Learning from Lewisburg
10. The past and the future |
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Walk back to 8th St., turn right and walk to the cemetery: |
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The large town cemetery which, like most
town cemeteries of either the 1820s AD or 600s BC, was built at the
far periphery, just outside of the town. Most ancient cemeteries that
were engulfed like this vanished under squatter housing. |
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Walk back through the cemetery on the small road which
continues the line of 8th St.: |
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Read some of the tomb stones — the
town was founded in 1785, so some of these folks were first generation
residents. The general pattern in the cemetery is, not surprisingly,
that the oldest stones are nearest town, with late 19th C. stone and
monuments dominant at the hilltop, and 20th C. stones spread out toward
the highway. |
| Reading a cemetery as a cultural landscape |
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While respecting the fact that every stone represents
some person's great sadness, a observer can see an interesting parallel
between the styles of the stones, and the style of the houses
that were being built at those some periods. |
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Folk and traditional styles dominate
in the lower sections of the cemetery closest to town. Hand-cut local
slate finished in traditional German style or venerable English spiritual
symbols reflect the conformist and egalitarian influences upon early
settlers. |
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"National" styles predominate
in the middle reaches of the plot that was occupied in the years following
the Civil War. These monuments clearly reflect the families' efforts
to demonstrate personal power and prestige. Mr. Himmelreich chose
the same stocky Greek Revival style for his stone (left) as for the
Presbyterian church building on Market St. that bears his name (right). |
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In the 20th Century style, visible
in the furthest corner of the cemetery, the monuments tell individual
stories outside of the public symbolic language that constrained earlier
generations. |
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Return to the bottom of campus |
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Note additional evidence of the re-orientation of Bucknell
away from the river and toward the highway, as we foretold at Roberts: |
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The functional "front" of
campus, formerly the elegant brick face of Roberts Hall, is now rows
of cars. Automobile culture has grown to dominate and despoil campus,
just as it overwhelmed most small towns in America. |
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A closer look shows how Bucknell is moving away from
Lewisburg and toward its own vision of a place in the larger world
... even as the town becomes increasingly dependent of the university
for its definition. |
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Bucknell has turned its back on the
town rather dramatically with the stark, unfinished hind end (left)
of the otherwise elegant (and still Greek revival in finish) new athletics
building (right). |
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Bucknell costs as much per year to
attend as the total income of 43% of the families in the surrounding
counties. Attendance at Bucknell, once the modest training for future
Baptist ministers, is now a prestige good like a Lexus, a good that
is substantially unconnected to the local cultural and economic realities.
Justifying this cost requires continual investment by the university
in amenities and infrastructure: the old academic upper campus is
juxtaposed against expensive new leisure center of the lower campus. |
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Bucknell now 'markets' — with
explicit in the use of that word — itself to a national and
international pool of potential students. Lewisburg is safe and scenic,
which parents like, but the perceived liabilities of geographic isolation
and a lack of nightlife for the students is seen as significant public
relations problem for the university. |
| Summary: the inversion of the university-town relationship. |
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We started the tour by examining how the new little
university attached itself to and adapted to the local town in the
mid-Nineteenth Century. In the intervening century-and-a-half the
influence of the university, nationally known and extremely well funded,
has overwhelmed the small town, thoroughly de-industrialized and now
commercially aberrant compared to the rest of the towns in the central
Susquehanna valley. This has inverted the relationship between the
two. This relationship that started in 1846 with the naming of "The
University at Lewisburg" has shifted over the years; Lewisburg
finding its success today as "The Town at Bucknell".
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