It was an ordinary day. Walking East on King Street from downtown Lancaster, reminiscing about how the city of Lancaster has changed so much during the last 70 plus years of my lifetime. I can still remember heading into Watt & Shand Department store to visit with Santa Claus in the basement during the Christmas season. At the time, East King Street extended from Penn Square in the center of Lancaster, Pennsylvania to the Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology on the eastern end of King Street. East King Street could be explored in a leisurely hour-long stroll from center square to the Eastern boundary with Lancaster. These city blocks spanned three centuries of Lancaster's history. It was in 1730 that a plan was developed for property lots along East King Street which at the time was known as High Street referring in the English tradition to a main thoroughfare. At the time the road was known as the "King's Highway" that connected Lancaster with Philadelphia. Two centuries later East King Street would become part of the "Lincoln Highway," established in 1913 as one of America's first transcontinental automobile roads reaching from New York to San Francisco. The architecture along East King Street holds three centuries of history which reflected a wide variety of building types from modest row houses to fashionable one-of-a-kind residences, major commercial buildings, small neighborhood storefronts, hotels and taverns, breweries, a Victorian market house, a prison, firehouses, a church, gas stations, small industries and factories. East King culminated with a city park that once contained a major reservoir and a trade school founded in 1905 that honored congressman and abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. If you travel along King Street today, you will still see most of the original homes, businesses and historical locations that were the city of Lancaster 70 plus years ago. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.
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