The Barn At Jacobsburg ...

“How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose if there were no winter in our year!”

           ~ Thomas Wentworth Higginson

                    ~1823-1911

               ~ from “April Days”

                          ~ 1861

A barn nestled in mid-March snow paints a picturesque late winter scene in Henry’s Woods at Jacobsburg State Park, which spans between Wind Gap and Nazareth, Pennsylvania.

The barn is part of Boulton, an early American industrial community in the heart of the Jacobsburg National Historic District – once the site where the famous Henry Rifle was made – which lies almost entirely in the park. Henry’s Woods offers very scenic hikes and the rest of the center grounds have multi-use trails.

The barn was built by William Henry III circa 1821 to house grain and livestock.

Jacobsburg State Park offers environmental education programs from the preschool environmental awareness programs to high school level environmental problem solving programs, historical programs, teacher workshops and public interpretive programs.

The park surrounds the Bushkill Creek.

The original land for the center was purchased by the Department of Forests and Waters from the City of Easton in 1959. In 1969, additional land was purchased using funds from Project 70. This brought the total land area of the center to its present size of 1,168 acres.

For more information on the Henry family visit the Jacobsburg Historical Society’s website at http://www.jacobsburghistory.com/.

Boxed Lunch ...

    ~ “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

        ~ alternatively, “There is no such thing as a free lunch” or other variants, is a popular adage communicating the idea that it is impossible to get something for nothing. The phrase was in use by the 1930s, but its first appearance is unknown. The “free lunch” in the saying refers to the 19^th-century practice in American bars of offering a “free lunch” in order to entice drinking customers.

There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, but there was no cashier in sight as this alpaca enjoyed its “boxed lunch” on a late November afternoon at the Lehigh Valley Zoo in Trexler Nature Preserve, Schnecksville, Pennsylvania.

A boxed lunch is a lunch or light meal packed in a cardboard box or similar container.

Evening Falls ...

“Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.”

           ~ Desiderius Erasmus

                ~ 1466-1536

The waters of the Monocacy Creek spill into light as they cascade over the Monocacy Falls as evening falls in late November at Monocacy Park, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.