Historic Sights

September 10-11

My Sunday exploration took me to the center of the city of Lancaster for a stroll around the historic district. 

It is full of lore, as you’d expect for a town that got its start in 1730: early settlers, French and Indian Wars, Revolution, Civil War, and various atrocities.

The site of the old jail has a historical marker relating that sometime in the mid-1700s a group of Conestoga Indians were being held at the jail under protective custody. It wasn’t very effective. They were all murdered by a local vigilante group known as the Paxton Boys.

The Paxton Boys and some of their other activities are mentioned in the historical novel “The Light in the Forest.”

I ran into a note about another person I had read about. General John Reynolds, who was among the first to engage the Rebels at Gettysburg and also among the first to die there, lived in Lancaster.

A very interesting guy, whose name and exploits were new to me, was Joseph Simon. He was a merchant trader who had extensive land holdings in the West. He had actually traveled as far as the Mississippi River. That was quite a distinction in the 18th century.

In the 1740s his house hosted the first Jewish services in Pennsylvania west of Philadelphia.

There’s a charming brick building that looks like it should be in Quebec. The sign outside says this kind of story-and-a-half house—one full story with a dormered roof—was standard in the early days of the town.

Another charmer, a two-and-a-half story stone house, was the home of someone with a name I know, mainly because I was brought up Lutheran.

This house belonged to Frederick Muhlenberg, who served as the first Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Lots of Muhlenbergs made names for themselves in 18th century, so I went to the Internet to sort some of them out.

Frederick’s father, Heinrich Melchior Muhlenberg, is the one I learned about in Sunday School days. He was sent from Germany as a missionary to Pennsylvania, where he is credited with establishing the Lutheran church in America.

There was also a John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, Frederick’s brother, who served as a general in the Continental Army.

All three of these Muhlenbergs were clergymen. Frederick was licensed by the Lutheran church and later also by the Anglican so he could preach in Virginia. That's in Colonial times, before the First Amendment.

Dinner on Sunday was an improvement. The Lancaster Brewing Tap Room, near the Rodeway Inn on the Lincoln Highway, has good meat loaf with even better mushroom gravy. 

I even got to try two new brews. I started with one called, appropriately enough, Pre-Flight IPA. It’s lighter on alcohol than Lancaster Brewing’s other India pale ales. Sharp and crisp, as an IPA should be, but also light, almost like a Pilsner, but without the Pilsner aftertaste.

I had another Hop Hog, one of the ales that I had tried at Pearly Baker’s in Easton. There is a Boss Hog, too, a double IPA that comes in at 9 percent alcohol, but I decided to pass that one up. I was driving.

They had an extra special bitter on tap. Well, they bill it as an ESB, but it had a strong taste of chocolate, probably from the malt. It was a deep amber, but came across more like an English stout, a little sweeter than Guinness, say. So that one is a been-there, done-that.

Monday took me to a historic site of a different order.

It’s a short hop from Ronks to Middletown, Pa., an hour tops. Middletown is a quaint old town about 10 miles south of Harrisburg. A mile or two south of Middletown is Three Mile Island.

It’s a simple route to get there: U.S. 30 West and then Pa. 441 North. The street view on Google Maps shows the power station behind a thin screen of trees. 

 I was concerned that I might miss it. That, it turns out, is damned near impossible.

The road comes over a rise and you see the tops of the four huge cooling towers. At the time, two were active with huge, but gentle plumes of steam. The other two were still.

A short while later, you come up square across from them. The road has a place at the side where you can pull your car while you gawk. 

Clearly, I wasn’t the first person to do this.

You can’t drive onto the island, because it’s privately owned, but then I didn’t want to do that anyway. And this was a better view than I had hoped for. 

In March 1979 Reactor 2 at the plant suffered a coolant loss. There was an explosion and a release of radioactive material into the environment.

The entire event was largely contained by the pressure vessel that housed it. I’ve read that the containment was so effective that operators, who knew the reactor was overheating, at first didn’t know there had been an explosion.

The issue of nuclear power is so politically charged that you never know what to believe. 

In connection with a story for Mechanical Engineering magazine, I spoke to Pennsylvania’s environmental administrator a few years ago and he told me that readings in the atmosphere in the days after the incident showed less radioactivity than there had been a year earlier. The earlier radioactivity measurement was attributed to drifting fallout from an atmospheric nuclear test in Red China.

I do remember how nervous we all were at the time. A lot of nuclear power projects ended then. 

I am ambivalent about nuclear power. Can it be dangerous? Yeah, sure. 

But it is nowhere near as dangerous or environmentally destructive as digging and burning coal. 

We haven’t decided what to do about spent nuclear fuel. We haven’t found a way to safely store coal ash either.

Coal and nukes are becoming dinosaurs not because of social agitation or government regulation. They are up against the one supreme decider of civilization: market forces. 

The Three Mile Island plant in recent years has been losing money, and Exelon, the owner, plans to close it in 2019 unless it gets help from the state of Pennsylvania. Apparently the natural gas plants can sell their electricity much cheaper than a nuclear generating station, or at least this nuclear station, can.

So the question out here may be: Is the state going to step in with some kind of bailout or a local New Deal? That might be nice for maybe several thousand people. It may also be unfair to people working for Exelon’s competitors.

Who can say? Not me, thank goodness. As an ex-Communist, I’m in no position to judge these things.

It was a short drive, half-hour at most, to my new digs, the La Quinta Harrisburg Airport Hershey.

I got to the room and searched Google for places with craft beer and good food. It gave me a very short, and rather disappointing, list. The menus were short, gimmicky, and heavy. Most of the beer selections were limited.

I wound up going to the nearest place, another franchise of the Lancaster Brewing Co. That’s the company that runs the Tap Room in Ronks.

I would have ordered the chicken schnitzel but it seems to have the same gravy as the meatloaf from last night. Very good, but not for two nights in a row.

I opted for summer sausage with mashed potatoes and sauerkraut. The sausage was very salty, but that was probably intentional, to go with the beer.

This place had fewer taps than the one in Ronks, so I wound up having two Hop Hog IPAs. 

There was a gose, a sour ale, on tap, so I drank that for dessert. The description said they use the wild yeast strain for only part of the fermentation. Then they add more-conventional yeast. I could taste the sour edge but it was mild. 

A very pleasant sour. And just right to have one among those bitter IPAs.

Be well, all, and here’s hoping that the sour edge is always just right for you.

Harry