Of a Place and a Time: Remembering Lancaster. This item is unavailable.Of a Place and a Time: Remembering Lancaster

This 199 page book looks at how Lancaster County, Pennsylvania became a tourist mecca. "For in those rich farmlands dwelled the Amish and Mennonite, the 'Pennsylvania Dutch' who had fled the turmoil of the old world for worship and toil in the new. Details of their lives had changed little over the years." "The tourist buses came, bringing plastic power and cash, and when the author came home as an adult, all was changed." This book tells the story of how Lancaster County dramatically changed in the 1900s.

During the years between WW I and WW II, Altick ( The Scholar Adventurers ), professor emeritus at Ohio State University, lived in Lancaster, Pa. The city's population, then estimated at 60,000, consisted of paradoxical communities: the citified and the farm-oriented, traditional Pennsylvania Dutch, or Amish, people. Altick fills his reminiscence with impressions of Lancaster's colonial heritage, recollections of his enchantment with such neighborhood businesses as the gas station, comments on the pretzel and other local specialties. Although in his youth not altogether mindful of the "kerosene-lit Amish farmhouses a few miles down the Old Philadelphia Pike," he nonetheless describes how the city faded when a postwar tourist influx brought affluence and a booming, exploitive trade in Amish handicrafts. This intimate memoir, nostalgic and infused with regional charm, captures a vanished American experience.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The south central Pennsylvania communities of Pottsville and Reading have found their chroniclers in the fiction of John O'Hara and John Updike, respectively. Now Altick performs a similar service for Lancaster in this warmly written, highly readable nonfiction account of life in a small Pennsylvania city during the 1930s and 1940s. Altick's memoir is both a nostalgic reminiscence of the "good old days" in the community and also a study of how and why changes come to urban areas. Lancaster, once the focal point of a thriving agrarian economy, is today a tourist mecca, besieged with hordes of visitors seeking out the "quaint and colorful" Amish and what passes for Pennsylvania Dutch culture. Altick's book is a good source of information on an interesting slice of Americana and is recommended for regional collections.
- Norman Lederer, Thaddeus Stevens State Sch. of Technology, Lancaster, Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.