Yumpu_Catalogue_Peacemaking

Jacob Beyerly. A woman was found with a chain draped around her neck, a man
with a tomahawk, freshly inscribed with English initials, sunk in his skull
like a log. Bierly is the name of the lawyer who filed papers for my
divorce.
About to swing his ax into a tree, Hannes Miller—three of his children
married Speichers—was shot by an Indian. He was called Wounded Hannes,
Crippled John, or Indian John until his death in Somerset. Some insist they
can hear old trees shriek the instant an ax hits. The Northkill Amish moved
west, seeking more and better land. I live near fields some of them farmed.
By the 1850s, ridges around here were bare, trees baked into charcoal to
fuel the iron furnaces.
In 1955, my father, driving a feed truck for the Belleville Flour Mill,
lost his brakes on Nittany Ridge. He shifted down, laid on the horn, flew
off Centre Hall Mountain, thick with hemlock and rhododendron, and blared
through Pleasant Gap without incident.
In the ten miles I drive to work, I pass three prisons. The oldest opened
in 1915, the year M. G. Brumbaugh became the last ordained pacifist
governor of Pennsylvania. At Rockview, called the Honor Farm, inmates
learned to prune apple trees and tend a Victorian glasshouse. I have seen
guards on horseback beside dark-skinned prisoners swinging scythes in the
ditch along Benner Pike.
In 1939, my great grandfather was killed by a tree that fell the wrong way
when he was logging on Jack’s Mountain. Around that time, the Klan in
Pleasant Gap prevented white Catholics from building a high school in
Bellefonte.
Behind Rockview Prison, in a copse of hemlocks at the foot of the Nittany
Ridge, an electric chair sits in a former field hospital. By the year I was
born, the state had electrocuted 350 people there. Since then, three more
died by lethal injection. The Dunkers never forgave Governor Brumbaugh for
calling the National Guard to shoot strikers in Pittsburgh or for calling
the Pennsylvania militia to arms during the First World War.