Father Pitt

Tag: Robin Hill Park

  • A Late Dahlia

    Pink Dahlia
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

    In the garden at Robin Hill.

  • More of Robin Hill, Moon Township

    Robin Hill from the front

    The only excuse we need for publishing more pictures of Robin Hill is that we have more pictures of Robin Hill. It’s a beautiful Georgian house designed by Henry Gilchrist for Francis and Mary Nimick; it was left to the township by Mary to be a park for the residents. We’ll walk around the house counterclockwise.

    Front door
    Perspective view of Robin Hill
    Right side of Robin Hill
    Perspective view of the garden side
    Garden face of the mansion
    Robin Hill mansion seen from the gazebo
    Back door of Robin Hill
    Window of Robin Hill
    Stairs up from the garden
    Left side of Robin Hill
    Garden face of Robin Hill
    Kodak EasyShare Z981; Kodak EasyShare Z1285.

    More pictures of Robin Hill, and a composite of the garden face.

  • Remnants of the Oil Industry in Moon Township

    Oil rig

    California’s gold and Pennsylvania’s oil were the two great booms of the 1800s. The Gold Rush gets all the glamorous stories, because gold is shiny and oil is dark and slimy. But oil made bigger fortunes. According to Wikipedia, oil production in Pennsylvania peaked in 1891. Well into the twentieth century, it was common to see oil derricks even in back yards in suburban towns. “Oil Wells in Moon Township” at the Moon Township Historical Society has some personal memories of the oil industry in Moon Township.

    Robin Hill Park preserves some memories of the oil industry, which you can easily visit if you walk down the access road behind the Robin Hill mansion.

    Some of the pictures in this article are enormous, with more than 20 megabytes of data if you enlarge them. Be careful on a metered connection. We are trying out a Samsung cell phone with a 50-megapixel camera. The results are okay. It will not replace good cameras, but it gives us more pixels to crop out in an emergency cell-phone picture.

    (more…)

  • Field of Flowers

    Field of native flowers
    Kodak EasyShare Z981.

    A field of native flowers in Robin Hill Park, Moon Township.

  • Garden Face of Robin Hill, Moon Township

    Robin Hill from the back patio
    Composite of three photographs from a Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z6.

    Old Pa Pitt had intended to place this picture with the rest of the pictures of Robin Hill the other day, but his automatic stitching software failed him. He had been reasonably careful in taking the three photographs so that they would line up nearly perfectly, but the stitching software produced a comical monstrosity reminiscent of Frank Gehry. What went wrong? Only because Father Pitt was stubborn enough to edit the “control points” himself—“control points” being identical features marked in two pictures, so that the software knows how to align them properly—did he discover the problem. The parade of identical windows was too much for the program. The extreme symmetry caused it to identify this window as the same as that window, which caused the whole building to collapse in a heap.

    So old Pa Pitt stubbornly picked out all the control points himself, and produced a nearly perfect rendering of the garden side of the mansion. Stubbornness is a character flaw, but it has its uses.