(Seven more chapters will follow over the coming week as part of the series.)
Thousands of collectables from the distant nineteenth century are stacked in the darkened Pennsylvania warehouse. Tin badges. Pistols and spurs. Garments and garters associated with Annie Oakley, the Earp Brothers, buffalo hunters, and prairie Indians.
The artifacts and collectables were intended for a cowboy museum in the heart of central Pennsylvania.
How those cowboys artifacts came to reside in a dark warehouse in central Pennsylvania is part of the misplaced history of the city of Harrisburg.
In the last decades of the twentieth century a handful of town officials would turn the once-solid town into something resembling a Hollywood western set.
Behind the shaky facades, nothing much but flimsy webs and scaffolding of debt would meet the eyes of the curious.
The Wild West artifacts were inconspicuously collected by former Mayor Steve Reed in the late 1990s. He had been secretly planning a cowboy museum for Harrisburg.
The story of how the misplaced cowboy artifacts came to be in Harrisburg is part of the story of the misplaced priorities and poor judgments of former Mayor Reed and other late-twentieth century town officials.
It’s also a story of more than a billion dollars in bond deals and bond debt which, in small part, paid for the Wild West artifacts.
1. Epic fail, ‘pardner’: differences in bond debt
In the past, Harrisburg’s town fathers would never have thought to underwrite a bond deal, or accumulate bond debt, without public support.
They never would have quietly floated the bonds, let alone secretly accumulated cowboy artifacts for a secret Wild West museum
History tells us that there were vast differences between the bonds that were floated to create modern Harrisburg at the start of the twentieth century, and the bonds floated at the end of the century that destroyed the city.
The earlier set of bonds — floated between 1900 and 1940, and even as late as 1980 — were financially sound.
The later bonds, for the most part, were not.
But the biggest difference between the two periods of bond indebtedness involves more than just financial soundness.
The bonds floated in early twentieth century were first accompanied by high-profile campaigns seeking broad-based public support, understanding, and participation.
The bond debt that would destroy the city almost one hundred years later was intentionally concocted to eliminate citizen participation and understanding… (To be continued)
