Popularizing Pennsylvania

by Simon J. Bronner

In many ways, Henry W. Shoemaker (1880-1958) embodies the spirit of the Progressive movement in America. A prominent reformist newspaper publisher in Pennsylvania, he used his wealth and position inherited from industrialism to promote the preservation of America's wilderness and native cultures. He fell in with such national leaders as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, who hoped to rekindle a rugged American nationalism. He became America's first State Folklorist and a pioneer of national conservation. Shoemaker's consuming passion was for preserving the cultural and natural heritage of his home state. He authored hundreds of pamphlets and books on Pennsylvania's nature, history, and folklore. Today his memory lives on in the legends he helped promote, such as that of the Indian princess "Nita-nee," for whom Central Pennsylvania's Nittany Mountain is supposedly named, and his instrumental role in creating Pennsylvania's noted system of parks and forests and the Pennsylvania Hist