BiblioVault - Books about History, Local

Tales and Towns of Northern New Jersey

Beck, Henry

Rutgers University Press, 1967

Long regarded as folklife classics, Henry Charlton Beck's books are vivid recreations of the back roads, small towns, and legends that give New Jersey its special character. Rutgers University Press is pleased to make these important books available again in newly designed editions.

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Tales and Trails of Illinois

Stu Fliege

University of Illinois Press, 2002

Based on a collection of fifty-two vignettes of Illinois history originally published as weekly columns in newspapers and revised for publication in book form, Tales and Trails of Illinois presents little-known episodes and adds perspective to tales of the state’s varied past. Pairing readable commentary with striking description and detail, the book is a useful compendium of Illinois heritage in an accessible and entertaining format.
Stu Fliege highlights historical events, such as the Herrin Massacre and Chicago’s Iroquois Theatre fire, and covers the diverse terrain of Illinois’s natural and constructed wonders, from Lusk Creek Canyon to Robert Allerton Park. Readers will meet a colorful cast of characters including pioneers, squatters, miners, gangsters, and utopian leaders. They’ll travel back in time to when salt production was the state’s main industry and learn of the Illinois ingenuity that spawned inventions including barbed wire, the steel plow, and the Ferris wheel. From Oquawka’s elephant memorial to Murphysboro’s mysterious mud monster, the book also offers quirky facts and spooky stories that aren’t found in the average history book.
Liberally illustrated and clearly written, Tales and Trails of Illinois is a helpful learning tool for Illinoisans of all ages, perfect for families, history buffs, libraries, and the classroom.

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Tales Never Told Around Campfire

True Tales Of Frontier America

Mark Dugan

Ohio University Press, 1992

Ten outlaws, ten states, ten stories of nineteenth-century fugitives remarkable because the events really took place. Mark Dugan’s latest outlaw chase reins in enough evidence to corral the cynics. There is new information on the strange relationship between Wild Bill Hickok, his enemy and victim, David McCanles, and the beautiful Sarah Shull of North Carolina. Was Tom Horn a hired killer for the big cattlemen in the unsolved Wyoming ambush? How much do we really know about Deputy U.S. Marshall Ed Short, legendary for his gun duel with Black-Faced Charley Bryant of the Dalton Gang in Oklahoma? Or Cora Hubbard, who led a bank robbery in Missouri, then went home to Kansas to change back into a dress and bury the stolen money in her potato patch? What became of Punch Collins, black leader of a New Mexico train bold up in 1884?

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Tales of South Jersey

Profiles and Personalities

Waltzer, Jim

Rutgers University Press, 2001

There's much more to southern New Jersey than the Pine Barrens and the Jersey Devil, and this collection by journalists Jim Waltzer and Tom Wilk tells readers all about it. Oceanside and bayside towns offer a box seat from which to observe the regions rich history and the summery lore of the wonders of nature. Landlocked towns boast their own homespun and hell-raising traditions and idiosyncrasies.

Waltzer and Wilk have compiled almost fifty stories about the state's southernmost counties. Although the focus is on Atlantic City and its remarkable people, outsize structures, and quirky events, the storytelling ranges across the wider region to provide an insiders look at history as it was being made. You'll encounter gangsters and gamblers, baseball hitters and hurricanes, famous piers and hotels, landmark theaters and eateries, splashy events and unheralded oddities ¾ in sum, a cross-section of the regions character and characters.

The authors divide their book into six sections: entertainment, famous and infamous events, innovations and innovators, leisure and recreation, room and board, and sports legends. Within each section are the rich and varied stories Waltzer and Wilk have collected for New Jerseyans reading pleasure.

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Tennessee Log Buildings

A Folk Tradition

John B. Rehder

University of Tennessee Press, 2012

Drawing on more than four decades of research, Tennessee Log Buildings examines one of the Volunteer State’s most precious—and fast-disappearing—traditions. From the pioneer era through the mid–twentieth century, folk builders in Tennessee used logs to construct cabins, barns, other outbuildings, schools, and churches. In warm, accessible prose that often makes this deeply researched work read like guidebook, John Rehder explores the varied styles and architectural characteristics of these fascinating structures, including their floor plans, the types of timber used, and the different notches that were cut into the logs to secure the structures.
Profusely illustrated with over one hundred images, Tennessee Log Houses traces the evolution of log houses from one-room (or single-pen) dwellings to more elaborate homes of various types, such as saddlebags, Cumberland houses, dogtrots, and two-story I-houses. Rehder discusses the historic settlement patterns and building traditions that led to this variety of house types and identifies their particular occurrences throughout the state by drawing on surveys conducted in forty-two counties by teams working for the Tennessee Historical Commission (THC). Similarly, he explores disparate barn and outbuilding types, including the distinctive cantilever barns that are found predominantly in East Tennessee. Sprinkled throughout the book are engaging anecdotes that convey just what it is like to conduct field research in remote rural areas. Rehder also describes in detail a number of the state’s exceptional log places, among them Wynnewood, an enormous structure in Middle Tennessee which dates back to the early nineteenth century and which suffered severe tornado damage in 2008.
As the author notes, many of the buildings originally identified in the THC investigations have now vanished completely while others are in serious disrepair. Thus, this book not only offers an instructive and delightful look at a key part of Tennessee’s heritage but also makes an eloquent plea for its preservation.

