It appears my great-grandpa Edwin Henry Herd (1869-1949) is still in the public eye!
In October this year, I was honored to speak for Anniversary Sunday at the church in which I grew up, and which was a Herd haven since Edwin served as its Lay Leader. In fact, several of my ancestors have their names memorialized in the stained glass windows! (Shown: William and Elizabeth Herd, Edwin’s parents, who had been born in the 1830s in Devon, England.)
I spoke on Our Spiritual Heritage, and was able to weave in some of the old family stories and photos associated with the history of Chapman Quarries United Methodist Church.
One of them is this portrait of the Chapman Slate Co. work crew, dated October 16, 1903, which includes Edwin, just above center, wearing a round hat with the number 22 written on his chest. Just to the above left is his 11-year-old son Hambly, one of my great uncles. (Young boys often worked the quarries in those days as “hollibobbers” to swab the slate with a stick wrapped in burlap to keep it wet so it could split easier, and to rework poorer quality slate into smaller pieces to gain experience.)
After church that day, we went out to eat at the Town & Country Restaurant in nearby Bath Borough, and found we were seated underneath a framed picture of that exact same image!
And now the other day, as I was catching up on some periodical reading at work, I discovered this page in the Pennsylvania Borough News magazine on little Chapman Borough, featuring yet again that same image from the day the photographer came to town!
