My appalling birthplace (tenth in an infinite series)

On the same day I read that Scranton is a great place for upward mobility, I also read this.  Covenant Presbyterian‘s not an abandoned church.  It’s a big, functioning congregation, with a particular outreach to adults with developmental disabilities — which I never thought much about as a teen attending there, but now I recall that work with a mother’s gratitude.  It’s the church where I went to nursery school, and (much later) the church where we got married, so yeah.  Leave the copper alone, please.  (This week also saw a lovely old landmark high school building in my hometown burned to the ground.  My grandparents went to school at that site.  Whatever replaces it won’t be a school — the town doesn’t need more schools — and it won’t be near so good-looking or sturdy, guaranteed.)

What’s a Pennamite?

Oh–yeah, you might be wondering. It’s an 18c. word for a person from Pennsylvania. It’s usually found in the phrase “Pennamite-Yankee Wars,” about a series of battles between Pennsylvania and Connecticut over the Wyoming Valley, running from before the American Revolution to the 1790s. I wrote my 1990 master’s thesis (starting, uh, twenty years ago this spring) about the role of maps in recording and shaping the changing situation of Pennsylvania’s northern frontier during that era.