I’ve always had a soft spot for people who march to a different drummer. I’m not talking about the whackos who pick up Channel 83 while the rest of us are just getting 3, 6 and 10, but the visionaries and dreamers who are not afraid of being thought a bit odd as they pursue goals that elude others.
People like Henry Mercer, for instance.
A turn-of-the-century renaissance man born in Doylestown in 1856, Mercer was a lawyer, archeologist, anthropologist and artisan who became best known for his classic tiles. But he …

The last time I heard any real numbers, the Lehigh Valley was losing farmland at a rate of about 3 square miles a year. I’m sure the current recession has put a little hitch in that giddyap, but it’s still a concern. One of the attractions of the region is the rural, open nature that has long surrounded the cities of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton and their immediate suburbs.
But take a Sunday drive in the Valley these days and it seems the biggest cash crop over the past two decades …

Several years ago I talked my editors into letting me go to Gettysburg to cover a statewide paranormal conference. Topics ranged from visual images of ghosts to electronic voice manifestations to the existence of vampires. While there, I interviewed a self-proclaimed psychic and a man who said his dog could see ghosts.
We decided to drive out to Devil’s Den, a particularly haunted section of the historic battlefield, after nightfall – which, technically, isn’t legal – to see if either the psychic or the dog could pick up any trace of …

For most Americans, it seems that history goes back only about 235 years – to our own Revolutionary War. Sure, we all learned about the Pilgrims and Puritans and William Penn in school, but the real scope of history seems to escape us, as a nation. That’s why I am sure many people will be shocked to learn that Eastern Pennsylvania has been inhabited by humans for more than 12,000 years.
That’s one of the first things you learn when you enter the new Sigal Museum in Easton. A product of …

On a sticky day in late August as the heat wave of 2010 was waging one of its last battles against the thermometer, the Cestere family from Long Island was attending a rock concert at one of Bucks County’s oddest parks.
Actually, they were the concert.
Armed with hammers provided by the owner of the nearby campsite where they were spending the week, Joe Cestere, his wife, Doreen, and teenage daughters Jessica and Brittany spent the afternoon tapping out tunes on the various boulders at Ringing Rocks Park high above the Delaware …

Every day hundreds of people file past the Liberty Bell in its glass home outside of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Over the past two centuries the bell has become known as a symbol of freedom and democracy across the globe. What isn’t as well known is the fact that if it wasn’t for a committed band of Lehigh Valley farmers, the iconic bell might not have survived the first year of the Revolutionary War.
The Liberty Bell Shrine at Zion UCC Church in Allentown is a tribute to the brave patriots …