Shoemaker
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
HENRY WHARTON, an American newspaper publisher, born in New York, in 1882. He was educated at Columbia University, N. Y. In 1903 and 1904 he served as secretary of the American Legation, Lisbon, Portugal, and of the American Embassy, Berlin, Germany. From 1905 to 1911 he was a member of the New York banking house of Shoemaker, Bates & Co., and since then director of numerous business corporations. Beginning with 1905, he was at various times the owner and publisher of several daily newspapers, chiefly in towns of Pennsylvania, acquiring finally the Altoona, Pa., "Tribu Pa., "Tribune" and "Gazette." He was a member of the Associated Press, and a member of many domestic and foreign scientific, benevolent, and patriotic societies. At various times he held commissions in the New York and Pennsylvania National Guard. During the World War he served as a captain of the Military Intelligence Division, General Staff, United States Army, and as a member of the Pennsylvania Commissions for National Defence and of Public Safety. He edited "Philosophy of Jake Haiden" (1911); "The Passenger Pigeon in Pennsylvania" (1919), and was the author of "Immaterial Verses" (1898); "Wild Life in Western Pennsylvania" (1903); "Pennsylvania Mountain Verses" (1907); "Pennsylvania Mountain Stories" (1907); ," "More Pennsylvania Mountain Stories" ( 1912); " Susquehanna Legends " ( 1913) "Stories of Great Pennsylvania ( 1914); " Stories of Pennsylvania Ani- Cavern mals " " ( 1914); " Pennsylvania's Grandest Grand ( 1914); " Captain Logan ( 1915); " Juniata Memories " ( 1916) " Eldorado Found " ( 1917); " Extinct Pennsylvania Animals " two parts ( 1917- 1918); " North Pennsylvania Minstrelsy (1919); etc.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921, Henry Wharton Shoemaker was a 39-year-old Pennsylvania newspaper publisher with a shelf of mountain tales behind him; most of his public career still lay ahead. He served as United States minister to Bulgaria in the early 1930s, chaired the Pennsylvania Historical Commission, drove the state's roadside historical marker programme, and was later named Pennsylvania's state folklorist, dying in 1958. Modern scholarship has been much harder on the books Collier's lists than Collier's was: folklorists have shown that Shoemaker freely embellished and in places invented the "Susquehanna Legends" and Indian lore he presented as collected tradition, so he is now read as a romantic literary figure rather than a reliable field collector. His 1919 study of the passenger pigeon, by contrast, documented a bird already gone — the last known individual had died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
Written for this edition, 2026.