Until his death in 2011, JOHN B. REHDER was a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He first joined the UT faculty in 1967. He was the author of Appalachian Folkways, which won the Pioneer America Society’s Fred B. Kniffen Book Award in 2004, and Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape, which won the Vernacular Architecture Forum’s 2000 Abbott Lowell Cummings Award.

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This Is New Jersey

Cunningham, John T

Rutgers University Press, 1995

The extraordinary diversity of New Jersey is captured in this revised and up-to-date edition of This Is New Jersey, for forty years a classic and one of the most popular books ever written about the state. History, current problems, and opportunities for the future are skillfully blended in a book that makes it clear that there is a lot more to the state than can be imagined by those who speed through it on any of New Jersey's numerous interstates or railways. Ranking forty-sixth in size, but sixth in population, New Jersey is the most urban and densely populated of the fifty states. In spite of that, the state truly deserves its nickname, Garden State, and it has a large recreation industry. John T. Cunningham examines the state county by county from the hill country to the city belt; from the dairy farms to the Jersey shore. Historically, settlement in New Jersey goes back to the Lenni Lenape Indians, to the colonists, and to the state's place as the crossroads of the American Revolution. To those who do not know the state's byways and quiet towns, it appears that highways abound. Yet there are also many thousands of acres of precious woodland preserved by park commissions in Essex and Union counties. In northern New Jersey alone, there are more than a million acres of hardwood forests. In southern New Jersey, over a million acres of the fascinating Pinelands account for almost a quarter of the total state area. New Jersey is a land of lakes and mountains, of fishing docks and two-hundred-year-old houses, of farms and factories, of old universities and new commuting towns. This fourth edition retains the popular pictures of each county courthouse, the heart of county history andadministration. This fully redesigned edition is enhanced by several four-color and over 100 black-and-white illustrations by noted New Jersey photographer Walter Choroszewski.

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This Storied River

Legend & Lore of the Upper Mississippi

Dennis McCann

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2017

In This Storied River, longtime journalist Dennis McCann takes us on an intimate tour of the Upper Mississippi—from Dubuque, Iowa, to the Minnesota headwaters, and dozens of places in between. Far more than a travel guide, This Storied River celebrates the Upper Mississippi’s colorful history and the unique role the river has played in shaping the Midwest.

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Timberline Tailings

Tales Of Colorado'S Ghost Towns And Mining Camps

Muriel Sibell Wolle

Ohio University Press, 1993

“Timberline Tailings is a follow-up volume which the author published in 1977, after years of receiving letters from people who related their own stories, directions and data about Colorado mining camps after reading Stampede to Timberline. — Sn3 Modeler

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Timberline U.S.A.

High-Country Encounters from California to Maine

Donald Mace Williams

Utah State University Press, 2003

As a youth in Denver, Donald Mace Williams developed an affection for high mountain country. After a journalistic career spent mostly on flat lands, he set out to rediscover what was special about country above timberline. He hiked the high alpine in four of America's major ranges-the Rockies, Sierra Nevada, Cascades, and northern Appalachians-and in his narrative of his travels, he tells us what he saw and learned and who he met. Having visited some of these areas when younger, Williams compares his psychological and physical responses as an older man and how his ideas about how to treat the environment have evolved. A recurring theme is the compromises that people such as he make between the pull of mountains and freedom and the responsibilities of making a living in the lowlands. Mainly, he observes and experiences what is distinctive about the timberline environment.

Throughout his book, Williams gently informs readers regarding timberline history, nature, weather, and archaeology; high altitude physiology; and environmental concerns. Frequently, he recounts encounters with interesting and varied people he meets on the trails: a young British hiking companion who has come back to Colorado to repeat a climb on which, a year previously, his two fellow climbers died; a pilot who climbs isolated peaks in the Sierra Nevada in search of bouillon-can scrolls signed by famous early mountaineers; a "Literate Farmer" who pauses on a mountain trail in Vermont to discuss Robert Frost.

Donald Mace Williams is a retired journalist who has worked for such newspapers as The Wichita Eagle, Newsday, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas, has published one previous book (Interlude in Umbarger: Italian POWs and a Texas Church); poems in Western Humanities Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and South Dakota Review; and a short story in Southwest Review. He now lives in Texas.

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Trail Of Gold & Silver

D Smith

University Press of Colorado, 2009

Traveling Through Time

A Guide to Michigan's Historical Markers

Laura Rose Ashlee, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2005

Traveling Through Time is the definitive illustrated guide to nearly 1,500 historic Michigan sites. With this book, travelers can journey through the state to discover the historical markers in Michigan's neighborhoods, along its highways, and in city centers.

