President's Comments - February 2026
- Donald Lancaster
- Feb 5
- 5 min read
As the Winter’s daylight grows longer, the Historical & Genealogical Society of Indiana County (HGSIC) becomes busier with programing and a new temporary exhibit opening. The HGSIC’s new exhibit is From Indigenous Tribes to Colonial Revolutionaries. It opens on February 17. This is the first exhibit in a series on Indiana County history that is being done in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the United States. The reception for the exhibition is on February 20. The exhibit will close on May 16.
As part of the America 250, the HGSIC will have a series of programs throughout the year.
Author Tom McMillian will discuss his book, The Year That Made America, on April 14.
Author Charles Cashdollar will discuss his book, The IUP Story – 150 Years, on April 28.
The John Montgomery Fife and Drum Band will perform on May 20.
A Salute to Our Veterans on June 26.
Wax Museum exhibit of historic figures in Indiana County history on August 14.
Fourth Annual Chickering & Sons Antique Piano Program. Period music from the mid-1800s will be performed on September 8.
Through the Years: 250 Years of Music on October 15.
Lantern Tours focusing on Indiana firsts will be held on October 24.
Dr. Jeffrey M. Santicola will talk about Taverns of the Late 1700s and Early 1800s on November 12.
Other programs may be added during the year. Check the HGSIC website Events page to get more information and to get tickets. Even though most of the HGSIC events are free we need to monitor how many people are attending.
During the Semiquincentennial of the United States, I will be posting photos on the HGSIC’s Facebook page and on Instagram to show how many Indiana County communities celebrated the Bicentennial of the United States. For those of us who remember the Bicentennial (I was 20.) it was a very big deal with almost anything and everything painted in a red, white, and blue color scheme. It seemed as if even the smallest community had some sort of celebration and/or a parade. Thanks to Clarence Stephenson, many photos exist of these celebrations that were held in various Indiana County communities.
Plans to start and develop the oral history archives of residents sharing their stories and experiences of growing up, working, and living in Indiana County are well under way. I recently had an email/snail mail exchange with Susan Ferrandiz, the creator of the website, McIntyre, Pennsylvania, The Everyday Life of a Coal Mining Company Town: 1910-1947 photos, documents, memories of town residents, and retired assistant professor from the Library Department at Slippery Rock University. Ferrandiz is very interested in oral histories of McIntyre and other Indiana County communities. We are going to meet in the near future to exchange ideas on collecting oral histories. I am hoping to be able to work with her and to learn how she developed her website on McIntyre. If you have not seen her website, it is well worth checking out.
I also had a conversation with Dr. Amanda Poole, professor of cultural, environmental, and applied anthropology at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). She has regional expertise in Appalachia, of which Indiana County is in the northern part. Dr. Poole expressed interest in the HGSIC oral history program. I hope to use her expertise in collecting oral histories and to, hopefully, develop a cooperative program with the IUP Anthropology Department to collect Indiana County oral histories.
According to Devin Proctor’s 27 Sep 2022 article in Sapiens, a Anthropology Magazine, cultural anthropology—like anthropology’s other fields of archaeology, linguistic anthropology, and biological anthropology—studies humans and what it means to be a human. What makes cultural anthropology different is that it looks specifically at the things humans do, believe, experience, and create.
This is what HGSIC’s oral history program will do; look at how our residents live and experience daily life. I often explain it in simplified terms using my Grandfather Glen Lancaster as an example. My grandfather was born in 1908 and died in 1999. He lived his whole life in Jacobs Creek, PA, a small town in Westmoreland County on the Youghiogheny River. Jacobs Creek, while not a coal town, was across the river from the Darr Mine that exploded on December 19, 1907, and killed 239 men and boys. The area where he lived his life is very similar to Indiana County with the majority of the jobs in mining and farming. His experiences growing up and living in Jacobs Creek were different than my dad, Glen Lancaster, Jr.’s (1929-1995) experiences. Both of their experiences were different than my experiences growing up in Rostraver Township, five miles away from Jacobs Creek. I was born in 1956 and lived in Rostraver Township until 1982.
My grandfather talked to me about what life was like before radio. His father, my great grandfather, Albert Lancaster (1875-1954) built the first radio in the village. It was a crystal radio set that received AM radio signals. My great grandfather connected a Victrola horn to the set so that many people could listen to the radio at the same time. On warm summer evenings he would put the radio and the Victrola horn in a window and neighbors would sit in the grass outside to listen to the radio. (My sister has that radio and it still works.) How many of you know what a crystal radio and a Victrola are? These were well-known things in the early 1900s but totally unknown by most people in 2026.
Jacobs Creek was located on the Baltimore to Chicago mainline of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. In the days before radio, railroad telegraph operators would share news with each other days before that news would appear in a newspaper. Today we have smartphones and the internet with the ability for us to receive news in real time.
My Great-Great Grandfather, Eli Lancaster (1858-1924), was injured in a wildcat coal mine that he and another person owned. He was setting a explosive charge and it blew up in his face. In the time before ambulances, if a person was seriously injured and lived near a main railroad line, the trains became the “ambulance”. My grandfather told me how they took my great-great grandfather to the Jacobs Creek railroad station. If the first passenger train through the town was south bound, my Eli would have been taken to the hospital in Connellsville, PA. The first passenger train was northbound, so my he was loaded into the baggage car and taken to the McKeesport, PA hospital. He lived a few years after the explosion was his face was permanently disfigured.
All these experiences were common knowledge back in the early 1900s but would be totally foreign to us today. What other things have disappeared with the passage of time? What parts of our daily lives, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, have disappeared? What will disappear from daily life today as time progresses into the future? These are the things that we will try to preserve with oral histories at the HGSIC. I look forward to sharing our progress with you over the next 12 months. It should provide us with some great stories!
for the HGSIC.
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