{"id":32898,"date":"2020-11-29T20:38:26","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T01:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=32898"},"modified":"2020-12-22T14:51:28","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T19:51:28","slug":"a-mid-19th-century-view-of-harrisburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=32898","title":{"rendered":"A Mid-19th-Century View of Harrisburg"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

While poking around on the Internet this afternoon, I found something that would excite me — a bird’s eye view painting of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, done by an artist for Edward Sachse’s company in 1855.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Bird's
Source: Library of Congress<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sasche is an artist I’ve mentioned before in conjunction with my family genealogy — he did bird’s eye view maps of Baltimore and Washington that I’ve delved into — and I use his 1852 panorama of Washington as my desktop wallpaper at work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I downloaded the TIFF from the Library of Congress<\/a> website and spent two hours cleaning up the image and adjusting the colors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s an interesting painting. Harrisburg doesn’t look anything like that, though some of the buildings remain. The state capitol burned down and was rebuilt at the beginning of the 20th-century. The Episcopalian cathedral<\/a> on Front Street looks exactly the same as it did in 1855, but I don’t know that I recognize any of the other churches. The Catholic cathedral<\/a> today, for instance, looks quite different from the church third down on the right side. I had no idea there was a canal to the east of the city that ran parallel to the river, and some research tells me that was the Pennsylvania Canal Eastern Division<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bottom panel in the painting is quite interesting to me — it depicts City Island, home of the Harrisburg Senators!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"City
Detail of bottom center panel, showing City Island<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

No baseball field yet. Even the bridges I know today aren’t there yet. But I know those mountains to the north. I’ve looked upon them many times from FNB Field on City Island or from Front Street along the Harrisburg side of the Susquehanna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s educational to compare this to a turn of the century photograph<\/a> of City Island and Harrisburg. A lot changed in 50 years — a new capitol was built, St. Patrick’s gained its green dome, the Walnut Street bridge as I now know it spans the Susquehanna, a ballpark and houses occupy City Island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I took it a step further, to clip the center image, center that, keep the signatures and caption, and reformat it as a single image, along the lines of Sachse’s panoramic views of Washington and Baltimore. It works quite well, looking like it was always meant to be that way..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Harrisburg,<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When I get my cleaned up version of the painting developed at Walgreen’s or CVS, I’ll have a nice piece of wall art for my apartment or office. I only have to decide which version I want — the cleaned up original with the various panels (which I’m leaning toward) or the single panoramic view. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While poking around on the Internet this afternoon, I found something that would excite me — a bird’s eye view painting of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, done by an artist for Edward Sachse’s company in 1855. Sasche is an artist I’ve mentioned before in conjunction with my family genealogy — he did bird’s eye view maps ofContinue reading “A Mid-19th-Century View of Harrisburg”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32897,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[126],"tags":[4964,4950,23,22,3921,4467],"class_list":["post-32898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","tag-city-island","tag-edward-sachse","tag-harrisburg","tag-harrisburg-senators","tag-pennsylvania","tag-susquehanna-river","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}