.

Most of them are outside a gift shop called Grandma’s Backporch. The picture of the day shows part of it.

The main streets were festooned with flags—the current U.S. flag alternating with another that has reversed the field and the stripes. The Union is at the upper mast side of the flag, but contains the red and white stripes. The body of the flag is blue with 12 white stars in a circle surrounding the 13th.

[Editor’s note: It took Harry almost a month to track down information on the reverse flag. It wasn’t from the Revolution, as he had originally surmised. It is known as the Easton Flag and was the company colors of a local militia unit during the War of 1812.]

The Sigal Museum is small, but like most local museums is interesting. Many of the objects on display are identified with specific local people, including a Lenape umbilical cord pouch, which had been donated by a descendant of the lady who made it.

It looks like yellow silk with beading. It’s probably from the late 19th or early 20 century. I learned that, even if you try, you can’t see whether it still holds the umbilical cord or not. 

There is a lot about the Lenape, including a wigwam made of tree bark furnished with a rough bunk and tools that the people would have used.

Many of the worked stone tools in the exhibit cases were found along the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers. The area is a trove for arrowheads, spear points, and other Indian artifacts.

There is a wall devoted to the Walking Purchase. I had heard the term, but didn’t know much about it. It happened here.

It was a fraud perpetrated by William Penn’s heirs. After he died, his two sons because proprietors of the Pennsylvania Colony. They made a deal in 1737 with the Lenape to buy a tract of land to be determined by how far three men could walk in a day and a half.

The Penns brought in ringers, who didn’t walk at all but ran. Their claim was more than twice the size that the Lenape expected. It was a swindle.

William Penn is reputed to have dealt fairly with the Indians all his life. Maybe they expected his sons to be as honest.

The wall contains a panel with a video that runs from time to time. 

The Walking Purchase was one of the many sore points that put the settlers and the displaced Indians at odds during the French and Indian Wars in the 1750s.

The colonial governors of Pennsylvania and New Jersey met leaders of various tribes, including the Lenape, the Six Nations of the Iroquois, and others, to discuss peace terms. 

Pennsylvania agreed to the return of prisoners of war and to an additional payment for the Walking Treaty lands. With the payment, the natives had to leave for wilder territory near present-day Wilkes-Barre.

Other exhibits describe the waves of immigrant settlers, Dutch, Moravian missionaries, Scotch-Irish, and German.

There is a section on people from Easton and Northumberland County who have served in various wars. Much of it looks at the Civil War. Many of the artifacts, mainly swords and uniforms are identified with local residents.

Pennsylvania is very proud of its Civil War history. Small towns all over the state have built monuments to soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union. After all, it was Gettysburg, Pa., where the tide turned and the Confederacy’s inevitable decline began.

Easton’s Civil War monument is in the middle of the city center traffic circle. It has a bugler on top of a column. When I saw it the first time, there was a sparrow perched on the bugler’s cap.

One display at the museum is devoted to fraktur art, mostly display certificates suitable for framing. The documents were printed in old German fraktur letters and names were filled in by hand. Many of the ones on display recorded births.

One of my favorites was an area devoted to toys. A cabinet displays old cast iron miniatures and traditional board games. I remember playing with things like this.

A local lady had a hobby of furnishing dollhouses. She gave one to the museum. Besides the expected display of miniature furnishings and scaled-down wallpaper, this dollhouse is electrified and the walls have framed miniature portraits of the lady’s family.

Martin guitars have a section of their own. Martin is based in Nazareth, Pa., not far from Easton.

It seems that the company set a new standard for guitars. Originally it made instruments with 12 frets up the neck. A musician asked for a longer neck to allow more fingering of chords.

Martin came up with a 14-fret design that it called an Orchestra Model. It proved so popular that 14 frets became the standard for all the company’s guitars.

Museum hands were in the final stages of setting up an exhibit called “Cat’s Meow,” about the Roaring ’20s with a local emphasis. I didn’t get a close look at it, but it seems to focus on clothing and jewelry.

I took a short stroll among the mansions on North Third Street before I went back to the room for a breather.

Dinner was at Antonio’s a block up the street from the hotel. I went there for more craft beer.

Everything was bottled, and familiar to me, which is all right. But I made a small mistake. I started with Dogfish Head 60-Minute IPA. At 6 percent, it has less alcohol content than the 90-Minute, which was also available. 

The problem is that they are both so fine that they are hard to follow. 

My second beer was from a Philadelphia brewer, Yards. The brew was called Sons of Ben and billed as a “rowdy pale ale.” If I had taken it first, and by itself, it might have proved fine.

I ordered spaghetti with oil, garlic, and anchovies. There was no chance that it would be like the anchovy dishes Joanna and I had in Italy. But it seemed the salt would go well with strong beer.

The dish was OK, but I'm not sure that I’ll order it again.

The 60-Minute held up well with the anchovies, but they just wiped out the flavor of the Sons of Ben, rowdy or not. The ale wasn’t strong enough to hold up to the fish and sharp salt that almost burnt my tongue at times.

For dessert I had a Pennsylvania-brewed ale, Victory Golden Monkey. It’s described as a “Belgian-style tripel,” which gives it 9.5 percent alcohol, and is brewed with spices. It’s a U.S. attempt to copy Chimay. Like most Belgian spiced ales, one is enough.

All in all, a very good day.

So I’m back at the hotel and finishing this up.

Good night, everyone, and may you reserve your Dogfish Head for last.

Harry