Today’s excursion was to the city of York, PA. I had never really thought about it but York was a monster in the manufacture of goods. York air conditioners, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Aeronca aircraft, automobiles, farm equipment and a flurry of other stuff was all fabricated in York during the heady factory days a bit earlier in our history, namely when smokestack industry ruled the economy. Harleys are still made in York.
To commemorate this heritage, York has a terrific Industry Museum that has all the stuff ever made in town all in one big building. It is a terrific place for people like me that enjoy museums with mechanical stuff in them. Quite a bit of the stuff still works and they also have a three-story high working grist mill which they can turn on if you ask. It is powered by an enormous overshot water wheel which turns a series of gears which clank and clunk happily as the mill starts the grinding stones to working. All the components for the mill were made in York, although it was a long time ago since water wheel grist mills went out of vogue about 100 years ago.
We found out that our $13 fee to enter the museum also gave us access to the other museums in York so we reluctantly left the Industry Museum and drove about ½ a mile to the York Archives which had a town square with a log cabin, an apothecary shop, a millinery (woman’s hat) shop, an early machine shop and a room dedicated to one of the museum patrons. They also had a bunch of pictures drawn by a guy named Louis Miller who scribbled them down when anything happened in York about 100 years ago. There is a great collection of tall case clocks and a pretty good exhibit about York’s history during the Civil War. It seems that the mayor of York made a deal with the Confederates so they wouldn’t destroy his town which worked out well for York but didn’t do the Union Army much good.
We drove around in York’s downtown area which has great masonry architecture but the town is getting pretty old and a lot of the buildings are now part of a miserable ghetto. The street paving is doo-doo and they are very narrow, particularly if you are driving an enormous Ford pickup truck through town. The back wheels ran over more than one curb at the skinny intersections. If there is an upscale part of York, we didn’t go through it.