Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past

Chapter 2: “A Journey That Will Inspire”: Regions, Routes, and Rails

“A Journey That Will Inspire” Regions, Routes, and Rails Since the beginning of time, the river has been a magnet—a natural force, drawing people to its banks: explorers, travelers, merchants, industrialists, and those just passing through. In modern times, the river still beckons: to adventure seekers, nature lovers, trailblazers, outdoor enthusiasts, and those “just passing through.” The Delaware Lehigh National Heritage Corridor is more than a series of connecting waterways and rails—it connects you to more than you ever imagined. Come, take a journey that will inspire, invigorate, and invoke a deep appreciation of the past and a renewed vitality for the future. The river is calling. —Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor booklet, 2007 The subject of this heritage text is the Delaware River, which runs along Pennsylvania ’s eastern border. Those “just passing through” its region today are, as the quotation marks suggest, addressed as leisure travelers rather than pioneers , industrialists, or merchants. Yet those earlier characters are the stars of the historical story told here and in similarly conceived areas. Whether designated as such by the state or federal government, heritage areas are the result of coalition building among museums, historical societies, tourism promoters, building developers, environmental groups, business owners, town and county governments, and sometimes other interests, all of whom hope to tell stories about the past in order to enhance their present-day surroundings.1 Their interpretation is thus, often, thematically very mixed. The process of qualifying for heritage area status is complicated and lengthy, taking as long as fifteen years.2 In deindustrialized regions, this phenomenon is “based on the idea ‘Let’s use these old industries to bring economic rejuvenation to this area—we can make an industry of it,’” explains Mark Platts, president of the Susquehanna Gateway 42 Pennsylvania in Public Memory Heritage Area, which combines York and Lancaster Counties. Heritage areas— or regions, corridors, or routes—map a leisure experience for travelers while reminding local residents what is on their doorsteps. “Our website is a network of 200 sites and attractions, and it helps you create an itinerary, and then it will print out a map showing driving directions and where everything is,” says Platts.3 The processes of naming and publicizing a heritage area also reframe local identity for the people who live in it, create a rhetorical bridge between regional character and nationality, and often situate the industrial past within grand, even mythological, ideas about landscape. From “Ingenuity” to “Bounty”: Telling a “Connective” Story About the Land In 1988, the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor became the first region in Pennsylvania to gain national heritage area status. It began with a plan to build a trail along the Lehigh Canal. Since then it has come to emphasize industrial history, with a narrative that features Bethlehem Steel as well as anthracite coal miners and with the tagline “Where America Was Built.”4 Executive Director Allen Sachse explains its evolution: The DL story started out as being about the DL canal and then it was the coal fields. We realized that if we were going to tell the story, it should be about the whole industrial system that was built to move and market coal. . . . Even the majority of people who live in the area don’t clearly understand the connections between the industries. Here was a region of the country where mining took place, which spurred community growth, and it was all transported to industries in the Lehigh Valley and in Philadelphia and New York and worldwide.5 This heritage region produced a regional touring guide called The Stone Coal Way (“stone coal” was a term for anthracite coal, which is hard) containing photographs and historic information about local towns and their industrial pasts.6 Some of these are called “Market Towns,” while others, along the Delaware River and closer to Philadelphia, are “Landmark Towns.” The idea is to encourage “connectivity” through a regional sense of heritage, says Sachse; otherwise, “many of those areas would not be looking at their neighbors. . . . Most interpretive sites focus on their site but not as part of the landscape, and Regions, Routes, and Rails 43 historically they haven’t looked at the larger scale.”7 The Delaware and Lehigh Heritage Corridor has state as well as national heritage area status. The state heritage area program was launched in 1990 with the explicit aim to “tell the story of Pennsylvania...