A heartfelt moment; America's Mayor Joe DiGirolamo (Bensalem PA) and Richelle Sherwood (St Francis) receiving a certificate at Hugh W. Elmore's Bridge Dedication ceremony today.
Most people know the painting. Almost nobody knows the boats were built in Pennsylvania. ๐ถ
The famous image of Washington crossing the Delaware shows a dramatic moment โ but what it doesn't show is where those vessels came from. The Durham boats used in the crossing on the night of December 25, 1776 were built in Durham, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. They were working freight boats, designed to haul iron ore and pig iron down the Delaware River from Pennsylvania's iron furnaces to Philadelphia. Flat-bottomed, nearly 60 feet long, and capable of carrying enormous loads, they were the industrial workhorses of the Pennsylvania river trade.
What's interesting is that Washington's army didn't commandeer fancy military vessels. They crossed one of the most dangerous rivers in the region, in a blizzard, on cargo boats. Pennsylvania-made cargo boats. The men who poled those boats through ice floes that night were largely Pennsylvania soldiers, using tools they already knew.
Here's where it gets complicated: the crossing worked partly because the boats were so well-suited to the conditions. Their flat bottoms could navigate shallow, ice-choked water that a traditional military vessel couldn't. Pennsylvania's iron economy, in a very real sense, made the Battle of Trenton possible.
Did you know the boats came from Pennsylvania? ๐ฏ
#PennsylvaniaHistory #PA #RevolutionaryWar #MadeInPA #ForgottenPennsylvania
In 1851, physicist Lรฉon Foucault hung a pendulum from the ceiling of the Panthรฉon in Paris and proved the Earth was rotating, just by watching it swing.
No satellites or computers needed. Just a weight on a wire.