Mark Milanese “So much great history”

Mark Milanese speaking at the March 2, 2011 meeting of the Coatesville Historical Committee:

“Of course there is so much great history in Coatesville. Including the fact that the stagecoach lines, basically these stagecoach towns were basically thirty miles apart and as you go down the first transcontinental road, the Lincoln Highway from Philadelphia to Coatesville to Lancaster.

Lancaster has the most historic properties of any community in the United States of America. Any community in the United States of America and you can see the difference in their community compared to ours.  They treasure their historic properties.

I don’t know if historic architecture review boards are the answer. Certainly the Historic Commission which is here today to serve does, I think, have a great opportunity to enlighten the community about the history of this great city and its role it played in developing the world.

Without Lukens Steel the fastest we’d be able to move would be with our two feet. With boiler plate steel, which Rebecca Lukens was the first to be able to roll out we were suddenly able to manufacture machinery and that would allow us to have a steam engine and factories etcetera.

All these things I think should be celebrated and by celebrating these things as a commission we will… I look at Lancaster at for instance; back to Lancaster, their center of town and you look at each corner, there are placards that tell us what’s going on.  

Here we have the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental road, there’s not one marker that tells anyone about that.

We have the Philadelphia Columbia Railroad, not one designation that tells us that; nothing that talks about our transportation or very few things about our great industrial history.

I have done and I would like to share with you a proposal that I gave to the City of a variety of ways to memorialize these great achievements of this City. And I think that by having some kind of memorials and placards and just these Lincoln Highway markers that were all up and down the Lincoln Highway put (there) by the Boy Scouts.

Nineteen thirteen is another great celebration. That’s the anniversary of the first transcontinental road, the first time a road went across our country and it went right by our front door in Coatesville. That’s also the first year the Ford Model T came out.

So we have this Riverwalk, we’ve got a beautiful opportunity to maybe make a designation on our highway that says, hey this is history town. It’s not just an old steel town that doesn’t have any mill workers anymore and the unions gone and its poverty; we’ve got a history that’s very magnificent to celebrate. So if there’s an email address, I guess it’s a twenty page proposal with pictures of everything that just shows you these landmarks and everything, perhaps it might be something as a commission to celebrate the history of the City you might be interested in.

And I did present it to the Chester County Economic Development Council and they did say there was funding available for those things but we have to show that the community wants them and where would they be and who would maintain them afterwards."

Cross-country drive Horatio Nelson Jackson

"While in San Francisco's University Club as a guest on May 18, 1903, he agreed to a $50 wager ($1,183.35 in 2008 dollars) to prove that a four-wheeled machine could be driven across the country...Somewhere near Caldwell, Idaho, Jackson and Crocker obtained a dog, a "Pit Bull" to be exact, named 

BUD 1st trip to cross US 

Bud. Newspapers at the time gave a variety of stories of how he was acquired including that he was stolen. In a letter to his wife, Nelson said a man sold him the dog for $15 ($319.55 today). It turned out that the dusty alkali flats the travelers encountered would bother Bud's eyes so much that Jackson eventually put goggles over the dog's eyes (the Winton had neither a roof nor windshield). At one point, Bud drank bad water and became ill, but survived. At this point, the trio became celebrities. The press came out at every stop to take their picture and conduct interviews."