Uncharted Lancaster

Rising above the surrounding grounds at the highest point of Greenwood Cemetery, Lancaster’s Egyptian Revival mausoleum stands as one of the city’s most striking—and unexpected—architectural landmarks. Completed in 1915 by acclaimed architect C. Emlen Urban, the massive granite structure has earned the nickname “Lancaster’s Westminster Abbey,” reflecting both its scale and civic importance.

This episode explores the symbolism and ambition behind the mausoleum’s design, from its stone sphinxes and bronze doors to stained glass that blends ancient Egyptian imagery with Christian themes of death and resurrection. Inside are hundreds of marble crypts, engineered with then-modern ventilation systems intended to create a permanent, sanitary resting place for the city’s most prominent citizens. Although the interior is currently closed to the public, the mausoleum continues to dominate the skyline above the Conestoga River, standing as a fusion of civic pride, funerary art, and early 20th-century fascination with the ancient world.

To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

From the late 18th through the early 20th century, the Susquehanna River functioned as one of America’s most important commercial highways. This episode explores the dangerous world of the river raftmen—skilled laborers who guided enormous, hand-built log rafts hundreds of miles downstream, supplying timber to growing cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia. The lumber they carried became ships, homes, mines, and the backbone of a rapidly expanding nation.

The story doesn’t end at the river’s edge. After selling their rafts, many raftmen walked the long Raftmen’s Path back home to preserve their hard-earned wages, completing a cycle defined by endurance, danger, and grit. As canals, railroads, and deforestation reshaped transportation and industry, this river culture faded into history. Today, only scattered place names, faint landscape traces, and surviving records hint at a time when the Susquehanna was crowded with timber, labor, and lives balanced against the current.

To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

This episode explores Roslyn Mansion, one of Lancaster’s most striking Gilded Age homes and a masterpiece of late Victorian design. Built in 1896 and designed by renowned architect C. Emlen Urban, Roslyn was commissioned by Peter T. Watt, co-founder of the Watt & Shand department store, as a birthday gift for his wife, Laura Watt. With its limestone turrets, Scottish baronial styling, and richly detailed interiors, the mansion was meant to signal wealth, taste, and permanence at the height of Lancaster’s industrial prosperity.

The episode traces the estate's architectural significance alongside the personal history of the Watt family, including memoirs that reveal the financial and emotional strain of maintaining such a grand estate in the early 20th century. It also examines how recent owners rescued Roslyn from decline and restored its historic fabric, ensuring that this historic landmark remains a living part of Lancaster’s architectural story rather than a forgotten relic.

To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

This episode dives into the violent, fascinating true story of the Buzzard Gang—one of the most infamous outlaw families to ever roam the rugged hills of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Rising from post–Civil War poverty, brothers Abe Buzzard and Ike Buzzard transformed a life of petty theft into a full-blown criminal enterprise marked by bold burglaries, armed confrontations, and a reputation that earned them the nickname “the Jesse James of the East Coast.”

Operating from the remote strongholds of the Welsh Mountains, the Buzzards used the rocky terrain around the Blue Rocks to evade law enforcement and disappear into the wilderness. Their story includes daring prison breaks, repeated arrests, and one especially memorable escape involving a pet canary—proof that truth can sometimes outpace fiction.

Yet this is more than a tale of crime and gunfire. As the years passed, betrayal, aging, and relentless pressure from authorities brought the gang’s reign to an end. Abe Buzzard even attempted an unlikely reinvention as a traveling preacher, adding a strange epilogue to an already legendary life. While the Buzzard name remains etched into local lore, this episode also explores how later generations worked to escape the shadow of infamy and build respectable lives of their own—leaving behind a legacy that blends outlaw violence, frontier survival, and Pennsylvania folklore.

To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

This episode explores the remarkable—and complicated—life of Edward Hand, an Irish-born physician who rose to prominence during the American Revolution. Serving as a major general and adjutant general under George Washington, Hand played a critical role in the war, expertly deploying Pennsylvania riflemen in strategic delaying actions that helped shape key moments of the conflict.

After independence, Hand reinvented himself once again—this time as a Federalist politician and civic leader in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he became a central figure in the young republic’s political and social life. He spent his final years at Historic Rock Ford, a Georgian-style estate that still stands today.

The episode also confronts the more difficult aspects of Hand’s legacy. While Rock Ford is now preserved as a museum of early American decorative arts, historical records show that Hand was an enslaver and that people of African descent lived and labored within his household. By examining both his public achievements and private contradictions, this episode offers a fuller portrait of Edward Hand—and invites listeners to consider how patriotism, power, and inequality coexisted in the Early American Republic.

To read more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

This episode explores one of Lancaster’s most curious architectural details—the stone face known as the Eavesdropper carved into the exterior of the historic Bausman House. Built in 1762, this rare sandstone residence stands apart not just for its age, but for the watchful figure set beneath its eaves, silently observing the street below.

We trace the meaning behind the eavesdropper, a symbolic warning against gossip in an era when open windows, close quarters, and public conversation blurred the line between private and public life. The episode follows the term’s evolution—from Old English references to roof runoff, to carved figures used in Tudor England, including those reportedly employed by Henry VIII to enforce silence at court—before arriving in colonial Lancaster as stone and symbolism.

