Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Pennsylvania (11 page)

You've seen it on the news and even in that Bill Murray movie: Every year, groundhog Punxsutawney Phil looks for his shadow. If he sees it, we'll have six more weeks of winter. If he doesn't, spring is sure to come early—or so say the people in Punxsatawney
.

G
roundhog Day traces its roots back to an early European celebration called Candlemas. Literally “candle mass,” it was the day when clergy members blessed all their congregation's church candles. Candlemas was held every February 2, right between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, and over the years, the day's weather took on a superstitious component: if the sun shone on Candlemas, winter would supposedly continue. But if the weather was cloudy or rainy, winter was over.

Sometime before the 1800s, the Germans added their own twist to the holiday. They used a hedgehog to predict the weather: If the sun was shining and the hedgehog cast a shadow, winter would continue. But if he was shadowless, spring was on the way. German immigrants who arrived in Pennsylvania in the 19th century brought this tradition with them, but there weren't any hedgehogs there, so they improvised and used groundhogs instead.

The first official Groundhog Day was celebrated on February 2, 1886, in the town of Punxsutawney, about 80 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The local newspaper proclaimed good news: “Up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen its shadow.”

The following year, members of the newly created
Punxsutawney Groundhog Club gathered at Gobbler's Knob, a small clearing just outside of town. (They chose the spot because it was well populated with groundhogs.) The local newspaper editor was there, too, and he officially proclaimed Punxsutawney the world's weather capital. The group also officially named its groundhog: “Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinaire.”

Over the years, legends grew up around Punxsutawney Phil:

The folklore is fun, but we've also tracked down some of the truths about the life and times of Punxsutawney Phil.

 

 

Pennsylvania officially became America's second state on December 12, 1787, but that wasn't the only important thing that happened that year
.

Sir Frederick William Herschel, a British astronomer, discovered two of Uranus's moons: Oberon and Titania.

The tallest man ever to live in Great Britain was born on February 10. William Bradley weighed 14 pounds at birth and grew to be seven feet, nine inches tall. He still holds the record of “Britain's tallest man.”

British sea captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet (11 ships carrying convicts) set out for the Australia penal colony on May 13.

Connecticut statesman Oliver Ellsworth—whom George Washington appointed as the third Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1796—proposed that the new country be called the “United States.”

The U.S. Congress enacted the third Northwest Ordinance, which
laid out rules for how areas in the Northwest Territory (now the Midwest) could enter the Union: territories could apply for state-hood when they had populations of 60,000. The ordinance also outlawed slavery in the new states, assured their residents religious freedom, and made provisions for public education.

John Fitch launched the first steamboat on the Delaware River. After serving in the Revolutionary War, Fitch settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and got to work building a sailing vessel powered by steam. On August 22, he successfully sailed his 45-foot steamboat for the first time, and he patented the design four years later. (Robert Fulton, who usually gets credit for building the first steamship, didn't launch his first boat until 1801.)

Mozart's opera
Don Giovanni
, based on the story of libertine Don Juan, premiered at Prague's Estate Theatre on October 29.

Robert Lowth, an English bishop and writer of one of the best-known grammar books in the English language (
A Short Introduction to English Grammar
), died on November 3.

Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 7.

By 1892, Andrew Carnegie was a wildly successful steel tycoon who was trying to forge a reputation as a forward-thinking businessman. But one bloody workers' strike was about to change that reputation forever. (Part I is on
page 19
.)

P
ublicly, Andrew Carnegie advocated for more influence and better conditions for workers, but he did not actually run his businesses according to those ideals. His profits relied on keeping costs down. Workers in Carnegie's steel mills were on the job for 12-hour shifts (often without breaks), seven days a week, and many earned salaries of about $500 a year, less than teachers (who made about $650 a year). Carnegie spent very little on safety measures, so accidents in his factories were common; workers were often disabled and sometimes killed.

In 1892, with his steel profits declining, Carnegie tried to cut costs by lowering the wages of workers at his mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania. That—and the company's history of poor working conditions—led the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers (AA) to call for a strike there.

Carnegie was on vacation in Scotland at the time, so he entrusted the mill's manager, Henry Clay Frick, to handle the strike. Frick acted decisively: he refused to negotiate with the union and locked workers out of the plant. He also brought in guards from a private security firm, the Pinkertons, to keep the union workers away from the mill and even built a 12-foot-high fence around the mill, complete with barbed wire and rifle peepholes. But his
drastic measures drew an equally drastic response from the miners. As the workers tried to drive the Pinkertons out of Homestead, gunfights broke out. The men set dynamite, dumped oil into the Monongahela River (where the Pinkertons' barges were docked), and set the oil on fire. Ten workers died and hundreds were injured, but they finally got the Pinkertons to leave. As the strike continued, the mill hired nonunion workers to fill the strikers' jobs and called in the Pennsylvania state militia protected them as they traveled to and from the mill.

The strike lasted four months before the workers, destitute and at a stalemate with the Carnegie management, finally gave up and went back to their jobs. For his part, Carnegie remained solidly behind Frick. He wrote to his manager, “We are with you to the end.” But by the time Carnegie returned to Pennsylvania, the media and public who had once praised his business ethics now branded him a hypocrite. He was seen as personally responsible for the 10 strikers' deaths and for ruining the lives of the men who had worked so hard to help make his fortune.

Carnegie later called the Homestead strike “the trial of my life . . . Such a foolish step—contrary to my ideals, repugnant to every feeling of my nature.” A few years later, perhaps out of remorse, he built a library, swimming pool, concert hall, and bowling alley in Homestead. But still, Carnegie continued to pay his workers low wages, he effectively drove all unions out of Pittsburgh's steel industry, and by 1900, his mills were bringing in annual profits of more than $40 million.

In 1901, Carnegie sold his steel company to J. P. Morgan for $480 million. (It became part of the massive U.S. Steel Corporation.) On making the deal, Morgan said, “Congratulations,
Mr. Carnegie. You are now the richest man in the world.” But Andrew Carnegie had always believed that excess wealth was of no benefit to an individual. He once said, “The man who dies rich, dies disgraced.” So after selling his steel company to Morgan, he proceeded to give away 90 percent of his fortune.

That money built more than 2,000 libraries across the United States—$5 million went to the New York City Public Library and established the Carnegie Institution to provide research for American colleges and universities. Carnegie himself created Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University (then called the Carnegie Institute of Technology) and funded the city's Beaux Arts Complex. He also established a pension fund for Pittsburgh's teachers and created the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which, among other things, built a Palace of Peace in The Hague, Netherlands. Today, it's the world's international court. Andrew Carnegie died in 1919 at the age of 83.

 

 

When you think of architecture, you can't help but think of Frank Lloyd Wright, and one of his most incredible creations is right here in Pennsylvania
.

T
his architectural wonder isn't nestled in the middle of a large city. In fact, it's not in a convenient location at all—to find it, visitors have to travel miles of winding roads deep into Pennsylvania's Allegheny woods. Yet every year, thousands of people from all over the world make the journey to Fallingwater.