Since 1955 the state of Michigan has erected historical markers throughout the state. In this revised edition of Traveling Through Time, Laura Rose Ashlee collects the histories that appear on these markers together into one handy guidebook---a great desk reference for researchers and armchair historians alike.

Some of the book's special features include:

o Location and full text of each marker

o Arranged alphabetically within county chapters

o More than 85 historic and color photographs

o Special section on Michigan historical markers placed outside Michigan

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Treadwell Gold

An Alaska Saga of Riches and Ruin

Sheila Kelly

University of Alaska Press, 2010

A century ago, Treadwell, Alaska, was a featured stop on steamship cruises, a rich, up-to-date town that was the most prominent and proud in all Alaska. Its wealth, however, was founded on the remarkably productive gold mines on Douglas Island, and when those caved in and flooded in the early decades of the twentieth century, Treadwell sank into relative obscurity.

Treadwell Gold presents first-person accounts from the sons and daughters of the miners, machinists, hoist operators, and superintendents who together dug and blasted the gold that made Treadwell rich. Alongside these stories are vintage photos that capture both the industrial vigor of the mines and the daily lives that made up Treadwell society. The book will fascinate anyone interested in Alaskan history or the romance of gold mining’s past.

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Treasure Hill

Portrait Of A Silver Mining Camp

W. Turrentine Jackson

University of Nevada Press, 2000

In 1868, the discovery of an exceptionally rich silver ore on Treasure Hill in eastern Nevada led to an intense but short-lived boom. The White Pine Mining District was quickly organized, and in time a new Nevada county was created with that name. The boom lasted only two seasons, but dogged investors, mostly British, spent more than twenty years pursuing the dream of making White Pine a prosperous mining district before they withdrew and left behind only disappointment and ghost towns. W. Turrentine Jackson’s study of Treasure Hill, first published in 1963, has endured as a classic case study of a typical mining district in the western United States. Much more than events at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, the rush to White Pine, its brief season of glory and excitement followed by sudden decline, typifies the pattern of development in the majority of mining districts in the West. Far more than a tale of sudden wealth and lawlessness—although both were abundant—Treasure Hill encompasses the impact of growing international capitalism and labor movements on the mining West, the bitter politics surrounding the creation of towns and counties, and the human costs of boom and bust. Available again in a new paperback edition, with a foreword by mining historian Joseph V. Tingley,Treasure Hill offers readers a lively, thoroughly researched account of one of Nevada’s richest and briefest mining booms.

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Treasure Tales of the Rockies

Perry Eberhart

Ohio University Press, 1990

Here is a whopping collection of tales of lost mines and buried treasure to stir the blood of any adventurous spirit and to satisfy the most lively imagination. Maps and photos galore accompany the stories.

Perry Eberhart gathered and researched almost 150 treasure tales and tells them with the same thoroughness, engaging style, and lively anecdotes that distinguish his other major contribution to Colorado lore and history: Guide to the Colorado Ghost Towns and Mining Camps.

Treasure Tales not only tells the original story of a lost mine or a buried treasure, but also fills in the pieces of the puzzle as they have come to light over the years. Many tales become more and more intriguing — but still remain a puzzle. In some cases the puzzle is solved, often accidentally. Eberhart also collects the fascinating tales of lost treasures found. This latest edition of Treasure Tales brings all of this information up to date.

Forty-three maps by Sandy Eberhart and forty-eight well-chosen photographs round out Treasure Tales. This is a book for both armchair excitement and for the adventurer who wants to search out what nature, time, and man's ingenuity have hidden from us — and what nature, time, and man's ingenuity also often help us find. Good luck!

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Turning Down the Sound

Travel Escapes in Washington's Small Towns

Foster Church

Oregon State University Press, 2014

In his new travelogue, Foster Church guides adventurers—lifelong residents of the Northwest and visitors alike—to the small communities beyond the state’s well-known urban center.

As in his previous book, Discovering Main Street: Travel Adventures in Small Towns of the Northwest, Church employs the finesse of his Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalism. He also shares his passion for encouraging tourists down less traveled paths—paths that curve beside valleys and wheat fields, travel along orchards and straits, and abut mountains and rivers.

Once inside these small towns, local flavors abound. Church reveals how each community’s unique character informs its hospitality and culture: In Morton, the abandoned Roxy movie theater was re-opened to host lectures and live performances. In the town of Palouse, a once-lonesome farming community in the Washington wheat country is now home to antiques shops and art galleries, and in Pomeroy, a pioneering legacy is celebrated in a lively annual festival.

With maps, photographs, and recommendations for more than thirty-five towns in all corners of the state, Turning Down the Sound vastly expands the resources available for readers and travelers keen on encountering what Church calls American tourism’s last frontier: its small towns.

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