The story also introduces William Bausman, the Patriot, public official, and entrepreneur who built the house with his wife, Elizabeth, anchoring the building firmly in Revolutionary-era Lancaster. Finally, we examine the home’s modern chapter: a careful, multi-million-dollar restoration that preserved its colonial character while adapting it for contemporary use.

Blending folklore, language, architecture, and history, this episode reveals how a single carved face connects Lancaster’s past conversations—spoken and unspoken—to the city’s evolving streetscape. To read more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Shop

A faithful replica of the carved face that watches East King Street from the historic Bausman House is NOW available as a wall-mounted piece or magnetic Fridge Guardian. Inspired by Lancaster’s architectural folklore—where small details carry big stories. Available now in the Uncharted Lancaster shop.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Who was Colonel John Mead—the so-called “gentleman bum” of the Susquehanna River hills? In this episode of the Uncharted Lancaster Podcast, we explore the remarkable life of a well-spoken, well-read hermit who spent decades living in caves and rock shelters along the riverbanks of southern Lancaster County. Known for his courtesy, intellect, and mysterious past, Mead welcomed railroad workers, vacationers, and curious travelers into his rocky home at House Rock, becoming an unlikely local celebrity at the turn of the 20th century.

From whispered theories about his origins and the unexplained “Colonel” title to the fire that destroyed his shelter and the rediscovery of his long-lost rock home more than a century later, this episode traces the strange, dignified, and quietly human story of a man who chose life beyond society’s rules—and left behind one of Lancaster County’s most enduring legends.

To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

In the winter of 1852, an unrelenting cold turned the Susquehanna River into an icy barrier, threatening to halt commerce and mail along one of the nation’s most important rail corridors. This episode tells the extraordinary story of how the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad responded—by building a temporary railroad directly on the frozen river between Havre de Grace and Perryville.

Rather than risk a locomotive on the ice, engineers used stationary steam engines, ropes, and pulleys to carefully slide loaded freight cars across the frozen expanse. For more than forty days, thousands of tons of goods crossed the Susquehanna without a single recorded accident. The episode also explores how this remarkable feat was later immortalized in a commemorative lithograph distributed by the Adams Express Company, preserving one of the most inventive—and unlikely—chapters in American transportation history.

To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Here’s your chance to purchase a beautiful reproduction of the 1852 lithograph showing the Adams Express Company railroad tracks crossing the frozen Susquehanna at Havre de Grace, Maryland, in 1852. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

In this episode, we unravel the strange history and enduring folklore behind a ghostly face staring out from the attic window of an 18th-century brick farmhouse in Peach Bottom, Pennsylvania. For generations, locals have whispered chilling explanations—some claim it’s the haunted visage of a Civil War widow, others insist it’s a death mask placed there in vengeance.

The truth, however, is no less fascinating. The face is a plaster teaching model once owned by 19th-century phrenologist Henry Carter. His daughter reportedly positioned it in the window as a prank to startle passersby, never imagining it would remain there for more than a century. Over time, the eerie sight became a roadside curiosity, even earning a mention in National Geographic.

Today’s homeowners continue the tradition—partly out of respect for local history, and partly due to a lingering superstition that removing the head brings bad luck, a belief reinforced by a structural collapse that occurred during a previous attempt to take it down. Known as the “Face on Carter’s Hill,” the object now stands as a shared cultural icon, where documented history and supernatural legend blur into one enduring mystery.

To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

This episode traces the dramatic rise—and lasting legacy—of the Enola Low Grade, one of the most ambitious railroad engineering projects ever undertaken in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Constructed between 1903 and 1906 by the Pennsylvania Railroad, the Low Grade was designed as a nearly level freight bypass, allowing massive trains to move efficiently along the Susquehanna corridor without the punishing climbs common to earlier rail lines.

Achieving that vision came at an enormous cost. Millions of cubic yards of earth were moved, and the project’s price tag—equivalent to roughly half a billion dollars today—was matched by a devastating human toll. More than 200 laborers, many of them recent immigrants, lost their lives amid hazardous working conditions, frequent dynamite blasts, and relentless industrial pressure. Their stories are an often-overlooked chapter in the triumphalist narrative of American engineering.

For decades, the Enola Low Grade served as a vital electric freight corridor, drawing power from the nearby Safe Harbor Dam and helping fuel the industrial economy of the region. By the late 1980s, however, changes in rail operations rendered the line obsolete, and it was ultimately abandoned.

Today, the route lives on as a 29-mile rail trail, inviting hikers and cyclists to move through a landscape once shaped by iron, blood, and ambition. This episode explores how the Enola Low Grade evolved from an industrial-age marvel into a modern public space—while asking what it means to remember both the engineering glory and the human sacrifice that made it possible.

To read more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.

Learn about other unique people and places like this when you step off the beaten path with Uncharted Lancaster: Field Guide to the Strange, Storied, and Hidden Places of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania by Adam Zurn. This one-of-a-kind 239-page guidebook uncovers 56 fascinating sites, from the county’s very own fountain of youth to the oldest continuously operating short-line railroad in the western hemisphere. Order your copy here.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify