Volume 9, No. 2 thaddeusstevenssociety.com Fall 2007
Chicken barbeque and sodas will be provided. If you’d like to bring a dish to the gathering, please call Ross Hetrick at 717-334-5227 and leave a message as to what you will be bringing.
To get to the park, take Route 30 west over South Mountain towards Chambersburg. Shortly after going over the mountain, you should see the entrance to the park to your right. Turn into the parking lot and walk over the small foot bridge that is across the street from the parking lot. You will see a small white building, which is the Thaddeus Stevens Blacksmith shop. That is where we will be gathering. Hope to see you there.
William K. Nitterhouse, a well-know businessman in the Chambersburg, recently donated the stove. He had owned the ornate stove for more than 10 years and decided to give it to the park after it opened its new visitor center, which provides a prominent space to show off the antique.
The park already owned a Caledonia-made stove, which is in the Thaddeus Stevens Blacksmith shop, a small building containing artifacts alongside Route 30. The recently donated stove is much fancier and probably was used in a parlor, Nitterhouse said.
Many thanks to Mr. Nitterhouse for his generous donation, which is a tangible part of the Thaddeus Stevens heritage.
The exhibit is part of the archives at the Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology in Lancaster. Society volunteers have been staffing the exhibit since September 9. The display includes a 12-minute video about Stevens, original letters, Stevens’s clubfoot boot, as well as furniture and other items used by the Old Commoner.
To spread the word about the exhibit, a flyer has been produced and is being distributed in a box at Stevens’s cemetery and at various Lancaster historical organizations.
The archives are located within the Learing Resources Center, behind the college’s main building, Mellor Hall. The college is located at 750 East King Street.
If you would like to volunteer to staff this important exhibit, please email the society at contact@thaddeusstevenssociety.com or by calling Ross Hetrick at 717-334-5227. Also come by some Sunday afternoon, you will find it fascinating.
“There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion – in the bloody religions of the heathen. There are fanatics in superstition. But there can be no fanatic, however warm their zeal, in the true religion, even although you sell your goods and bestow your money on the poor, and go on and follow your Master. There may, and every hour shows around me, fanatics in the cause of false liberty – that infamous liberty which justifies human bondage, that liberty whose ‘corner-stone is slavery.’ But there can be no fanaticism however high the enthusiasm, in the cause of rational, universal liberty – the liberty of the Declaration of Independence.” – June 10, 1850.