Alex Brubaker, guitar The last thing Alex Brubaker wants to be is “just another guitarist.” With that in mind, the 20-year old from Elizabethtown, PA is taking the road less traveled as he seeks to stand out and keep his guitar playing both fresh and challenging. Though he’s been playing since the age of 12, it’s only been in the past few years that he’s started to write his own music. Then in the summer of 2007, Brubaker had a revelation that has opened up a whole new world of guitar playing for him. Brubaker discovered the finger style playing[Read more...]

Entertainment.  This is where Mike’s blurb about the contents of this page will be located.  Hopefully Mike can accomplish this task with brevity although it is more likely he will type a lot of words as I’m doing.  But I’m doing this to see how the words will fill the space. He will do it because he likes to se how many words he can write.

I was approached by three spirits yesterday. It was quite a sight. Albert Einstein, Plato, and Thomas Jefferson approached me and told me a story. It was quite a sight. Why they chose me, I don’t have a clue; except that they arrived on bicycles. Einstein looked comfortable, but the other two seemed a little iffy.

It is a unique rags-to-riches story from the early 1800s.

Stephen Smith was a self-made black millionaire who worked and lived in Columbia. He made his money in the lumber industry and through thoughtful investments. Instead of being proud of his success, many people in Columbia were jealous of him causing him to move to Philadelphia. Today, few people in central Pennsylvania have ever heard of him.

Smith’s first stroke of luck was being purchased by General Thomas Boude, a hero of the American Revolution. General Boude had married Elizabeth Wright, a Quaker. She was the granddaughter of John Wright

The early Germans and Scots-Irish settlers who migrated to the Elizabethtown area stumbled upon an area rich in natural resources.  The fertile soils to the southeast of town, which supported a vast forest, derived from limestone bedrock. The limestone itself became important for industry when outcrops of a dark, extremely hard rock were discovered to be magnetite, which contained as much as 60 percent iron ore.  The large deposits of magnetite found at Cornwall and at Silver Spring (today, Grubb Lake) when heated in a mixture with limestone and charcoal, produced molten iron. To separate the magnetite from the rocks[Read more...]