The bus ride from NYC back in 1971 was a long and grueling one. Liberty, Roscoe, Binghamton, Elmira. Then a place called “Horseheads”—Horseheads! And a little north of that, a glimpse of a waterfall.

It was the ’60s, rock was involved, and the Brits were everywhere. But this wasn’t the British Invasion of the 1960s I was seeing. Before me were weathered and lichen-covered headstones marking the ...

Myer Farm Distillers sits on Route 89 overlooking the west side of Cayuga Lake—that is, if you can get above the trees for the view. It was probably more visible in 1868 when John and Joe Myer’s great ...

100 years ago, J.P. Ward’s foundry rekindled the coal town of Blossburg. Ward Foundry, with its various names, was the foundation for the small town of Blossburg. The company’s payroll sustained ...

Rye whiskey makes sense in Pennsylvania. Rye is a hearty grain that survives harsh northern winters and cooler climates better than corn does. Back in the day, whiskey distillers had to largely stick ...

For years, Tioga County hunters have protected the locations of ancient aboriginal stonework in once-remote parts of the woods. Although they reach heights of several feet or higher, the cone-shaped ...

We’ve all heard about treasure maps, but sometimes the map is the lost treasure. This is the story of a map created in 1965 by Penn State Professor Howard Higbee. After three decades of drawing 86,000 ...

Summertime, and the reading was easy (even in the steamy Nebraska heat) for a ten-year-old girl sprawled across an old armchair in the cool of her home’s unfinished basement. I’d recently received a ...

Stories echo through the hollows. Rustling leaves sound like whispers, and waterfalls call wanderers off the trodden trails. The land rewards listeners with signs and questions that only a local ...

When fall weather cooperates, a second cutting of hay is possible. During one of my wanderings along Stony Fork Road, the sun rising behind this colorful eight-wheel hay rake caught my eye. The wheels ...

All beer used to be sour beer. Before Louis Pasteur isolated yeast in 1857, beer was created by the yeast and bacteria floating in the air or living in the wood that held the liquid, what brewers call ...

Great trout fishing on Pine Creek didn’t happen by accident. It took incredible work on the part of an individual with a dream of not only what could be but what should be. It took irrepressible ...