Joy McCrackenWilliamsport Music Club

Williamsport- The Thomas T. Taber Museum of the Lycoming County Historical Society will host a dual program at its last Coffee Hour of the year on Thursday, December 13, 2018, at 10am. The program is free and open to the public.

Joy McCracken, a weaver, spinner, and shepherdess to her own flock of sheep, will be talking about an invention from the World War I era. The device is a sock-knitting machine which hastened the production of socks, badly needed by the soldiers of the ‘Great War’. She will be talking about the machine as she demonstrates its output. Joy is a volunteer at the Home Textile Tool Museum in Orwell, Pennsylvania and often demonstrates her weaving and spinning skills at the Taber Museum during its annual History Day Camp.

A musical offering by an ensemble of the Williamsport Music Club will follow Joy’s presentation and will include a number of familiar songs drawn from the holiday season. Light refreshments, as always, will be available.

During 2018, fourteen lectures at the Taber have focused on the era of World War I as the 100th anniversary of the end of the war approached. The end of the war is remembered on Armistice Day (now more commonly referred to as Veteran’s Day), 11 November. In 1918, the armistice was signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I. It took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”.

The Lecture Series has received the support of the Edward J. Smith Post, Muncy; the Bower-Decker Post 251 American Legion, Montgomery; the Garrett Cochran American Legion Post in Williamsport; and Leroy O. Buck Post, Duboistown. As well, the Lecture Series is underwritten by the Woodcock Foundation for the Appreciation of the Arts.